Comfort Food From Iowa

Apple Goodie

3 cups sliced or diced apples
3/4 cup white sugar
1/4 teaspoon soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/3 cup melted butter
1 rounded tablespoon flour (2 level tablespoons)
Salt and cinnamon to taste
3/4 cup oatmeal
3/4 cup flour
3/4 cup brown sugar, firmly packed

Combine apples and white sugar and put in buttered 8x8 Pyrex pan. Mix soda, baking powder, melted butter, flour, and salt and cinnamon to taste. Spread over top of apples. Combine remaining ingredients and crumble over the top. Bake 30 to 40 minutes at 350 degrees. Cut in squares and serve with hard sauce or whipped cream. I don't use either one; good without.

Neighboring on the Air: Cooking with the KMA Radio Homemakers, by Evelyn Birkby

Winter Bird

Pine Grosbeak
Pinicola enucleator

During the winter of 1989-90 snow cover was sparse, so it was easy to walk our woodland trails. On January 2, I heard whistling calls and, in a grove of red cedar trees, spotted a flock of plump, cardinal-size birds with short dark bills. A few were pinkish red with black wings and white wingbars. Most had gray plumage with yellowish green heads and napes. I soon identified the birds as male and female pine grosbeaks. I knew this sighting was unusual, since pine grosbeaks come this far south only sporadically, so I notified Anne Marie Plunkett, who arrived the next day with Ray Glassel and Bob Janssen, both of whom, at three hundred ninety-seven species each, still tie the second-place record for the most species seen in Minnesota. The three friends found the grosbeaks in the same cedar trees where I had seen them.

North American Fringillidae, also known as winter finches, include purple finches, goldfinches, redpolls, pine grosbeaks, red crossbills, white-winged crossbills, and evening grosbeaks, among others. They are small to medium-size arboreal, seed-eating songbirds that fly fast, undulate in flight, have high-pitched calls, and gather in flocks when not nesting. As with the northern owls, patterns of movement and numbers vary greatly from year to year in response to fluctuations in food supplies, especially in winter. The birds I saw had moved south because of a poor crop of mountain ash berries, conifer seeds, and seeds of other trees across much of Canada.

Breeding locations also depend on food supplies and vary from year to year, but nesting primarily occurs in the open spruce and fir forests of Canada. The male grosbeak sings soft, whistled notes to defend his territory and in courtship feeds his mate. He remains nearby while she gathers moss, twigs, grass, lichen, and rootlets to build a bulky nest fifteen to twenty feet high on a horizontal branch or in a fork of a conifer. She sits on her two to five eggs for about two weeks. Her mate feeds her on the nest. Both parents develop throat pouches in which they carry seeds, buds, berries, and some insects to their nestlings. Young birds fledge two to three weeks after hatching.

Because of their flocking nature, these birds may be vulnerable to the spread of disease. Habitat destruction from logging operations is another concern, as are poor food crops and competition with other species.

I will always connect the 1990 occurrence of pine grosbeaks in my woods to the three expert birders who came to see them, especially Ray Glassel, a beloved Minnesota birder who has since passed away. The birds remained among the cedar trees for six weeks, which was fortunate because they have not appeared in my woods again.

Nancy Overcott, illustrated by Dana Gardner, Fifty Uncommon Birds of the Upper Midwest

Winter Story

The garden began to come up in April and as we had perfectly lovely weather things started to grow very fast and every morning I ran literally ran I was so eager to see how much things had grown over night and then nearly the first of May the hoppers hatched. Yes hatched i[n] millions and billions. One of the neighbors who had out a little small grain came one day and said, "Well nothing can live over two days. The hoppers will have every green thing eaten."

And then that night came a blizzard from the north and first came sleet or rain that froze ice over everything it touched and later turned to snow with [the] hard north wind. We had very little fuel and that little was wet. We managed a little breakfast some way but I was so chilled and everything so wet the roof leaking so badly J.T. insisted on my putting on his overcoat while he put one on his brother Donald had left us which was large and he could put Willie inside and going to neighbor Ellis[es] till the storm let up. They had a dugout and shingled roof so we knew they would be comfortable especially as he had a team of mules so had been able to haul wood. It was 3/4 of a mile west and I did not believe I could make it and would rather go to bed but there was no dry place for the bed and J.T. rolled the bedding up as small as he could to keep it dry. You see before this we had taken the straw roof off and put on a sod roof but the rafters were so light we could not put much dirt on so it leaked and leaked, muddy water at that. Well J.T. got me on the south side of him and Willie in his coat but some way I could hardly walk and he had to help me along with his arm around me and then just as we got to the door and the warm air struck me I fainted and nearly fell. 

When I recovered I found myself in bed with warm irons to my feet but I did not feel very well all day so do not think I got up. Nor did I seem to want to eat or drink, just to lie still in a kind of stupor. J.T. went back home to see to the stock and about getting some kind of fuel raked up [and] probably went over to the garden for small pieces of old corn stalks and put [them] in the house.

A Prairie Populist: The Memoirs of Luna Kellie, edited by Jane Taylor Nelsen

Winter Gardening

Saturday, January 21

One month beyond the winter solstice, and we're deep into the kind of weather that sends farmers, retirees, and other "snowbirds" south to places like the Texas and Florida gulf coasts. The kind of weather that gives a special punch to TV ads touting cold remedies, snow tires, ski lessons, rock salt, and Caribbean love boats. The kind of weather that tells me to pull on my heavy wool socks, long johns, t-shirt, flannel shirt, and sweatshirt, and enjoy the simple pleasure of keeping warm on a bitterly cold day. The temperature this morning just ten above and the north wind gusting up to thirty-five miles an hour for a windchill factor of twenty below. Not exactly the sort of weather to tempt even the cross-country skiers outside.

