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! 

Banana Cream Pie

This past weekend, G's family had a reunion with his aunts/uncles/cousins, and I was asked to make a couple of pies for one of the meals. What kind of pie? G said banana cream for sure. And I still had those unripe apples from our tree, so I decided to make an apple pie too. More on that tomorrow. 

Of course I wanted to make the banana pie from scratch. But what recipe to use? I narrowed it down to two very highly rated recipes. G thought I should make two banana cream because it's very popular, and originally I was going to make both recipes. But time slipped away from me and the filling of recipe #1 (Sally's Baking Addiction) ended up being more than fit in my pie crust, so I got creative. 

To make life easier, I did a graham cracker crust. The pie recipe said to wait for the pudding to cool before pouring it into the crust, but I didn't see why it had to wait, so I poured it in after cooling a few minutes. 

Beautiful. 

There was filling leftover but not quite enough to fill a whole pie. The second recipe (Preppy Kitchen) I wanted to try suggested a layer of bananas, then pudding, then more bananas, then more pudding, then whipped cream. It also suggested variations to keep the crust from getting soggy, for example a layer of jam or nutella. Hey! I still had some homemade nutella in the fridge! 

So I spread a layer of nutella on the crust, then added a layer of bananas. 

By that time, the pudding had cooled significantly and I had to spread it out in the tin. 

Not nearly as pretty. Good thing it would be covered up by whipped cream! 

I waited to put that on right before we left for the meal. I had worried the whipped cream would deflate in the wait before dessert, but the second recipe suggested using powdered sugar to make the whipped cream. Powdered sugar includes corn starch (or arrowroot powder) which stabilizes the cream and allows it to hold longer. Definitely going to remember that tip! It actually held up days later! 

So, overall thoughts on the recipe. Sally's recipe was not overly sweet. The pudding was smooth and very creamy. I really do want to try the second recipe to compare. My nutella experiment met with mixed results. I actually liked it better than the straight banana cream pie. G liked the original. He said the nutella took over the flavor completely.

The original recipe was definitely a crowd pleaser- there were only three pieces left at the end of the night. Nutella banana cream had half the pie left. 

Vacation and Farmfest

It's been a busy couple of weeks and I haven't been able to keep up with my posts! 

My dad, Jaron and I, and my sister and two of her kids went to Ag PhD Day sponsored by Hefty seed. It's an education day for farmers where everything is free- admission, the education sessions, food, and treats. Because of the kids, we didn't sit in on any education sessions this time. The weather was beautiful and we had a great time looking at machinery and playing with farm toys (and enjoying root beer floats and mini donuts). 

The following week we went to Farmfest. This time it was my dad, brother-in-law, and Jaron and me (my sister was planning to come with the kids, but they got sick). It was actually very pleasant with such a small group. Jaron was content to see tractors and equipment everywhere, and the smaller group made it easier to ask questions of vendors and see the things Dad wanted to see. 

Jaron tested out a lawnmower there...

Jaron and I also continued my summer tradition of going on a trip with my college travel friend. We went to Indianola, IA, for the hot air balloon festival. Before we left, the weather forecast looked beautiful. Once we arrived, wind and rain moved in and all the balloon festivities were cancelled every day we were there. 😩 

It was different than usual since she brought her four month old and I brought my 21mo old. We still enjoyed eating out, afternoon ice cream, late night chats, and hiking local parks. 

But our evenings out ended much earlier than usual so the kiddos could get to bed. Our daytime activities also revolved around naptimes and feeding times. Honestly, it was a bit exhausting being the solo parent. 😅 We both have wonderfully helpful husbands. On our way home, we talked about what next year's trip might look like... We both agreed we should find a cute place to stay closer to home and have low expectations about how many activities we'll accomplish on our trip. We'll probably look for a town having a festival around our trip dates, one with nice walking paths and a decent ice cream shop. 😉

Plum Syrup Fail

My poor plum syrup is no more. 😭 

I forgot to tell G to stir it before I left on a three day trip and the plums got moldy. 

Unfortunately, because of the sugar and liquid, if there's any mold, the whole thing has to get tossed. 

Which is really a shame because the second batch had just started to release the juices. 

I talked to a friend of mine with experience making this recipe. I wondered if I had used a faulty recipe. She uses this recipe, which is essentially the same as mine. The main issues with mine were not stirring and using plums that were too ripe. Even though the ones I used weren't ripe, they weren't green enough. The ripe ones mold so quickly, if I would do it again, she suggested I keep it in the fridge to keep the mold from forming until the juices come out. 

