Berry season has always been a favorite time of the year – sweet juicy berries thick in the meadows and along the edges of the woods. By now, many pick-your-own strawberry farms in my area of eastern North Carolina are ready for early harvesting, and folks are getting ready to put up!
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The humble onion is a root vegetable that can be used in so many ways. If you planted early, you may have some spring onions you can use in the recipes below. The main idea is to have enough onion in the recipe for a
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A late season winter storm is having a last bit of fun across much of the United States this week, complete with freezing temperatures, feet of snow in the Northeast, and super-strong winds across the Midwest. Schools have been closed, practices cancelled, and kids are bored, bored, bored!
What to do? Try an old-fashioned solution that will last for a couple of days: bake some cookies. This easy recipe has been in my family for generations. I remember baking them with Mom and Granny when I 7 or 8, and they’re just as good when I make them now.
If you like your cookie more cakey, roll them out a little more thickly, or try dropping them by the teaspoon on the cookie sheet. If you like your cookies more crispy on the edges, roll them a little thinner than one-quarter inch. (Or, if you’re a traditionalist like Gran, pat out dough and then cut out with your favorite cutter.)
Add your family’s favorite flavors by swapping out the vanilla for orange or lemon flavoring, and adding orange or lemon zest.
Granny’s Sugar Cookies
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs
1 cup milk
4 cups flour
1 cup shortening
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon vanilla (or flavoring to taste)
Cream sugar, shortening, eggs and milk in a large bowl. In a second bowl, stir all dry ingredients to combine and remove any lumps. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients gradually, mixing completely. If dough feels too sticky, add flour one tablespoon at a time to desired consistency, especially if you want to roll dough out. To roll out, flour surface generously, roll out small quantities of dough and cut into shapes. Flour rolling pin if needed.
Drop cookies onto baking sheet, or lay cut out shapes onto sheet. Bake at 350 degrees until edges of cookies are golden brown. As each oven is different, watch your first batches of cookies closely to establish a baking time. (Generally, I bake mine 9 to 10 minutes on a large cookie sheet or jelly roll pan.)
These cookies are great plain, topped with cinnamon sugar (add this on cookies hot from the oven), or your favorite icing or glaze. They’re supposed to keep up to two weeks in an airtight container, but they’ve never lasted that long at my house! The unbaked dough may also be frozen in dropped cookie shapes or as logs for later slicing and baking. Frozen dough keeps six months, wrapped in foil and stored in airtight containers or bags.
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You may think that you can only hunt wildlife in the woods. But in late spring, the season for another kind of hunting … morel hunting!
Unseasonably warm temperatures in many areas have started a phenomenon: morel mushrooms are literally popping up ahead of schedule in woodlands all over.
Recently, my brother-in-law and I hiked half an hour to
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That feeling you get when you see yourself in a photo that you didn’t know someone took, and you look pretty nice–well, we get a feeling like that here at Lehman’s when our products are chosen for review by websites, magazines and other publications.
Lehman's Stainless Steel Popcorn Popper
Our Stainless Steel Popcorn Popper appeared in the March 2012 issue of
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Some people remember their family histories through food. I know that my family is one of those. “Granny’s Sugar Cookies.” “Aunt Patty’s 10 O’Clock Rolls” “Aunt Lena’s Jello Salad”.
And then there was Mom’s Lemon Foof. OK, it’s really called Lemon Mousse, but that wasn’t near as funny.
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Although the perception is that one must have a giant sugarbush, and lots of specialized equipment to make maple syrup, our blogger Lisa Amstutz tells how she does it in her back yard!
I fell in love with the gigantic silver maple tree in my back yard at first sight. Several feet in diameter, it towered above everything else in the yard and had tree swing potential written all over it. The tree has lived up to expectations in that department. It has also provided cool shade on hot summer days and homes for many of the birds we so enjoy watching.
As if that wasn’t enough, my lovely silver maple literally has sugar running in its veins. While sugar and black maples make the best maple syrups, red and silver maples work well too, as does box elder. “Maple” syrup can even be made from certain species of birch.
Taps and bags on my silver maple.
