An Uncle George Recipe!

This recipe comes by way of Sister Freda, (Almanzo's cousin). 

When she was growing up, her family raised sheep.  She says, her Uncle George did all the cooking at their sheep camp.  Uncle George was a real cowboy - punching cattle, herding the sheep, and doing the cooking.   There, in the sheep wagon, he would prepare their meals.  Usually it would be a meal made from what they had packed and brought with them.  But sometimes, they would come up with other ingredients to go with what they already had packed and brought along.  As Freda remembers, most meals had some kind of beans, along with other things.  When you're out doing hard work like that, you need a good, hearty meal to keep you going.  This recipe represents a typical meal that they ate, out on the praire.

Uncle George's Cowboy Meal

Ingredients:

• 3 Cups of dry Pinto beans
• 1 gal. canned hominy or about a qt. of dry corn kernals
• 1 Cup Walnuts, ground up
• 1 Cup Corn meal
• 1 Cup pumpkin or sweet potato, cubed

Directions: If you are using the dry corn kernals: Put the corn kernals in a dutch oven 3/4 of the way full of clean water.  Place the dutch oven over your hot coals or wood ashes of your camp fire.  Boil for about a half hour.  Wash the kernals and remove the skins.  Put back in the pot and boil again, till soft. (Maybe about an hour - increase your time, if you are in the high country!)  Once the corn is soft, add the pinto beans, uncooked.  Cook with a lid on the pot, for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours, till tender. 

Place the shelled Walnuts in a flour sack and pound with a good-sized rock or mallet.  Mix the Walnuts with the corn meal.  Add this mixture to the corn and beans.  Bring to a boil.  (Add more water as needed.) 

Finally, throw in the pumpkin or sweet potato.  Cover and cook, till tender.

You may wish to add some salt & pepper and maybe even some nutmeg & sugar.  Again, this was a meal made on the fly - so use what you have and what you like!  "Yippee, Tie, Yi!"

Freda says they would lead the sheep for months from hill to holler and take them to market and do shearing and all that stuff!  Just imagine eating three meals a day at a camp fire all that time!  I know I'm spoiled - when I prepared this meal for her I made it with store bought beans and hominy!  But she said it tasted just like one of Uncle George's meals.  (Hope she wasn't just saying that to make me feel good :)

If you get the chance, come by my shop and visit with Sister Freda - she'll be happy to share some of her experiences with you.  (She has plenty of them to share - being 90 years old now!)

 

"The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies."  Laura Ingalls Wilder

If you make this recipe, please let us all know, by leaving a comment here.  Thanks.  The Old Man in the Bib Overalls