Cecropia Moth

We found this GIGANTIC caterpillar in our driveway this morning. 

Cecropia moth, North America's largest native moth, part of the silk worm family. You can see some silk on the caterpillar's legs/the cord.

They live as caterpillars for about one month before making a cocoon they overwinter in for 10 months. As adults, they live for two weeks and don't eat - they don't even have mouths! Their sole purpose is to mate and lay eggs. 

We rehomed this big guy to our maple tree so he can keep eating! 

A quick Google search revealed that he's pretty close to going into cocoon mode: 

"Cecropia moths remain in the caterpillar stage for about 4 to 5 weeks (approximately 30 to 35 days).

Growth and Molting

During this brief period, they grow from tiny, black hatchlings into massive, bright green giants. They go through five distinct growth stages called instars, shedding their skin between each one:

• 1st Instar: Tiny, black, and covered in small bristles.
• 2nd Instar: Turn bright yellow with black spikes.
• 3rd Instar: Become green or bluish-green with yellow, blue, and orange bumps (tubercles).
• 4th & 5th Instars: Grow up to 4.5 inches long, turning a brilliant sea-green with striking red, yellow, and blue knobs.

Once they finish feeding at the end of the fifth instar, they spin their tough brown silk cocoons and begin the long pupal stage, which lasts all through the winter."

Scaled Down Egg Salad and Freeze Dried Herbs

The egg salad was a hit! Unfortunately I wasn't around to witness it; my summer sand volleyball team was in the playoffs that night with a double header (we won our division!) and I missed the whole event. 

But she said that everyone loved the food. I actually got a call from a Saint Mark member who wanted the egg salad recipe. I offered to write it down and bring it to church on Sunday and he said "Oh Emily, I don't think that will be soon enough." He wanted to make a batch that afternoon! So, I scaled the recipe down and brought the recipe and a dozen eggs over to his house. 

If any of you are itching for a scaled down version of the recipe, here you go: 

Makes: About 6–8 sandwiches

• 12 large hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
• ¾ cup mayonnaise (I used Hellman's)
• 3 tablespoons sweet pickle relish (drained if very watery), I added a little more for extra tang
• 2 tablespoons yellow mustard 
• ⅓–½ cup finely diced celery
• ½–¾ teaspoon salt (start with ½ and adjust)
• ¼ teaspoon black pepper

The garden might be slow, but I was able to harvest some herbs. I've heard that freeze drying herbs is super easy and has a great result, so I popped these leaves in the freeze dryer. 

Basil, sage, and bay leaves. 

The freeze dryer app said to skip the prefreeze and have them dried at a lower temperature (95 degrees), so I adjusted the settings. 

I only put the three trays in. Mistake. The machine has sensors in all four tray areas to detect doneness, so when I don't have a fourth tray, it messes up the machines sensors and it doesn't actually recognize when the items are dry. Of course I found that out after the fact. 

When I took the trays out, some of the leaves were completely dry and others were still filled with moisture.

I left the ones that needed more time out to air dry and put the dried leaves in glass jars. 

I'll try freeze drying herbs again when there are more herbs to harvest!

Egg Salad for 70

Our last Saint Mark Summer Night was Tuesday night, theme- Out of This World. 

G and I came up with space themed foods. 

• Crescent moon sandwiches (egg salad on croissants and ham/cheese as an alternative)
• Alien jello cups
• Meteorites (cheese balls)
• Star shaped chicken nuggets 
• Rocket pops

We debated between egg salad and chicken salad, but we have a ton of eggs, so we settled on egg salad. 

We planned food for 70 people, which meant I needed to hard boil 80 eggs. 😳 My mother-in-law gave me the idea to do it in the oven. You crack your eggs into a loaf pan, then put that pan into a larger pan of water (water up to the level of the eggs), creating a bain-marie. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes, boom. Done. 

Well, you still need to chop the eggs and mix in the other ingredients, but the hard work is done. 

Cracking 80 eggs actually went fairly quickly... I had a little helper handing me eggs. 

He was ecstatic the entire time. I counted as we went, and Jaron kept chiming in, "Fourteen! Sixteen! Eggs! Crack!" So proud to be handing me eggs. 🥰

 

It was nerve-wracking at first, but he's been pretty good at handing me eggs when we collect them from the chickens. It helps he can only hold one at a time. 😜 In the kitchen, he only cracked three on the counter, and two of those three were salvageable. 😅 

The poor guy cried when there weren't any more eggs to crack. 

After cooling, I chopped the eggs in batches in my food processor. For about two seconds, I used my hand pastry cutter. That would've taken forever. 😂

The food processor worked better than I expected. I had mixed up the sauce ingredients in a gigantic bowl first:

• 5 cups mayonnaise
• 1¼ cups sweet pickle relish 
• ¾ cup + 1 tablespoon yellow mustard 
• 1½ tablespoons salt 
• 1½ teaspoons black pepper 

And then added the processed eggs, one bowl at a time, stirring each. So easy to mix everything in. 

