October’s legendary “bright blue weather” seems to be arriving right on schedule this autumn.
Appreciatively celebrating these seasonal blue skies, we once again are greeting another awesome-as-always arrival of a new autumn.
Autumn 2015 just rolled around again a few days ago on September 23, and our new autumn season’s start signals that we now can happily anticipate cooler days soon arriving for our comfort and enjoyment as this past summer’s high temperatures will start dropping down to autumn’s more comfortable cooler climate.
Lowering of a departing summer’s often too high heat opens up for us the seasonal door to our local great outdoors for the duration of another so very welcome pleasant autumn season.
We now can comfortably look forward to an incoming beautiful autumn weather’s refreshingly cool weeks accompanying all of the also soon-incoming autumn season’s spectacular red and golden falling leaves.
Our uniquely Florida style fall and winter seasons will pull our outdoor temperatures down a notch or two and sometimes drop them even a lot lower than that. Florida can get cold at times!
As always, autumn’s cool-down break from summer’s heat brings with it grand opportunities for grabbing lots of good times enjoying our inimitable Florida-style great outdoors.
It’s a grand time of year both for all of nature’s many dedicated fans of the cool, comfortable fall season and for all fans of good food and fun times as well, which is even more greatly enjoyed when served outdoors in pleasant places out in the refreshing open air.
The just-cool-enough great outdoors dining season seems to be fairly soon arriving again, so let’s roll out some picnic tables into our back yards and let this fall season’s food-and-fun festivities begin.
After enjoying our early evening’s meal, we can continue relaxing outdoors, maybe carrying a good book out with us for some pleasant relaxed time for reading, maybe even picking up and carrying out with us for recreational reading an armful of our treasured many Apopka-area community cookbooks created by our hardworking local organizations and local churches and schools through the past years and decades.
We can enjoy the outdoors fresh air while turning pages and browsing through these many Apopka-area local cook books in quest of discovering great all-new-to-us recipes for our next backyard “dining out” the next time we would really enjoy and rather be cooking and eating in nature’s outdoor “kitchens” via our backyard grills rather than at our traditional indoor kitchen stove.
Indoor dining with our fine lace tablecloths and stemmed glassware is very nice, too, but just as fine a “dining room” is the equally enjoyable rustic setting only Mom Nature can offer us in her fine locale for dining out in nature’s great outdoors beneath this season’s beautiful blue skies.
Nature’s awesomely beautiful spring, summer, autumn and sometimes even winter outdoor setting “dining rooms” can enhance our meals far more enjoyably and certainly more memorably than just another conventional indoor meal.
Autumn on most days and evenings is a season for backyard or nearby park picnics or, best of all, enjoy your picnic in an oceanfront park setting or an Apopka lakeside picnic area.
Grab one of those east Florida route A1A rustic park tables for an ocean-view picnic in the Ormond Beach area or south of Flagler Beach while the fall season’s spectacular beauty lasts.
For close to home jaunts into the grand world of great outdoors dining, enjoy at a local lakeside park a well-iced picnic basket of fine foods selected from this week’s Kitchen Kapers suitable for picnic table outdoor dining recipes.
So, what really good foods might you relish cooking and eating in our great outdoors, or what foods can you carry out from your kitchen stove, still steaming hot or extremely well-iced for foods served cold, just as far as your own backyard outdoors table?
What foods might travel well a bit further for a local lakeside park site somewhere on Lake Apopka’s beautiful grassy slopes after confirming with officials whether or not picnics indeed are permitted at whatever site you select?
For lakeside or any parks, beach, woods or other nature sites where carry-in picnic food is permitted, keeping very carefully well-iced cold foods in coolers is a practical and essential solution. If it’s your own backyard table, warm foods straight from your stove will work wonderfully well.
A bit of those both are included in this week’s recipes below, including even a Middleburg Plantation Corn Custard from Carole Arthurs’ great Older Americans Cookbook: From the Past to the Present. Enjoy cooking, sharing and eating these fine foods from so many of our skilled Apopka home chefs and do relish nature’s current incredible beauty in Florida’s magnificent great outdoors!
The “Wild Rice” recipe sounds just right for dining out in the “Florida wilds” of our own backyards or maybe actually heading for a wooded park or real wilderness on the next day this fine early fall Florida weather calls us to come on out into our great outdoors and eat out.
Enjoy this week’s Kitchen Kapers recipes next time you feel like “eating out” on your porch or at your back yard picnic table.
ESTER BUNTING’S
MIDDLEBURG PLANTATION CORN CUSTARD
Recipe from Carole Arthurs’
Older Americans Cookbook
4 well beaten eggs
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
2 cups cream or Half and Half
2 cups cut corn
1 tablespoon melted butter
Beat the eggs. Add sugar, salt, pepper and cream. Fold in the corn. Bake in buttered dish set in a pan of hot water at 350 degrees until an inverted knife comes out clean.
LOUISE RICHARDSON’S
B-B-QUE MUFFINS
Recipe from St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church’s A Taste of Heaven
1 (10 ounce) tube buttermilk biscuits
1 pound ground beef
1/2 cup ketchup
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1 cup (four ounces) shredded Cheddar cheese
Separate the biscuits and flatten them into five-inch circles. Press each circle into and up the sides of a greased muffin tin and set aside. Brown and drain the meat. In a small bowl, mix the ketchup, vinegar, brown sugar and chili powder. Stir until smooth, add the meat and mix well. Spoon the meat mixture into each muffin cup, about one-fourth-cup of mixture per each muffin cup. Top with shredded cheese. Bake at 375 degrees for eighteen to twenty minutes, until golden brown. Recipe yields ten servings.
NATALIE RING’S SPINACH
STRAWBERRY SALAD
Recipe from St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church’s A Taste of Heaven
1 package spinach
1 box strawberries
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup sugar
2 teaspoons sesame seeds or walnuts, chopped
1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon minced onion
1/2 teaspoon paprika
Mix together vegetable oil, sugar, sesame seeds, Worcestershire sauce, minced onion and paprika. Pour over spinach and berries. Chill and serve.
EDITH STEPP’S WILD RICE
Recipe from Lake Hill Baptist Church’s Treasures from Heaven
1 cup rice
2 cups water
1 package dry onion soup mix (Lipton)
1/2 stick butter
1 small can mushrooms
Combine first three ingredients. Melt butter and add, stirring into mixture. Add mushrooms and their juice from can. Cook in oven at 325 degrees (uncovered) for forty minutes. Cover and cook for fifteen minutes more. “Delicious with roast beef,” the recipe contributor added. Rice is always a great accompaniment for a vegetables plate as well.
BETTY LAND’S CARROTS JO ANN
Recipe from First Presbyterian Church of Apopka’s Treasures and Pleasures
1 pound carrots, cooked fully
1/4 cup liquid from the cooked carrots
1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons horseradish
2 tablespoons onions, chopped
salt, pepper and paprika to taste
bread crumbs
Mix the fully cooked carrots and liquid from the cooked carrots with the mayonnaise, horseradish and onion. Add dash of salt, pepper and paprika. Put mixture in casserole dish and cover with the bread crumbs. Bake for thirty minutes at 350 degrees until brown.