Comfort Foods from Iowa

Beef Stroganoff

2 pounds round steak, cut into strips or cubes

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1/2 cup butter

4 green onions or 1 tablespoon minced onion

5 tablespoons flour

1 can beef broth

1 teaspoon prepared mustard

1 6-ounce can mushrooms, drained

1/3 cup sour cream

1/3 cup cooking sherry

Brown seasoned meat in butter; add onion and brown slowly. Stir flour into meat and onions. Add beef broth and bring to boil, stirring constantly. Turn heat to low; stir in mustard. Cover and simmer for 1 hour or until meat is tender. Add mushrooms, sour cream, and sherry. (Heat just to boiling point.) Salt to taste; serve with hot rice or noodles. Serves 6.

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

Winter Bird

Downy Woodpecker
Picoides pubescens

In fall and early winter, male and female downies maintain separate territories. Each bird excavates its own roost. In late winter, each member of a pair selects its own drumming post and the drumming duets begin. Over the next several months, the mates will increasingly synchronize their activities. After beginning several excavations, the pair will finally agree on a nest site in dead wood twelve to thirty feet above ground. Both sexes excavate the cavity, which is usually camouflaged by surrounding lichen or moss. The four to five eggs hatch in about twelve days. Both adults incubate and later brood and feed the nestlings. The male may do most of the brooding. The young leave the nest at about three weeks of age and remain near their parents for around three more weeks. In winter, adults and juveniles often forage with other small birds.

Fifty Common Birds of the Upper Midwest, watercolors by Dana Gardner, text by Nancy Overcott

Bachelor Bess Winter Story

February 14, 1914 / Fort Pierre, South Dakota
To Mrs. M. M. Corey

Plague take that ground hog! We had such swell weather—was as warm as spring. The last day of January they were worrying over not having any ice. The river seemed going out and they say if the ice goes out before the 10th of February it doesn't freeze again. But that ground hog settled that. He put his nose out just at the wrong time. Then it kept getting colder and colder till the night of the 4th when we had a howling blizzard[;] it lasted all day the next day and the following day (Friday) I made it to school tho few did. The cold was intense. Grant froze his nose and toes just going to the barn. I made my twelve miles that Friday and only frosted my feet. Saturday was a fright again but it moderated a little and I made it to school O.K. We had another howling storm all day Wednesday so I stayed at Donahues that night. Stayed again Friday night in hopes that I could get to town yesterday with Mr. D but it stormed to beat the [railroad] cars yesterday and is at it today. They are out of groceries and coal so Mr. D is going to try to make it in this afternoon and out tomorrow but its fierce. Thought I'd let you know I was O.K. and won't try to drive till its better.

Well I must close. Don't worry about me.
Lovingly yours,
Bachelor Bess

Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Corey, 1909-1919 edited by Philip L. Gerber

Winter Gardening

Tuesday, February 14

Thirteen above this morning—a balmy start by comparison with the last several days. A good omen for St. Valentine's. But when I put Pip out on his leash, the air must've hit me the wrong way because it suddenly felt intolerable. So cold, so harsh, I didn't even want to look at the sky or eyeball the backyard or anything else outside. I just wanted to get back in as fast as I could. And when I got back inside, something inside me screamed out what I was feeling just then in every part of my being. "I've had it. Had it with the cold, the wind, the ice, the ice-covered driveway, the ice park over the backyard, the iced-over sidewalks, the iced-up car, my ice-nipped ears and toes and fingertips. And the heavy clothing. And the dry air. And the overheated rooms. Everything." Or words to that effect. 

