Cooking at home
Walt and I love to backpack and hiking in the fall is so beautiful. The evenings can be a bit chilly, so a campfire and a warm drink make for a good way to relax before bed.
Once the weather starts to cool, it’s time to bring in any herbs that you want to keep before they freeze. I use a simple method to dry my herbs to save them for later use. Drying herbs takes little effort except for patience.
Last week, I posted about making fresh pesto from the basil I grew in the garden. This week, I am going to talk about one of my favorite recipes that uses pesto – stuffed chicken breast with prosciutto.
I really enjoy using fresh from the garden food in my cooking. This year I grew basil, so it’s time to make some pesto! It’s an easy to make recipe that can add so much flavor to your food.
It’s popular right now to enjoy food bowls. The idea started with Hawaiian poke bowls – fish, vegetables, and sauce. They have recently become common, with restaurants popping up all over the place and options in the freezer and deli sections of the grocery.
We love to use the poblano peppers from our garden to make stuffed peppers, but sometimes the peppers are too small or tear when I am peeling them. I wrote about that process here. I decided to see if I could change a recipe for stuffed peppers into a casserole.
When you are on the trail, food is important. You want to have energy for the hiking, but you don’t want the food to be too heavy (you have to carry it after all!) or elaborate to prepare. I’m a slow starter in the morning anyway, so one of my favorite trail breakfasts is Logan bread with coffee and a bacon bar. It can be eaten cold and munched while packing up the camp.
As the weather starts to change, the maple tree in the back yard starts to drip sap. It’s not a sugar maple, so it wouldn’t make a sweet syrup. Plus you need a lot of sap to make syrup.
Georgie talks about making syrup in the notes she wrote about growing up in West Point. On the Bruegenhempke place, there was a row of soft maples north of the house. Sometimes they collected the sap and cooked it down.
Her great-uncle Ben Wellman had a sugar camp in the timber, and in the spring collected maple water. In February, when it froze at night and warmed in the daytime, they collected maple water in buckets. Maple season in Iowa lasts 3 to 4 weeks.
Aunt Teresa would make maple sugar candy in a pan with molds which all had different designs on the bottom. You can buy or make your own maple sugar candy today. It is often shaped in molds that look like a maple leaf.
This is an interesting article on the history of making maple syrup posted by the Maple Valley Syrup cooperative.
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