Three Sisters Stew

It just seems to get longer and longer between blogs. Life has been busy between cooking classes, school, editing cookbooks, writing articles, videotaping cooking lessons, field trips, experimenting with new recipes and life! But without all of these activities, we’d be busy anyway. I just had to sit today and write briefly about our latest meal we invented. Okay, perhaps we didn’t invent it, but we modified a recipe to fit our own taste buds. The weather here has started to cool off – okay, drop about 2 degrees from our normal summer afternoon high – and we are thinking about autumn. We started making camping reservations and that is always our signal that summer is ending. We decided to start about a month early this year by heading north. We made reservations at Fort Clinch State Park in Florida for October and at two Georgia State Parks for November. Somehow, we are hoping that we just might find some autumn leaves in November in Georgia. In the meantime, we are busy decorating our house with harvest decorations. The children did find one red leaf today in the front yard, which they are ready to press and save. In preparation for Thanksgiving – you have to plan things REALLY early when you write for newsletters – we decided to experiment with a Thanksgiving stew. (Most of you who know me thought I would never get back to my original point!) We based our recipe on the Three Sisters from the Native American culture – corn, winter squash and beans. These items were grown together early in North American history because they are symbiotic – nourishing each other and the soil and making good use of cleared fields. Anyway, the stew turned out marvelous! So basic and easy to make that I am sure it will be a staple in our house every autumn – if not year round! It’s too good to make only during one part of the year. Click here for the recipe.