Make It Today!

Good morning! Well, we are back from our weekend of camping, it's E.'s first day of her second year of preschool and it's E.'s birthday! Whew! I sent her off to preschool this morning with her !new! pink! backpack.
The above is a picture of some flowers growing down near the dock up on our land. Can you believe we saw a hummingbird up there!! I always associate hummingbirds with the tropics somehow, so seeing one in the northern woods of Minnesota makes me grin.
Here is a lunch spread- I managed to get one picture of food while camping which is one more than last time! You can see Ziploc bags of soup (pea and lentil from the coop) there up front behind the baby food, sippy cups and mugs. Then to the left are the pitas and crackers with the dips (from front to back; lentil walnut dip, black olive tapenade aka poor man's tapenade, and some leftover teradot- which was sooo good btw- from the felafels from the night before) lined up in the center and the hummus away off to the side on the left.
That was our lunch for two out of three days (we 'went into town' one day for lunch), plus these dips, crackers and pitas served as lunches on the way up and back when we stopped at rest areas.

The camping food was a great success and the thing I'm the proudest of was the maple syrup dumplings! Whee! It worked! I made the dough for the dumplings at home, even up to the part where I cut the margarine in, and put that in a Ziplock. Then I put the maple syrup in a Nalgene container (1 C roughly) and it all traveled well!

Maple Syrup Dumplings with Blueberries

1 C flour
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
2 T Earth Balance
1/2 C water
1 C maple syrup
2 C water
1 pint blueberries

Before camping, sift the flour, salt and baking powder together into a bowl. Cut in the margarine until the mixture is like meal. Place into a Ziploc bag.
Pack your maple syrup into a well sealed container. Put a Ziploc around this (you don't want this leaking all over your cooler).
Pack your bag of flour, the maple syrup and a pint of blueberries into the cooler.
At camp;
Pour the maple syrup into your pot, add two cups of water and bring it to a low boil.
Meanwhile, mix the dough in a bowl with 1/2 C water. Divide into 8ths.
Form the dough into dumplings and drop into the simmering water and maple syrup, cover and let simmer for 20m.
Remove the dumplings back to your bowl and set aside.
Dump the blueberries into the maple syrup and water and simmer, uncovered, until thick.
Serve the syrup over the dumplings. Yum!!

Truly, I enjoyed this dish. You should make it today! Aglaglagl, the sauce was sooooo good!

The rest of the pictures are from our CSA. In addition to the below, we got tomatoes, summer squash, dragon tongue beans, peppers (bell and paprika), garlic and onions!
Kale! My favorite.
Sweet corn! It was so good, we boiled it right up!
This is a salsa pack, I disassembled it and used the component parts seperately.
Here are three pretty little cabbages, I wonder what to do with them...

Here you can see the purple potatoes we got, pretty cool! Now with extra antioxidants!! And below are the glads we were sad to leave behind.The End.