Thistle War

I'm pleased to report we are winning our war against the thistles. In the pasture at least. 

Last year we had tons of thistles in this area. G went out many times to cut the flowers off before they turned to seed. The thistles put so much energy into producing flowers, they don't make it over winter, or so the experts say. 

This year, there's clover and grasses. It worked! Jaron and I checked it the other day and were pleased to see just a few. We did chop off the thistle flowers we saw, much to Jaron's delight. "Chop!"

The battle in our garden continues however. The worst corner with thistles looks better, but thistles are popping through the mulch/cardboard. Again, we made sure to chop the flowers off. 

Another potential issue is that the chickens found the garden... 

They've been seen crawling under the garden gate. That's an easy fix. But I'm not sure if they're hopping over the chicken wire too. That will take more work. 

So far the chickens have just scratched around the mulch and pecked a couple peppers. But if they decide to go to town on the rest of our veggies, that will be a major issue. 

Never underestimate your animals is our unofficial motto. I guess that means I better fix the fence. 😅

Shoes Everywhere

There's a shoe problem at our house. Shoes everywhere! Fancy shoes, work shoes, wet weather shoes, casual shoes, sandals... I know it's only going to get worse. 

We have a bench in our entryway with a shelf underneath that's been our shoe home, but we've long outgrown it. I had the idea to add on a second shelf above the first to get double the shoe storage space. The concept is basically my "between the studs" style of shelving. 

To the garage! Lots of spare wood in there. 

While I dug around, I also unearthed a kid work bench set I got at a garage sale last fall. Jaron got to work right away. 

So cute. He's a handy guy! 😉

Back to the project! 

Unfortunately, we didn't have any wide boards long enough to stretch the length of the bench. What about two thinner boards? That should work! So that's what I did. Jaron's work bench also worked as a saw horse in a pinch. 😅

I decided that screwing the long boards onto the side supports ahead of time would be smart. 

It also would've been smart to start the side screws before lifting it into place. It was a little hard to see where I was going. Originally, I plan planned to use one screw and hope that the tightness would keep the shelf from tipping. No such luck. But there was room for a second screw on the cross board of the bench, so that solved the problem. 

Tada! 🥳 Much neater entryway. 

Potato Volunteers

A few weeks ago, G brought home the leftover seed potatoes and onions from the garden center. I wish I had known about it before he tossed them on there (or had thought to pick through them for the good ones). I would've told him to put them in our potato bed in the garden. 

But at the time I just let it go. 

Now we have potatoes volunteering in the compost pile...

Is it worth it it replant them in the garden??? 🤔😂 Not going to do it of course, but I will admit, I did consider it for a few minutes. 😂

Unripe Apple Pectin

Apparently, it's a bumper year for apples. One of our young apple trees had a couple of branches loaded with apples. G asked me if I thought he should prop those branches up so they wouldn't break. I said no, the tree should be able to tell it's weighted down and shore up its own branches. 

Well, I should've listened to G. 

The two heaviest branches broke. ☹️ There are still apples on the tree, so all is not lost. But we did lose a decent chunk. With unripe plums on the brain, I wondered if I could put the unripe apples to use too... 

Some I have in the fridge to bake a pie. The rest I turned into apple pectin. 

Super easy recipe. Coarsly chop the apples, leaving the skins and cores. Put in a pot with just enough water to cover the apples and cook for one hour. 

Strain through a cheesecloth without squeezing. 

Let it rest overnight. Then reduce the strained liquid by half.

And boom, your pectin is ready. You can freeze it or can it for later use. Mine is in the freezer. TBD what I'll use it with...

Unripe Plums - Pickles

Even after all the syrup making, I still had unripe plums to work with. I found this recipe for pickled plums. Very simple and sounds like something I'd enjoy. 

I weighed the plums, scoring them as I put them in the jar. Then I figured out what 7% of the weight was and put in the equivalent grams of salt. I didn't have any star anise, but I did have whole coriander, so I put in about one tablespoon. Cover with slightly cooled boiled water and once it's completely cooled, store in the fridge for one week. Then they're ready! 

I am a little concerned that the salt I put in didn't dissolve all the way. I used a kettle of tea water I had heated in the morning but forgot to make tea with it. 😅 It was warm when I poured it in, but not anywhere close to hot. But chat gpt says it should be fine and the salt will even out over time. 🤷‍♀️ 

Before I moved it to the fridge, I added a glass fermentation weight just to keep the plums under the water. 

We'll see how they taste in one week!