2 May 2020

Food and Garden






Do you like sweet, sticky, pork ribs?  I love them but have never attempted to cook ribs at home.  My daughter in Oz has recently bought herself a Slow Cooker and cooked up some most amazing barbecue flavoured spare ribs.  I decided to give it a go myself and was delighted with the results.  Just put the ribs in the pot, cover with some barbecue sauce and forget about them for six hours. The meat was so tender and tasty and ten minutes in a hot oven made them really sticky!

gardener at work
It’s the beginning of May and everything in the garden is started to burst into flower.  My potted azalea is looking splendiferous (thank you Chris and David for a lovely gift) and I spotted the first rosebud today. 




The lupins are going to beat the fox gloves in a race to show their blooms (they were new additions to the garden that we planted last autumn) and the blueberry bush flowers are suggesting a healthy crop of fruit for the summer.

blueberry flowers with dodgy focus

new lupins

When the sun is shining I love this time of year.


14 comments:

  1. I always love looking at people's flowers and gardens. I love lupins! Great work on those ribs - they look delicious. -Jenn

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    1. It's the first year we've grown lupins so it's quite thrilling to see them grow. I am easily pleased!

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  2. Good to see that you are further South than us. My lupin plants have healthy foliage but no sign of flower buds yet. Tulips still in full bloom.

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    1. That's the one thing that is missing from this garden - tulips.

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  3. The azalea is beautiful and those ribs look yummy! I don't have a slow cooker, but wonder if I can find a small capacity one. The ones I've seen here all seem to cater for large families.
    Last autumn I planted two rose bushes, and in January the pretty pink one, with a lovely fragrance, bloomed with the most perfect flower. Since then it has kept on giving! Not so the deep red one planted nearby, it's had just two or three rather battered looking blooms.
    I'm off to the garden centre next week to buy some more shrubs. It's suddenly gone very warm (23º before 9 a.m. this morning) so must get planting before the ground dries rock hard. You showed us a photo of your Pieris, and that's one of the plants I'm hoping to find. I had a beautiful one in my garden in the UK.

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    1. My slow cooker is a bit on the large size but I do big quantities and then freeze stuff. I think you can get smaller ones if you look around. Temperatures are still on the cool side here although things should be warming up next week. It would be nice if our garden centres were allowed to open again.

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  4. Back in Brighton, one of our nearby Chinese takeaways used to do the most delicious ribs. I could have eaten nothing but them every day of the year.

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    1. I was surprised how easy they were to cook, I don't know why I've never done it before. Made my fingers very sticky though!

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  5. I had a tiny blueberry bush, but the birds used to get any berries before I could! I spotted our first ( orange) rose bud yesterday too, and the raspberries are almost about to flower, though it seems very early. I love lupins but can't seem to grow them......put a plant in one year, but never see it again the next! I think that the emerging new growth is very tasty for slugs/snails.

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    1. I think we will have to net the blueberries when the fruit starts ripening.

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  6. The gardener looks like Mellors in "Lady Chatterley's Lover" milady.

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    1. Every lady has to have her own gardener.

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  7. I love ribs but almost never have them and have never attempted to cook them. Maybe I will try your slow cooker method, followed by a few minutes on the grill. Your flowers are lovely.

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    1. They worked really well with the slow cooker.

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