从Rails 3中的JSON响应中获取数据

So I am trying to pull tweets off of Twitter at put them into a rails app (Note because this is an assignment I can't use the Twitter Gem) and I am pretty confused. I can get the tweets I need in the form of a JSON string but I'm not sure where to go from there. I know that the Twitter API call I'm making returns a JSON array with a bunch of Tweet objects but I don't know how to get at the tweet objects. I tried JSON.parse but was still unable to get the required data out (I'm not sure what that returns). Here's the code I have so far, I've made it pretty clear with comments/strings what I'm trying for. I'm super new to Rails, so this may be way off for what I'm trying to do.So I am trying to pull tweets off of Twitter at