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Responding
"Welcome to this amazing forum raised-by-bears! Looking forward to some wild rice recipes, favorite fishing lures, notes on how to make your maple sugar etc etc. :-)"
Favorite wild rice recipes:
Start with hand parched rice, if you can, farm rice if you must. Farm rice is okay, but it takes twice as long to cook, and it just doesn't come out the same.
One thing you can't do with farm rice is pop it. Hand parched wild rice pops kind of like pop corn. Do it the same way you would pop corn.
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Wild Rice Breakfast: Boil for about 15 minutes (or a lot longer if it is farm rice), serve hot, or cool in refrigerator overnight (if you are at home). Add blueberries, or raisins and cover with maple sugar (or syrup) and, if you are at home, you can add cream.
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Wild Rice Soup: 1/2 pound bacon diced, six Tbs chopped sweet onion, fried together, one can Campbell's potato soup, one can Campbell's cream of chicken soup one and a half cups milk, one cup diced cheddar cheese, 1/2 cup wild rice (already boiled)
Heat soups & milk, add cheese, stir until cheese melts; add bacon, onions, rice.
You can also add broccoli.
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Minnesota Hot Dish (we don't know what a casserole is around here)
Take a cup and a half of wild rice, boil it up. Fry up a half pound of chopped venison or bacon (or whatever you like). Fry up a diced green pepper, half a sweet onion, a cup of diced celery, and mix with cooked wild rice. Don't fry it too long, keep it crisp. Add meat, peas, and one half cup chicken broth and pepper to taste. Fry until warm clear through - again, not too long, keep celery and peppers crisp.
Serves six city people - or - three rabbit chokers - or - two ridge runners.
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Just for Good Measure:
Duane's Grandmother's Fry-Bread (From Leech Lake Rez - best I've tasted, better than the rest):
Three cups white flour, 1 tsp Baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 Tbs powdered sugar, 1/2 or 1/3 cup powdered milk - mix dry ingredients.
Add water (about a cup). Dough should not be dry or runny - mix with hands.
Add one egg - and - brown sugar & cinnamon or raspberries or blueberries.
Let sit at room temperature two or three hours. Do not refrigerate.
Pull out hand-fulls and flatten from middle out. Do not use rolling pin. Drop flattened hand-fulls into hot grease (bear oil - if you've got it - lard if you don't).
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Favorite fishing lure? Hmmm. nothing too esoteric, probably a shad rap or a dare devil. One of my favorite ways to fish lake trout is to catch and freeze smelt, and when we paddle in to a good northern lake, put the smelt on a fresh water hook and cast off shore where you can stand on a nice rock shelf with deep water beside it and let the hook lay on the bottom. In the right lake, soon as they hit the bottom, the trout have it. Hard to keep the hook baited.
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Sugar Bush:
Sap starts running soon as the day temps are above freezing and the night temps are below freezing. Further apart the two temps are the better the sap runs.
To start: Snowshoe in to the sugar bush and start putting in spiles. This requires drilling or tapping the trees with about a 5/16 bit and brace. Tap in the spiles and hang your buckets. I usually put out somewhere between 50 and 100 taps - as it is only for family use.
When the swap gets running good, on a good tap, you may have to empty the bucket twice a day (doesn't happen that often).
I do this old fashoined, and boil down in two large 25 gallon kettles (though my brother has been working on a stove and stainless steel boiling tub for me - he's just not too quick). Fill the kettles 2/3 full and set to boiling. You need a wood paddle to keep stirring the syrup as it gets down. I usually keep filling the kettle during the day, until the last boil is thick syrup.
To make sugar I use a small one and a half or two gallon kettle and watch it like a hawk. You can ruin a whole days work by a moments inattention.
Using a wooden spoon, I keep checking the syrup by taking up a spoonful and dropping it back in the kettle. When it "sheets," your syrup is ready. Carefully pour the thick syrup into your molds and it will harden and crystallize (kind of).
There are a couple of other ways to make sugar. My grandfather used to get the syrup thick and work it back and forth in a six foot wooden trough (hollowed out log) with a wooden hoe. Or, you can make "wax" sugar, which is just medium thick syrup dropped on clean snow. Almost kind of like molasses, but much better tasting. Grandfather liked birch molasses, and would tap birch trees in the same way as the maple - except it takes 80 gallons of birch sap to make syrup, instead of 40 gallons of maple sap.
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