Recipe Of The Day

This recipe has become a household favorite and as the days grow shorter and the temperatures drop this will warm you from top to toes.  If you have garden tomatoes and fresh basil put them to use.

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Autumn Shrimp, Sausage and Tomato Stew

This is the time of year that tomatoes are really coming on-line and if you’re like me you’re eating fresh, vine-ripened tomatoes multiple times every day. If you have an abundance of cherry tomatoes from your garden or the farm market here’s a terrific recipe that is an easy-peasy meal to enjoy in a bowl by the wood stove accompanied by a chewy baguette.

Ingredients

4 cloves of garlic – finely chopped

1 pound smoked sausage of your choice (andouille, venison, chorizo, etc.) – cut into pieces.  I used smoked Conecuh from Alabama.

Olive oil

½ t fennel seeds

2 - 15 oz cans of garbanzos – drained and rinsed

4 C of garden tomatoes cut in chunks 

1 C dry white wine

24 jumbo shrimp (peeled and de-veined)

½ cup fresh basil leaves - chiffonade 

Fresh-cracked sea salt and black pepper to taste

Crusty baguette

Crushed red pepper (optional)

 

Instructions

 

In a stock pot brown your sausage in olive oil until it is brown and beginning to crisp. Add the garlic and fennel seeds and cook, stirring constantly, until fragrant.

 

Add the garbanzo beans, tomatoes, wine and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat and cook (covered) until the tomatoes begin to break-down. 

 

Uncover, add the shrimp to the pot and cook for another 3-4 minutes.

Remove from heat and stir-in the basil.

 

Serve with slices of baguette and that bottle of dry white wine. Fireside is best.

It’s acceptable to dunk your bread in the stew.

 

Recipe serves four. 

Oktoberfest

I pulled-out all the stops for the festivities here.

German beer radishes from the garden and a frosty lager from the Fatherland...

Friday Music

Berthold Heinrich Kämpfert -  Bert Kaempfert - was a German orchestra leader, instrumentalist, producer, arranger, and composer.  His music figured significantly in our household when I was a child.  

Bert made easy listening and jazz-oriented records and wrote the music for a number of well-known songs, including Strangers in the Night and Moon Over Naples, Danke Schoen, Blue Midnight, We Can Make it Girl, Sweet Maria, Sweet Caroline, Wooden Heart, That Happy Feeling and many more.  

Long before it was popularized by other latter-day artists the LP entitled A Swingin' Safari was heavily influenced by South African kwela style music containing versions of Zambesi, Wimoweh, Skokiaan, and Afrikaan Beat, as well as the title track. -Wikki

Take A Hike

From yesterday. 

By 10 am the rain stopped and skies cleared.

Bumble bees galore gorging on golden rod.

Great day for a hike.

Door County Land Trust: Bear Creek Nature Preserve   

 

Tourism Slide

 

U.S. Travel Association president and CEO Geoff Freeman shared some illuminating tourism stats. 

Despite hosting the World Cup, the U.S. saw a decline in overseas travel this summer.

America's on pace for overseas visitors to drop by 2 million from last year — down 20% from the '19 peak.

"We're the only major country in the world losing visitation," Freeman says. "It's mind-boggling."

Travel from longtime allies has cratered — including from Canada (down 23% over two years), Germany (down 16% year to date) and France (down 15% year to date).

Two big winners from the U.S. tourism slide:

China, which has expanded visa-free entry.

Japan, where a cheap yen and rising reputation as a prime destination have driven a long-term inbound resurgence.

Any theories?

Native Blooms

From our walk yesterday we found some Bottle Gentian (Gentiana andrewsii) also known as the closed bottle gentian.  This native wildflower is characterized by its blue-to-purple blooms that never actually open.  This unusual feature serves as a barrier to keep out smaller, nectar-seeking insects.

Because the flowers remain sealed the plant relies almost exclusively on larger bumble bees for pollination.  Bumble bees are big and strong enough to force the petals apart and crawl inside.

As a reward for this herculean effort is the high sugar (40% to 45%) content nectar.  Think of it like a high-energy soft drink for the bumble bee.

An additional trait is visual signaling.  Flowers with white tips signal that nectar is available while blooms that have transitioned to pink or purple signal that a bee has already paid a call and exhausted the nectar within.

If you're interested enter the word gentian in the search box located in the upper left corner of the blog homepage.

Champion Tree

If you were to have a talk with an old timer around here they would tell you a couple of things about the 1950s-60s; namely deer were scarce, there weren't as many deer as there are nowadays.  The other thing you'd learn is that elm trees were common and in a few instances dominant.  The landscape around here includes bottomlands with a higher seasonal water table.  Like similar species elm won't tolerate year-round water; but they don't mind getting their feet wet and prefer seasonally hydric soils found along stream banks and flood plains.

Today there are more whitetails on the landscape than anyone can remember and American Elm (Ulmus americana) has just about vanished.

Dutch Elm Disease (DED) was already established in Wisconsin by the 1950s.  When plant pathologist Eugene Smalley joined the faculty at UW-Madison in 1957 he noted that Wisconsin's elms were being decimated by DED.

This UW Extension Service map from 1965 specifically documents when DED was first detected in each Wisconsin county.

An article from the Door County Advocate dated April, 23, 1968 reported that Wisconsin "was rapidly losing its elm shade trees" and the state Agriculture Department's Dutch Elm Advisory Council was recommending removing diseased elms and replacing them with other species.  The implication is that by the time spring rolled-around in 1968 Dutch elm disease was a problem here.

And we know how it ended.  The elm died-off and over the next three generations various ash species filled in the gaps.  Around here, entire woodlots of ash flourished.  The nearby Black Ash Swamp takes its name from the primary tree species found there.  Until the  Emerald Ash Borer arrived on the peninsula in 2014.  Today the landscape around here is dominated by dead and dying ash trees.

It's difficult to know what will replace the ash.  Soft maple varieties such as red and silver maple and box elder come to mind; but with the deer population as large as it is and these species high on the whitetail's list of preferred browse it's difficult to believe they stand a chance.  Time will tell.

Meanwhile, I can tell you for a fact that elm still maintain a small toehold here and there.  And over the last thirty years I've maintained a mental inventory of their locations.  Because elm produce seed at a young age, before they are targeted by the elm bark beetle that spreads DED, the species has avoided extinction.    

This one is located at the edge of the old campsite on the north side of Silver Creek.  It shares its space with some swamp white oaks we planted, some willow and dead ash trees.  At this moment in time it's looking healthy and hopefully producing seed that might become it's progeny.  Fingers-crossed.

 

Initially I was not sure that this tree was absolutely, positively, an American elm.  Perhaps it was a slippery elm?  A forestry professional told me that leaf ID is unreliable and that an inspection of a bark cross section would reveal the answer.  Breaking-off a piece of bark, Slippery elm is solid red while American elm has distinctive alternating red and white layers (like an American flag). 

Fast Fact:  In 1952, an elm tree in Egg Harbor reportedly had the second-largest girth of any elm in Wisconsin. The famous Jorns Elm was recorded as being 110 feet tall and sported a girth (circumference) of 35 feet.  That's what we call a Champion Tree!