Thanksgiving Holiday Menu 1

Surprise your family with this delicious meal from the University of Iowa Press's cook book collection. Come back on Wednesday for our dessert ideas!

Roast Turkey (Elizabeth Hiller, Cooking School Instructor) from P.E.O. Cook Book

Select a plump, young, ten-poung turkey, dress, clean, stuff and truss. Place it on a rack in a dripping pan, rub entire surface with salt and spread with a butter paste, make by creaming together one-third cup butter an adding slowly one-fourth cup flour. This is spread over breast, wings and legs. Place in a hot oven and borne delicately, turning turkey often. Reduce heat when evenly browned, add two cups water to fat in the pan and baste every fifteen minutes until turkey is cooked.

Buttermilk Biscuits from Prairie Cooks

2 cups all-purpose flour                                  1 teaspoon soda
2 teaspoons sugar                                           2/3 cup buttermilk
1/3 cup butter or margarine

Sift flour and sugar together. Add butter and cut in as if mixing a pie crust. Stir soda into buttermilk and add all at once to flour mixture. Stir with a fork until it holds together. Turn out on floured board and knead two or three ties. Pat dough into a 1-inch-high round and cut out with a 1.5-inch biscuit cutter. Gently bunch any remaining dough to form and cut last biscuits. Place closely together on buttered baking sheet and brush tops light with buttermilk. Bake at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes or until brown. Makes 16 - 18 biscuits.

P.E.O. Cook Book(Souvenir Edition), edited by David E. Schoonover

Prairie Cooks, by Carrie Young with Felicia Young

Excerpt from OF MEN AND MARSHES

In cutting through ice, the muskrats are adept if they work from below, and they may work well at this in water. They may gnaw upward through the ice in the middle of a marsh, and then heap up the vegetation for  a new lodge around the new hole. I happened to be walking across the care ice of a marsh center when a muskrat cut through ahead of me. It pulled its wet body out, and there it sat amid ice splinters beside a hole leading down through a foot or so of ice. A muskrat may similarly gnaw from below the ice over the plunge hole of a solidly frozen, abandoned lodge and rehabilitate the lodge in a few hours.

From OF MEN AND MARSHES by Paul L. Errington

Gardening in November

Saturday, November 18

...Dan turned the soil and I pulled out the dried corn stalks and the dead cosmos, marigold, okra, and sunflower plants. The accumulated stuff of an entire season's growth, fruition, and decay so quickly cast away. A mess of rotten straw, dried-up cucumber vines, sodden leaves, and soggy squash plants gradually turned under, gradually exposing the rich dark soil itself, chiseled by the spade, moistened by the snow, glinting suddenly in the noonday sun. Just the dark soil and the white row covers.

Carl H. Klaus, My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season

Excerpt from OF MEN AND MARSHES

With the first freeze-up, mallards typically appear by thousands. They cover the remnants of open water or sit on the ice. If the ice melts again in a day or two, the waterfowl population may not be so much different from before except for the departure of the coots and the mild-weather ducks and for the great proportions of mallards. More of the ducks have brighter plumage in late fall: the green heads of the mallard drakes stand out and so do the white throats and brown necks of the pintail drakes. The drakes of what are locally known as the "northern spoonbills" do not look like the same species as the brownish shovelers of early fall.

Mallards may be in no hurry to leave as long as they have access to cornfields and a safe place to sit between feedings. They may still be on the larger lakes by early winter.

Excerpt from OF MEN AND MARSHES by Paul L. Errington

Michael Lannoo Interview Part 3

Your new book has convinced me that conservation biologists trained at Lakeside Lab—and biological research stations like it—might just be able to solve today’s huge array of environmental problems. Tell us more before we forget about this summer’s extreme heat and drought.

Our current societal emphasis on the spending habits of 15-year-old girls at shopping malls means that we are culturally ill equipped to understand the things that are really important to us. Further, we retain little memory of critical events such as environmental disasters, especially when we were not directly affected or inconvenienced. At some point in the future, for civilization to continue, we will have to place our emphases on things necessary to propagate civilization. And both our resources and our models for operation will come from ecosystems. Right now, nobody understands ecosystems better than people working at field stations. These rubber-boot biologists collectively know everything that we now know about ecosystem functions and services. Lose these guys (of both sexes) and you’re left with folks trying to understand life by sitting in front of a computer screen. And life is still too complicated, and probably always will be, for us to adequately model it in any sort of reasonably predictable way. Concerning this past summer’s weather, people sitting in front of their computers and looking at their models say, “Wow, we never thought this would happen!” while field biologists are out in it looking. Getting sunburned, sweating their rear-ends off, measuring everything they can, observing effects firsthand. In science, these facts should always take precedence, and by and large it’s folks at field stations who are collecting them.

Circling back to the younger Michael Lannoo who discovered his future at Lakeside in 1977, what advice would you give to a similar nineteen-year-old taking a course there for the first time?

