Cooking a pumpkin (or any winter squash) is not for the faint of heart. It requires some of the elements that make for a good horror movie: a large knife, pumpkin guts, and awkward stabbing motions to pry the squash open.
I believe many people skip the ordeal of cooking a pumpkin because of the labor involved. But all the guts and gore are worth the effort if you love pumpkin. When I am literally up to my elbows scraping the innards out of a pumpkin, I remind myself of the soup or spice-infused dessert I will be serving …
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As fall sets in, everyone is getting ready for winter. Thinking back, this is when most families would typically stock up and preserve their food. For me, dealing with the meat side, that would include smoking your meat products to help preserve them during the winter. I still have the old world view of the shack-looking apparatus in the back of the house that would serve as the smokehouse. Product would be hung in the smokehouse for days to help preserve it and give it that distinctive smoke flavor and appearance.
During all the tours we give at our …
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Last weekend we celebrated our son’s fifth birthday with extended family. Lunch included plenty of produce from the farmers’ market and the lovely weather encouraged us to linger at the long table set up on the porch. The little man-of-the-hour’s request for a cake? He wanted it to be like a caramel apple… so I baked a three-layer spiced apple cake with local fruit and frosted it with caramel buttercream made using local eggs with yolks the color of sunset.
After dessert, as a few of us were sharing stories about foods we love, the talk turned to family favorites …
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If you’re interested in local foods, you must be interested in things that are good for you and good for the environment too. The U of I Extension Master Gardener volunteers have been working hard to develop a demonstration garden that exhibits water and energy saving practices. The demonstration garden is a tool to show and teach the general public how to grow food crops in a sustainable manner.
Using techniques like deep mulch, vertical gardening, sheet composting and no till improves soil tilth while also expending fewer resources to have an abundantly producing vegetable garden. Though some watering has …
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Vegetables cannot go dormant in times of drought like your typical lawn does, says Extension Horticulture Educator, Candice Miller. Therefore additional watering is necessary to sustain a productive vegetable garden in these times of drought.
In the vegetable garden, there are certain periods of growth in particular where having moisture is especially important. As a rule of thumb, water is most critical during the first few weeks of development, immediately after transplanting, and during flowering and fruit production.
Anytime there are fruits (squash, cucumber, eggplant, tomatoes for example) or pods being filled (peas, snap beans), water needs to be uniformly …
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