Jaron wanted to help again, so I let him stir the salad. 

Man, I love that big bowl. 

Last Fair

I judged my last fair of the year Monday afternoon, this time at the Martin County Fair judging 3-5th crafts and fine arts. I've judged for this county for prefair entry days before, but never at the fairgrounds. It was a little toasty in the building, but not unbearable. I dressed for the weather and my table was near an open door so I got a breeze. 

Crafts and fine arts is one of the most popular 4H project areas and the judges are always busy. Martin County is a big county with a solid 4H program, so I expected to be busy. There were four judges in my project area including me. Two judges did the older kids and another judge and I handled the 3-5th graders. 

It went pretty smoothly once I figured out that I had missed the craft section in the front of my judge's binder. I thought there was an error and I just had Fine Arts entries. Crafts and fine arts are actually separate categories, and they were on complete opposite ends of the binder- I thought the papers for both would be next to each other. 

Overall, I didn't see too many projects that wowed me. Lots of diamond art, some button art, some drawings, some clay figurines, a few mini wooden scenes from kits. The most unique entries were a felted wool bowl (the 4Her said he uses it as a hat at home) and a gigantic Lego scene set in Jurassic World. It was about 2ft by 4ft and he said he'd been working on it since January. He had a story to go with the scene, so it wasn't just Legos. Very impressive. He ended up getting champion. 

Crispies

I think I figured out why people put milk on cereal...

Jaron wanted a snack, and he had already had a large variety of snacks earlier in the day, so I was trying to come up with something he hadn't had yet. Rice crispies? Sure. He's older now and shouldn't make too much of a mess, right? 

I scooped him a tiny cup of crispies and handed it to him in his tower. He did okay at first. He held the cup and slurped the dry cereal with his mouth. Then he set the cup down to eat with his fingers. I went back to work in the kitchen. Bad decision. I heard a clattering and saw that he had dumped the cup on the counter and was sliding his hand back and forth knocking the cereal to the ground. So I took the cereal away. 

Then, silly me, I gave it back to him in a suction bowl. My only defense is that he was eating a few I missed so I thought he'd do better if it were in a different vessel. Wrong. He peeled the suction bowl off the counter and dumped it directly on the floor. 

Silly me again, he still seemed interested in eating the pieces I picked up off the floor, so I took him out of the kitchen tower and set him on the floor. He could do double duty and clean up for me while eating snack. Yeah, no. He smeared his hand through the crispies, then stepped on them on purpose crunching them up. So much for cleaning up. I scooped up as many as I could (seriously, how did this many rice crispies fit into such a tiny cup?) and then got out the broom. Jaron wanted to sweep them up himself of course, and had a meltdown that I wouldn't let him hold the big broom. 

I wonder how much of this mess would've been avoided if there had been milk in the bowl holding them all together? 

Aw, who am I kidding? Then I'd have had milk to clean up too! 😂

4H Judging

I judged two county fairs earlier this week, which also contributed to my delays in posting. Oftentimes I judge not-as-popular categories and have a bunch of down time between 4Hers, but both of these fairs kept me busy pretty much the whole time! 

The first was in my home county. I always like judging there because I recognize a lot of the families; a bunch are children of people I was in 4-H with. That and the Murray county fair is one of the best fairs in the state of Minnesota. 😉

Originally, I was going to judge a completely different category. But the 4-H coordinator was having trouble finding someone willing to judge eggs, and she asked me to switch. I figured I could handle that with all the eggs that we've been handling on our homestead, so I said yes. I ended up judging flower gardening (individual flowers and arrangements), indoor gardening (potted plants and fairy gardens), largest vegetable (exactly what it sounds like), vegetable box (a collection of six kinds of veggies with multiples of each veggie, quantity determined by size of produce), vegetable plate (one large or three medium or 6-10 small), fruits (only one 4Her came), herbs (also one entry), and eggs (brown and white... many entries). 

As you can imagine, with all those categories I was kept quite busy. There were a lot of scratches, which are canceled entries. You sign up for how many projects you're taking in May and there's no way to know how your garden will turn out at that point. A bunch of people said that their flowers didn't grow because of the heat. Others said that their "insert vegetable here" didn't grow because of the rain/sun/bugs. So. It's a tough category to do well. 

I've judged flower and indoor gardening before, but never vegetable gardening. It took a couple of 4Hers for me to feel comfortable with the category. The veggie judging was pretty easy once I figured out the requirements. If their items looked uniform, they got a decent ribbon. 