Become a sponge; look, listen, and absorb. Know that the world doesn’t revolve around you. Also know that the first rule of life is living. Have a good time—but not so good that your fun gets in the way of learning—and know that human memory functions best when experiences are tied to deep emotions. Lakeside has always been a place where you can discover who you are and what you’re about, if you’re open to it. Right now our society sets us up to be clueless, and to be absolutely serious about our cluelessness. So much better to know yourself, and with this knowledge learn not to take yourself so seriously. During that first summer at Lakeside you’ll become knowledgeable, you’ll become competent, and if you want, you’ll begin to understand who and what you are.

Michael Lannoo, author of The Iowa Lakeside Laboratory: A Century of Discovering the Nature of Nature

Excerpt from OF MEN AND MARSHES

My memories of marshes in fall are so loaded with nostalgia that I often find myself enjoying Iowa or Minnesota or Nebraska marshes largely to the extent that they remind me of my youth and early manhood in South Dakota. I find old copper bases of shotgun shells working out of an Iowa beach, read the "U.M.C.," "New Rival," "Referee," "Premier," along with older trademarks that long ago disappeared from hardware shelves, and visualize the distinctive colors of the cartridges as they came out of the cardboard boxes. I remember wet shells so swollen that I could not push them into the chamber of a gun, shells that would not always fire if I did get them in, the bellow and smoke of a heavy charge of black powder, the smell of a freshly fired case, the feel of a jolted shoulder, the picking up of game.

From Of Men and Marshes by Paul L. Errington

Michael Lannoo Interview Part 2

It’s ironic that Lakeside, with its diverse plant and animal communities, is surrounded by what may be the most intensely cultivated landscape on earth. How does this affect your teaching and fieldwork there?

Iowa is iconically the Midwest: an agricultural desert. Its beauty is acquired, subtle, and because its agriculture is so large-scale, its native ecosystems are necessarily small. Iowa’s natural history tends to be squirreled away in this nook or that cranny, a bend in the road, a ravine, a railroad track right-of-way, a field too rocky to plow, a seep that cannot be drained, a grove that meant something to a family and therefore was never logged. In 1977, Okoboji was a lot like that. Sure there were more state parks and natural areas than in most other parts of the state, but classes found areas to explore and plants and animals to study based on experienced faculty knowing where to look. There was a cumulative institutional knowledge about where things were, and new discoveries were shared immediately: an orchid in that woods, a new fish species in that stretch of river. Classes were visiting small remnant habitats that almost everyone else overlooked. Many of these sites were on private property. Beginning around 1988, that all changed. The state and federal governments working with NGOs such as Pheasants Forever and Ducks Unlimited began purchasing property from farmers who approached them. Gradually, vast grasslands were established around restored wetlands—basins that hadn’t held water for 70 years. Today, Okoboji supports over 24,000 acres of “natural” areas that weren’t present 30 years ago. The difference has been remarkable and has fundamentally changed how we teach. Thirty years ago we’d spend afternoons sampling specks on the landscape; today there are areas where we spend days and do not see everything.

A quick story. There is a little wetland on private property along a road about two miles south of Lakeside where, if you sampled early enough in the year, you would find these beautiful, transparent fairy shrimp—the only place in all of Okoboji that supported them. It was a Lakeside secret; not because we wanted it to be, it’s just that nobody else cared. Twenty years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service came in and bought land from a farmer named White in the section east and south of this little wetland. A few years ago they bought much of the remaining section, including land immediately adjacent to the wetland. Last year I noticed that the wetland, too, had been purchased. When I saw the Iowa DNR biologists responsible, I mentioned how happy I was that Fairy Shrimp Pond was now protected. They had no idea what I was talking about, and when I explained we all laughed at the serendipity. The current program of land acquisition and restoration had enveloped one of the Lakeside faculty’s favorite little sampling hotspots.

You are a professor of anatomy and cell biology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, yet you also teach field biology during the summertime at Lakeside Lab. Tell us how you balance these very different kinds of teaching.

You have to live in the moment. In Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean notes that some people have to do more than one thing to be complete, and that certainly holds for me. Here at IU, I argue that there’s a huge component of human health that’s tied to environmental health, and that it is important to understand environmental health; thus, both the human neuroscience and conservation biology foci. But deeper than that, the two major opposing (they don’t have to be) forces on earth today are 1) the way the human brain puts humans first versus 2) the resulting loss in biodiversity and ecosystem function. I figure if I understand both of these issues deeply enough to teach them, I may be able to help us find a way out.

Interestingly, my IU med students tend toward an extremely conservative political outlook, while my UI Lakeside students tend toward an extremely liberal outlook. Instead of trying to exert any political leanings on either group of students, I tend to listen without comment; I will however moderate extreme views on either side.

As an aside, after writing the previous paragraph I now have a marker for retirement. If I find that I cannot keep UI and IU straight, it’ll be time to hang it up.

Michael Lannoo, author of The Iowa Lakeside Laboratory: A Century of Discovering the Nature of Nature