But shortly before noon this morning, when I was up in the attic scanning the landscape, touching up some of my previous reports, and thinking about the one for today, I noticed Kate lugging our large splitoak harvesting basket back and forth between the house and the gazebo. She'd mentioned something the other day about having to defrost the basement freezer, but not wanting to do so until the weather turned cold enough outside so she could temporarily store the frozen produce outside. But I'd forgotten the plan, so when I ran downstairs to ask her what she was doing, her answer momentarily brought me up short.

"I'm just making something out of winter."

And so she was. At the north end of the gazebo, she'd carefully piled up all the frozen cartons, containing all the beef broth and duck broth she'd made during the fall, the fresh gulf shrimp we'd bought this summer and fall, and all the tomato puree and spaghetti sauce we'd made from the bumper harvest of tomatoes this summer. At the south end of the gazebo, she'd set up a large cardboard carton filled with ducks from a local farmer's wife, chicken pot pies she'd made a few weeks ago, and ice cube trays of frozen pesto that I'd made from the bumper crop of basil this summer and fall. The box was closed, the top weighed down with a heavy stone garden turtle to protect the stuff inside from the neighbor's untethered dog.

But the mere sight of it all having come back outside to the gazebo at the edge of the garden on one of the coldest days of the winter gave me a sudden feeling of intense warmth, a renewed sense of the deep interconnectedness of things in the world, of the seasons and a new understanding of Shelley's timely question: "If winter comes can spring be far behind?"

"You bet," said Kate, the point of which I could feel acutely in every one of my chilled fingertips after carrying all the frozen boxes back in again.

From Carl Klaus's Weathering Winter: A Gardener's Daybook

Looking for a good art exhibit to visit?

Come see Bill Witt's photography from Enchanted by Prairie at the Waldemar A. Schmidt Art Gallery located on the ground floor of the Fine Arts Center at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.

Hours: 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. daily

Comfort Foods of Iowa

A Recipe for a Day
"Take a little dash of water, cold,
     And a little leaven of prayer,
And a little bit of sunshine gold,
     Dissolved in the morning air.

Add to your meal some merriment
     And a thought of Kith and kin,
And then as your prime ingredient,
     A plenty of work thrown in.

But spice it all with the essence of love
     And a little whiff of play,
Let a wise old Book and a glance above
     Complete the well-made day."


Baked Ham
Mrs. Erma Geist, Joliet, III


Select a thick ham weighing fourteen pounds, scrape trim, cover with fresh, cold water, let soak over night. In the morning, drain and dry; prepare a thick dough by mixing flour and water together, roll out to one-half inch thickness and enclose ham in it, wet the edges and press them firmly together; place ham in a large dripping pan and bake slowly in a moderate oven from four to five hours, remove from oven, break off shell and skin, trim off any ragged portions, stick fat side with whole cloves in diagonal rows an inch apart, grate the crumbs of white bread thickly over this surface and return ham to oven until a golden brown. Ham cooked in this way is cooked in its own juices and is very delicious and no waste.


David Schoonover, editor, P.E.O Cook Book

Winter Bird

Townsend's Solitaire
Myadestes townsendi

On January 18, 2004, John Hockema found a Townsend's solitaire in a red cedar, a common species of juniper, about ten miles from my home. Although I had looked for solitaires before, I had never found one. I hoped my luck was about to change, but my search that day was unsuccessful. The next day Craig Mandel led a field trip to Fillmore County for his Twin Cities-area Audubon Club. I met them at the solitaire place, but in spite of looking carefully and playing a recording of the bird's clear, single-note call, we were unable to find this thrush from the western states and western Canada that sometimes winters as far east as the Upper Midwest, where it maintains a solitary territory in the middle of a supply of cedar berries. Some compensation for our lack of success came with the sightings of a southern shrike and overwintering flickers and robins on the way to my woods, where the group leader found further compensation in watching a tufted titmouse at our feeders, a species that is uncommon elsewhere in Minnesota.

During breeding season, the solitaire's diet expands to include worms, spiders, and insects that it finds in coniferous mountain forests. It hunts by hovering to pick insects and berries from foliage, pouncing on prey that it finds on the ground, and flying out from a perch to catch prey in the air. Although the bird is similar to flycatchers in its slender shape, long tail, and method of catching insects, the complex, warbling songs that the male sings to defend his territory prove his membership in the thrush family.

Solitaires use pine needles, bark strips, twigs, and grass to construct a shallow cup nest in a dirt bank, in the crevice of a cliff, under tree roots, or under another overhanging shelter. Ornithologists know that the clutch size is usually three to five, that the incubation period is about eleven days, and that both parents feed their babies, which have spotted breasts like the other young thrushes, but they know little else of this bird's breeding biology. In his 1926 book Birds of Western Canada, P. A. Taverner wrote, "A bird typical of the high mountain solitudes, well named Solitaire. Its unobtrusive dull grey golor, glorious song, and the romantic habitat and names surround it with an air of mystery that piques the imagination."

I suspect that solitaires have occasionally wintered among our cedar trees in years when they have wandered east due to poor supplies of berries in their usual winter range. My inability to find one may be due to lack of luck or diligence, so I will continue to look for this bird, which my friends say is not so difficult to find, especially since the species is doing well and faces few significant threats.

Nancy Overcott, illustrations by Dana Gardner, Fifty Uncommon Birds of the Upper Midwest