Surprised Kitty…

is surprised.

What Cereal Should I Eat?

-Click the image to see the entire chart-

Get Ur Own

Happy National Cat Day!

Yes, today is National Cat Day.

It’s the one day a year set aside to honor our hard working cats. On this day, cats take a break from their busy schedules to lay around and reflect on their achievements, their superiority, and mice.

Hickory Smoked Baby Back Ribs With Ground Cherry Hot Sauce

We previously gave you the recipe for the ground cherry hot sauce. Now for the ribs to go with it.

There are a variety of ways to cook ribs. This time I tried using the 2-1-1 smoking method — cooking them in 225° smoker for 2 hours uncovered, one hour wrapped in foil, and a final hour uncovered again.

This process starts out like most baby back rib recipes. Remove the membrane from the bottom (less meaty side), rinse the raw racks of ribs off in the sink and dry them off. For easier handling, I cut each rack of ribs in half. Apply a dry-rub and marinate 12-24 hours in the refrigerator. I was lazy and used a pre-mixed rub, but there are hundreds of recipes for rib rubs available online.

Ground Cherry Hot Sauce

This past weekend, we set out to make a mild hot sauce from this season’s ground cherry harvest. Because the plant was new to us this year and we didn’t know what to expect, we only grew two plants.

The ground cherry plant flowers and produces fruit in a husk similar to a tomatillo, but much smaller. Once husked most are the size of a large pea or blueberry. The cherries are harvested as the husks dry a bit and the fruit falls to the ground. We were pleasantly surprised with their mildly sweet flavor and early on decided to freeze all we got to make something special with them at the end of the season.

Apple Season!

Image © 2009 Donna H. Chiarelli

“i picked you, as an apple is picked by the little peasants for their girls…”

~ee cummings ~

Ruby Throated Hummingbird

image © 2009 Donna H. Chiarelli

Thanks to my good friend Michelle, we planted this Cardinal Climber plant this year in the Dutch Ghetto Garden. I had tried for years to get hummingbirds into our garden but figured it was impossible since we live in town. This plant did the trick. About a month ago this little bird and one other came by for a drink of nectar. They seem to be back every day, a few times a day. We were lucky yesterday and got this shot of the bird  showing us the extensible long grooved tongue that hummingbirds and some woodpeckers have.

I’m back…

Hello all. I’m back from a summer hiatus of sorts. Can’t tell you I went on some awesome journey or vacation but I did volunteer at Philly Folk Fest again this year for roughly the 23rd time plus other assorted things that had to be taken care of this summer. Anywhoooo, I’ll be here posting more of my madness :)

July Garden in the Morning

Images from the Dutch Ghetto garden on a sunny July morning:

All images ©2009 DHCStudio.com