Earlier this month, on a Sunday when the temperature topped out in the 60s, I thought how nice it would have been to be barbecuing the slabs of spare ribs that were still in the freezer from this summer. If this story has a moral, it is this: When navigating the volatility of winter weather in Kansas, timing is everything.

So I pulled my slabs of ribs out of the freezer and let them thaw on the kitchen counter. On a trip to the supermarket, I noticed that many people were in shorts, a lot of people were running and riding bicycles, and somewhere a barbecue grill was emitting an aroma that reminded me that I was missing an opportunity.

Early the following morning, I fired up the smoker and left my husband, who was home for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, in charge. He’s more into the whole barbecue-smoker thing than I am anyway, and he good-naturedly agreed to tend the fire while I went out for the day.

Through years of experience I have learned to sort of get out of the way when he is in charge of the smoker because he observes all sorts of smoker rituals that would not occur to me. For example, after I loaded up the smoker with charcoal, he proclaimed that the smoking could not begin in earnest until he had interspersed wet chips of fruitwood among the coals.

Sure enough, he emerged from the basement with a bucket of cherry wood chips and immersed them in water. Whatever. This is a nuance of flavor that would be lost on most rib-lovers, but he swears by it.

When I left the house about 8:30 that morning, everything was proceeding as usual. The fire was going in the smoker, the ribs were salted and lined up in the rack, and the lid was on tight. I fully expected the meat to be falling off the bone by dinnertime.

Here’s where the timing part comes in. While Sunday’s weather had been balmy, Monday’s high temperature was more seasonal, somewhere in the mid-40s. When I returned late in the afternoon, my husband reported having had a great deal of difficulty getting and keeping the smoker hot enough to cook the ribs. In fact, the temperature dial on the lid of the smoker did not register in the optimal range until just before I got home.

The variable I had not counted on was the lower outside temperature. Like a cherry tree tricked into a premature blossom, only to be zapped by a late-winter frost, my poor spare ribs were sizzling, sort of, but were far from done.

Our next move was a meat smoker’s sacrilege, but our options were sorely limited as the sun was about to set and the outside temperature would be dropping even further. We pulled the ribs out of the smoker, laid them in a roaster and finished them, covered, in the oven at 300 degrees.

They were so far from done when we took them off the fire that I left them in the oven another four hours and we ate something else for dinner.

Ordinarily, I would be hard-pressed to claim that the time – well over 12 hours – and effort that went into these ribs were worth it, even though I know people who treat slow-cooking like a religion and think nothing of hanging out by a smoker all weekend, just to poke the fire. Most of us don’t have that kind of time to spend tending the coals.

But these ribs were delicious. When the ribs were finally tender, the time over the coals and fruitwood had infused them with flavor, and finishing them in the oven gave me more control over their doneness.

I’ll do it this way again, even when it isn’t winter outside.