Should you cook those baby back ribs over stone barbecues or barbecues charcoal? Should you marinate the meat beforehand or just baste the sauce on while cooking? Do you want to make beef, chicken or pork for your meal?

Do you want thick sauce or thin sauce, spicy or sweet, vinegary or tomato flavored? The choices seem endless. Before you get out that apron and those tongs, let’s take a look at some popular varieties you may want to cook up this summer.

barbecue cooking
Memphis, Tennessee is famous for its barbecued cooking and is home to the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, which attracts 90,000 BBQ fans each May. The wet ribs are made with a mild, sweet sauce basted on the ribs before and after they’re smoked.

Another variety is dry-rubbed with a spice blend as they’re cooking or right after they’re done. Another variation is the classic pulled pork sandwich topped with coleslaw, which many say is the best way to experience Memphis barbecue, rather than the brisket BBQ recipes.

Of course no discussion of barbecue cooking could be complete without mentioning the Lone Star state! Texas has four different ribs BBQ recipes can be made out of. In East Texas (Houston/Dallas), pork shoulder or rib is slow-smoked over hickory wood and topped with sweet, thick tomato sauce like that served in Tennessee or Arkansas.

barbecues propane
In Central Texas (Austin/Lockhart), European style cuts of leftover pork and beef are cooked with native oak and pecan over high heat, marinated and served without extra sauce on the side and no sides other than saltine crackers, onions and cucumber pickles.

South Texas BBQ, influenced by its Mexican border, serves up cow’s head wrapped in wet maguey leaves, buried in a pit of hot coals for hours, then made into tacos. Lastly, Northern Texan BBQ, developed by cowboys, involves beef shoulder and brisket meat cooked on an open pit using heat from mesquite.

Summer is the time for beef barbecue recipes. The smell of burning meat wafts through the air, inspiring a slew of amateur chefs to break out their charcoal grills and fire up their propane tanks on that warm summer evening. While you may find a number of sites with brisket BBQ recipes, you may feel a more spontaneous urge to eat BBQ, in which case a store bought sauce is good to have handy.

BBQ recipes rib
For Kentucky BBQ, try Evan Williams, Jim Beam Kentucky Bourbon Steak Sauce or Ole Ray’s. For Kansas City BBQ, you can try KC Masterpiece and for St. Louis style, you’d like Maull’s BBQ Sauce. KC Masterpiece gives you that thick, molasses texture so characteristic of Kansas City, Missouri cooking, while Richford Original Barbecue Sauce provides a mysterious, thick and vinegary taste.

Since I run a website on frugal homemaking, I hear almost every day from exhausted mothers just like you who desperately want to prepare wholesome meals for their families, if only there was time to take care of work, chores and dinner as well. While I have the luxury of staying home all day, the vast majority of today’s women work full-time and are still expected to feed their family at the end of the day.

Of course things weren’t always this way. Just two generations ago, it was perfectly normal for the wife to stay at home and spent all day taking care of home and family. That included having plenty of time to cook a nice slow cooked meal. You do remember those famous stews and soups your grandma used to make. Or how about that pot of chicken and dumplings? Grandma had plenty of time to stir pots in-between making beds, doing laundry and mending socks.

What’s a modern mom to do? In the seventies a new tool came on the market that I couldn’t live without. It allows you to slow cook a homemade meal while you are at work or running around town on errands or playing taxi for your kids. Here are some of the different types of meals you can cook in a crockpot.

• main dishes
• drinks
• sauces
• dips

Are you curious yet to try this way of cooking? Here are a few recipes for the crock-pot for you to make. Take a few minutes to browse through and read through these recipes and then pick one or two to try out this week. You’ll be surprised at the taste and texture. Your grandmother’s way of cooking is reborn in your own kitchen and you don’t even have to be there to stir the pots.

When you get back to your kitchen after a long day, dinner will be ready. If you are making a hardy soup or stew, you may want to make a batch of warm biscuits to go with it. The batter is ready in minutes and since these are quick breads, they bake up in under 10 minutes. After that it’s just a matter of sitting down to a delicious meal. Clean up is a breeze as well since everything cooked in just one pot. Hard to beat that. I hope you give it a try.