Author: Daphne Cybele Van Schaick

Writer, compulsive reader, apple pie baker, complex cable knitter. Life with family plus two dogs, a stray cat, chickens, weeds, and bees.

Recipe: Excellent Spare Ribs

On By Daphne Cybele Van SchaickIn Home & Garden8 Comments

Tender excellent ribs like my grandmother used to make. Oven roasted in two hours, with only three ingredients. Easy recipe.

Yes, this blog goes from flintlocks to poetry to ribs, we cover it all here. These ribs are reminiscent of my grandmother’s recipe for oven baked ribs, tender, melty, slightly glazed with barbeque sauce:

Ingredients: 

  1. Pork Ribs:  must use spare ribs. Not baby back. Not country style. Plain pork spare ribs. You want enough to not worry about how many you can eat and still have left overs. Spare ribs are cheaper than baby back, I have no idea why that would be, because I think spare ribs are much better.
  2. Mesquite dry rub or dry rub of your choice
  3. Sweet Baby Ray’s barbeque sauce* (this sauce is our preferred sauce)

Directions:  Heat the oven to 325F. Put mesquite flavor grilling spice on both sides, put in the pan, meat side down. Do not cover. Bake for an hour (the smell will start to waft all over the house). Flip them over so meat side is up, bake for 45 minutes more. Wait, do not turn the oven off…. spoon some Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce fairly evenly over the top, bake for 15 more minutes. Let rest a few minutes. Slice between the bones. Plate or keep in pan with sauce side up.

These ribs are excellent with rice and some chard greens (recipe for our chard greens is here…we make those with red pepper flakes, garlic, salt, lemon and a little bit of olive oil… we chop and put the stems in first and cook those for about 5 minutes, and then top the cooked stems with chopped leafy parts of the chard, add salt, cover until wilted. Top with red pepper flakes and minced garlic, a shot of lemon, cover and remove from heat.  Toss before serving).

Spicy chard greens with red pepper flakes, salt, garlic and lemon
Spicy chard greens with red pepper flakes, salt, garlic and lemon

Do you have a favorite rib recipe, and how is it different than this one?  Feel free to post below.

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Twaiku

On By Daphne Cybele Van SchaickIn Opinion & Editorial8 Comments

image I have found new reading territory. I’m not the first to come across it by any means, but to me it’s uncharted and unexplored, fresh and new.  Exciting. Imagine a scroll of brief poems: a haiku, then a tanka, another haiku, a micro-poem, each less than 140 characters. In such a condensed form, poets must select their words even more carefully, each word cleanly cut, faceted, lyrical. Brief snippets of language can contain entire worlds. No stumbles on mangled or misused words; these are the true virtuosos of language, exceedingly skilled at creating with the written word (and also, spectacular spellers, which is particularly dear to my heart).

This new reading territory I’ve found, this always changing scroll of poetry can be seen, of all places, on Twitter (which I find absolutely brilliant in this one regard, still under evaluation for other aspects). A selection of those I’ve recently read, and now seek out:

Kim Talon @This_is_Talon on Twitter her web site here

George Szirtes, @george_szirtes on Twitter, his web site here

Chen-ou Liu @ericcoliu on Twitter, his web site here

John Wisdom @John34239 on Twitter his web site here

There are many others. I would like to post examples, but I feel I would need permission to excerpt, even in quotes. If you are on Twitter, some examples can be found by following those above, or by searching #haiku and #micropoetry on the site. I retweet those I come across that I enjoy under (Twitter can be somewhat of a curating experience in that you find things you love and create your own stream). Check out their web sites, maybe add them to your Feedly or your rounds, even if you are a Tweeter. I wish you much happy reading.

Do you Tweet?  Have you found any new reading territory there, or somewhere else?