But Kate was still asleep. I didn't want to wake her up. And besides, the feeling passed so quickly I was left musing upon the suddenness of its appearance, as if out of nowhere. Like the dream I'd had just a few hours earlier about the end of the semester. It was the last week of classes, or perhaps exam week, or the week after graduation. No one around. And I was wandering the hallways, looking for someone to talk to, to have coffee with. But all the offices were shut. And no signs of light or life were visible in the gaps between the office doors and the floor. I was standing alone in an empty hallway, in an empty building. Not an uncommon experience when school is out. And sometimes, in fact, a pleasurable image to contemplate, especially in the midst of a semester when the press of students and committees becomes unbearable. But in my dream last night, I felt desolate beyond belief, with a great heaving in my chest. An anguish so intense I was on the verge of tears. And then I awoke, shaking. And then it gradually came to me that I must have been grieving the prospect of my retirement. A strange twist, given the pleasure I've had this semester, on "phased-in retirement," teaching only one course with just a dozen students and a few auditors, who leave me almost completely free to write my daily reports and to contemplate the time when I'll be completely free to write, travel, and garden as I wish. I thought I'd adjusted to the chilly side of retirement just as I thought I'd adjusted to the harshness of winter, except, of course, for a few qualms now and then, like the ones I had a couple of weeks ago. But when all is said and done, it must be that I'm troubled by a long run of bitterly cold weather, no matter where it occurs—wide awake or in a dream, in an empty hallway or right outside the back door. This winter watch is getting closer to home than I imagined.

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

Winter Sport

Deep winter now, and for more than fifteen hundred miles the Upper Mississippi lies white and silent under the ice-wind. On broad Lake Pepin the ice is nearly three feet thick and still expanding. In the clearest, coldest nights of the year the trees crack and bang as the deep frost expansion crack begins, running out of the distance like an express train coming onto a trestle—a long sustained boo-o-o-OOOMMMM-m-m-m! amplified by the vast drumhead of ice, passing on and fading as the Great River returns to its slumber.

With first light, the ice-wind is back. It is hardly more than a breeze, an airy zephyr that would be scarcely noticed in spring or fall, but now it carries a chill factor of 50 degrees below zero and strikes into exposed flesh like blue steel.

I walked across one of the river-lakes to visit a place where a commercial fisherman had discarded a seine-load of carpsuckers and gizzard shad. Eagles were said to be there, scavenging the frozen fish. It was rumored that one was a golden, and although it was almost certainly an immature bald eagle, I had to see it for myself. The ice was varied, with large patches as smooth as any glass except for the expansion cracks, and adjacent fields of rough crystals that broke noisily under my shoepacs. It almost appeared to be burning as the wind whirled talcum-fine snow over its surface, making the ice seem to fume and smoke. There was no sun or any sign of sun. The sky was a single white blankness that neither promised nor threatened anything. I had left my camera in the truck, for although there was light enough it was flat light without character, providing neither shadow nor highlight. No matter. I never reached that slough with its alleged eagles. The parka hood and thick woolen cap were not enough to turn the edge of that wind. It was literally striking into bone, into the sinuses of face and forehead as a sickening ache that I could feel clear down under my breakfast, and when I put my mittened hands over my face there was no sensation in nose or cheekbones. Even in the heavy beaver-skin mittens my hands were growing numb—and the eagle slough was still almost a mile away. Enough. I turned tail, the ice-wind scourging me off its River.

From John Madson's Up on the River: People and Wildlife of the Upper Mississippi

Comfort Foods from Iowa

Peanut Brittle Crunch Pie

1/4 cup cold water

2 tablespoons butter

1 cup milk, scalded

2 tablespoons sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

2 beaten egg yolks

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 envelope unflavored gelatin

2 stiffly beaten egg whites

1 cup crushed peanut brittle

1 9-inch graham cracker crust

Soften gelatin in cold water. Combine egg yolks, brown sugar, and salt. Gradually add scalded milk. Cook until thick, stirring constantly. Add butter and gelatin, stirring until dissolved. Add vanilla. Cool. Chill until partially set. Gradually add the granulated sugar to the egg whites. Beat until glossy and sugar is dissolved. Fold into chilled mixture. Fold in whipped cream and peanut brittle. Pour into graham cracker crust.

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

Winter Bird

Red Crossbill

Loxia curvirostra

Few people would speak of a red crossbill and a northern hawk owl in the same sentence, but I will always link these birds because my only sighting of each species was on the same day: February 22, 2005. On that day, with Fred Lesher, Carol Schumacher, and Rochester birder Bill Bruins, I visited the small town of Manly in north central Iowa to see the hawk owl that had wandered far south of its normal range to spend the winter there. From Manly, we traveled west to Thorpe Park in Winnebago County, where a pair of red crossbills was in residence. As soon as we entered the park office, we saw a red, dark-winged male at a sunflower seed feeder. Soon the female arrived. She was grayish olive and yellow with dark wings.

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