Sugaring season varies every year, but it often starts at the end of February or beginning of March, when the nights are below freezing and daytime temperatures rise to around 40°, and lasts until the trees begin to break bud. During the last week in February, we finally got around to tapping our tree, a week or two after we started seeing bags and buckets on our neighbors’ trees.
It’s not difficult to make maple syrup. The supplies are inexpensive—I spent about $25 for two bags, holders and spouts that can be reused year after year. Some syrup-makers prefer to use plastic tubing and 5-gallon buckets or just hang a bucket or milk jug directly on the spout.
The biggest problem for many backyard syrup-makers is finding a good place to boil down the sap. It takes roughly 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, which means that large quantities of water must boil off. If you try to do it on your kitchen stove, you’ll steam off the wallpaper and end up with a sticky mess unless you have a stellar ventilation system.
Getting sap right from the source!
For our small quantities, we’ve found that cooking the sap on a hot plate on the porch works fine, as long as we keep a close eye on it. If you have more trees, you may need to cook it in a kettle over a fire or rig up an evaporator. The syrup is ready at about 66° Brix, or when it boils at 7.1° F above the boiling temperature of water. At that point, there’s nothing left to do but make pancakes and enjoy!
Besides its taste benefits, real maple syrup has the advantage of being all-natural—most commercial “maple syrup” brands have little to no actual maple syrup in them but rather a cocktail of corn syrup, preservatives, and artificial colors and flavors. In addition, maple syrup is one of the few truly local sweeteners available in northern climates.
Available online or at our Kidron store.
Of course, our one tree produces only enough syrup to whet our appetite for more, but it does make for a few wonderfully memorable pancake breakfasts each year. Even if you only have one or two maple trees in your yard, why not give backyard sugarin’ a try this year?
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I grew up watching and reading about cowboys. Every Saturday night my parents, siblings and I would gather in front of the black and white console television and watch Gunsmoke. I saw John Wayne’s Westerns at the movies, and read Louis L’Amour and other Western writers.
All westerns shared common themes. Rough and tumble men tracking less desirable roughnecks across valleys and plateaus on horseback. Bands of the ‘good guys’ such as cattle drives or wagon trains, always included a scruffy, grumpy old cowboy cook, usually nicknamed “Cookie”.
His kitchen was a chuck wagon, his cabinetry a wooden box mounted on the rear of the wagon, his work area a sideboard off the tail gate of the wagon, and his main cooking dish a large cast iron pot.
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Cornish hens are just one example of how chunks of meat can be cooked in a Dutch oven. The cast iron wonders also work well with pork, beef, wild game and all poultry.
A person eats thousands of meals in a lifetime, but usually only a few really stand out as lasting memories. My first experience with Dutch oven Cornish hens at a frontiersmen rendezvous reenactment outside Kansas City about 20 years ago was such a meal. To this day every time I think of, or someone mentions, a Dutch oven the first thing to come to mind is that meal.
Cast iron Dutch ovens are the perfect cooking tool for chunks of meat, whether it be poultry, beef, pork or wild game. The most common oven sizes are 12 or 14 inches, both offering plenty of room to prepare a meal for all but the largest family. A great thing about cooking this way is that the ovens can be stacked atop each other to allow more cooking space for larger meals.
That first meal of Cornish hen was prepared for two … myself and a fellow reenactor sharing a ride to a weekend event. He was an experienced rendezvous participant and packed a Dutch oven in his camp gear along with the usual canvas lean-to, wool blankets, hatchet and knife. On our way to the gathering we discussed our menu for the weekend and stopped at a grocery store just short of Kansas City for supplies. His suggestion was Cornish hens, potatoes, carrots and onions for supper that first night.
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The fun-shaped, sunny-colored banana is a wonderful fruit in its own jacket. High in fiber, potassium and flavor, bananas make the “super food” list easily. Need a comforting, pick-me-up dish for the lingering cold days? An old-time banana pudding fits the bill!
Old-Fashioned Banana Pudding – from my cookbook, “From My Family Recipe Box
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2 cups vanilla wafer crumbs
2 bananas, sliced into 1/4 inch slices
3/4 cups white sugar
1/3 cup self rising flour
2 cups milk
2 egg yolks
2 Tablespoons butter, softened
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Meringue:
2 egg whites
1/4 cup white sugar
½ Tablespoon cream of tartar
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