Egg judging was also fairly simple. Make sure the eggs look uniform, don't have bumps on the shells, aren't cracked. You would be surprised how many cartons had a cracked egg in there. I brought along a mini flashlight so I could candle eggs, and I showed quite a few 4Hers their subtly cracked eggs. Hard to argue when you can see the crack lit up through the shell. One boy was absolutely devastated when I pointed out his cracked egg. He had gone through three buckets of eggs to find the perfect ones for the fair. I asked if he lived close to the fair... maybe he could switch it out. He didn't, but he remembered his dad was still at home. He called his dad and said, "Bring every egg we have!" I had him get out of line so I could keep judging and eventually he returned with a full dozen plus one more just in case. I gave him a purple ribbon for commitment to quality. 

You would also be surprised how many people didn't know how to properly store eggs. Eggs should always be stored with the pointy end down. The air sac is on the wide end and that should be up to let the egg last longer. Imagine you put a balloon at the bottom of your laundry basket. What would happen when you put clothes on top? That's what happens when your egg is upside down in the carton; the pressure on the airsac reduces the egg quality much quicker. 

Picking champion and reserve eggs was difficult. There were a lot of beautiful eggs. In the end, I went with the biggest, most uniform eggs, where the 4Her knew about pointy side down and had a good interview. 

The next day, I judged in Nicollet County and did my favorite category- Food and Nutrition. I also judged the most stressful category- Food Preservation. Why so stressful? The rulebook says that 4Hers have to use an approved recipe from one of the three canning/preserving sites for food safety, and a large quantity of entries don't. They bring family recipes and then I have to break their hearts by giving them a lesser ribbon. In the past, I've had to deal with angry parents who didn't read the rule book, and kids crying because their project got a red ribbon. I've also had kids who knew the rules and brought their family recipe anyway. I appreciate the confidence of those kids. But I also wish they'd lead their interview with, "I know this is a non-approved recipe..." so I don't have to worry about how to tell them.

Anyway, judging went very well aside from sugar overload from eating so many sweet things. A couple 4Hers brought savory things, but those were few and far between. I did take pictures of two recipes I'd like to try myself. 

So tiny, almondy, and chewy and crunchy at the same time. Delightful.

Tastes like fudgy box mix brownies.

One recipe I didn't take a picture of, but is still intriguing me is cloud cake. Ever heard of it? It's cake but lightly sweet and with a slightly eggy texture. It's fascinating. I think this is the recipe he used. Maybe I'll make that one someday too. 

Gluten Free Unripe Apple Pie

I planned to make an apple pie for the reunion. Just a simple standard apple pie, aside from using unripe apples. The unripe apples kept me blocked for a while. I didn't know how much sugar to use! 

It's a good thing I waited. At the Friday night gathering, I found out that some members of the family are gluten free. I knew that the other pie offerings were going to include gluten, and since I hadn't made the apple pie yet, I figured I could easily (or semi easily) make it a gluten-free apple pie. 

Chatgpt to the rescue again! 

1½ cups almond flour

1 cup tapioca flour

¼ cup potato starch

¼ cup arrowroot powder

2 Tbsp sugar

½ tsp salt

10 Tbsp cold lard

1 egg

1 tsp apple cider vinegar or lemon juice

2–4 Tbsp ice water

It originally called for 1 and 1/4 cup tapioca flour, but I ran out and had to improvise with the potato starch. It also originally wanted me to use butter, but since I have homemade lard, I wanted to use that. 

The crust came together quickly, and as the recipe cautioned, it was pretty crumbly. It rolled out just fine on the countertop. I thought I would be able to use my pastry scraper to fold it and set it into the pie tin. But it was so delicate that it kept squishing and breaking into pieces. I ended up putting the pieces in the pie tin and squishing them together.

The recipe suggested rolling out the dough between two pieces of plastic wrap, so that's what I did for the top crust. That worked better, but I still wasn't able to get the whole thing on top of the pie. Instead of wasting time messing with it, I took a cookie cutter and cut pieces of crust to lay overlapping on top.

It was much easier to peel up those small cookie shapes and arrange them.

Plus it made the pie look quite fancy!

The crust turned out nice and flaky and had a good flavor. Some people who sampled it after the gluten-free people got their pieces said you would never be able to tell that it was gluten free.

I thought the filling also turned out well- a little tangy, and not too sweet. One suggestion chat GPT had was to sample an apple to see how sweet it was. Why didn't I think of that? 🤦‍♀️ 

The filling recipe:

8 cups unripe apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced (I just cored and thinly sliced them... Don't let the picture fool you - they were way too small to mess with peeling.)

3/4 cup brown sugar or maple sugar (if the apples are on the sweeter side, go down to 1/2c sugar)

2 tablespoons tapioca flour (I ground up tapioca pearls in my spice grinder to make flour)

1½ teaspoons cinnamon

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

¼ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 tablespoons lard, cut into small pieces (I forgot to add this in, didn't seem to make much difference)

I would definitely make this pie again!