Whew, A Busy Day

Where did my day go???  We took a walk—lots of the snow is melting but another system is on the way.  Isn’t it a tragedy about the cattle in South Dakota—we thought our snow was deep here but those poor people were inundated! 

Lunch for Nat and Michael was a recipe I found in the American Profile magazine which comes with the newspaper—Nat still subscribes to a “paper” newspaper and it is thrown at his door every morning.  We had Smoky Corn and Shrimp Chowder—it was delicious and here is the recipe:

SMOKY CORN AND SHRIMP CHOWDER

4 ears fresh sweet corn (I used four cups frozen corn)

4 bacon slices

1 medium white onion, chopped

1 tsp salt

1 tsp smoked paprika

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (I left this out, Nat doesn't do pepper of any sort)

2 TBS flour (I think it could use more if you, like we do, want a thicker soup)

2 medium baking potatoes, chopped

5 cups 2% milk (I only used 4 cups of liquid--3 cups of skim milk and one of Half & Half)

1 pound shrimp (the recipe doesn't say to chop the shrimp, but I did, it would be hard to eat soup with whole shrimp)

4 cups baby arugula or other peppery greens (I used spinach as that was what I had and not as much as the recipe called for)

If using fresh corn, cut the kernels from the ears and set aside.

Cut bacon into small pieces and cook bacon in a large Dutch oven, then add onions, corn, salt, smoked paprika and cayenne pepper, saute' 10 minutes.

Add flour, whisking well; cook 2 minutes. Add potatoes and milk. Cook until thick, creamy and the potatoes are soft, about 10 minutes.

Add shrimp and cook until they are pink.

Stir in the arugula.

Serves 6

I also made a type of apple crisp and I should have listened to my instincts—the recipe was from an older Junior League of Little Rock, AR cookbook and every recipe I’ve ever tried from these Junior League cookbooks is usually good.  This was a poorly written recipe without enough directions and instead of apple crisp, we had apple pudding—the taste was wonderful but it didn’t look so pretty!! 

After the guys headed back up the hill for some more board sawing and nail pounding I began working on the plums—there are two trees behind our former home which would blossom but never produce fruit when we lived there.  Tammy, who with her husband Joe now own that house was here a couple weeks ago and the trees were literally loaded with plums.  Last summer Tammy gave the trees a major pruning, maybe that’s why they produced plums this year??  She gave me half of them—I’ve let them ripen in the cool basement.

That’s a big pan of plums—I cut them in half but left the seeds and skins—you can do that with this Nutri-Steamer juicer—this is a link to another brand on Amazon, they don’t seem to carry the Nutri-Steamer brand anymore. 

I let the plums steam for a little over a hour and got almost 10 cups of beautiful red juice--I will make jelly in the next few days.

Every afternoon around 3:30—4:00pm, Emmi and I walk up the hill to the shed building project, taking Michael something to drink.  We sit on the Kawasaki mule, prop our feet up and admire the view—it was such a strange, warm, totally windless afternoon, it was almost summer feeling—and you can’t beat the view: