National Mustard Day is August 1st! Mt. Horeb, WI - The World's Mustard Capital, Celebrates With Mustard Festival

August 1st is National Mustard Day! The festival begins in the streets of Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin - World Mustard Capital. The Poupon U Accordion Band sets the tone for raucous mustard games, face painting, a kids' rock-n'-roll show, and random wanderings through a cheese maze. A futile attempt at seriousness will be made by representatives from the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board who will recommend proper pairings of cheeses and mustards. The Mustard Museum will be open for mustard tastings, film-viewing about the world history of mustards, and a look at over 4800 jars of mustards on display. At noon on the street, the winner of the best-screen-play-starring-mustard writing contest will be awarded a $1000 check with appropriate fanfare and hot dogs. The Oscar Mayer jumbo beef franks are free if slathered with mustard (or eaten plain). Diners over the age of 10 who squirt ketchup will be considered iconoclasts and may be booted from Mt. Horeb. But better to behave because all mustard-festival proceeds and donations will benefit the Mt. Horeb Food Pantry. Sad but true, man does not live by mustard alone. So stock the food pantry shelves by going to Mt. Horeb's National Mustard Day Festival.

What? You live out of state and can't get to Mt. Horeb by Saturday? You'll miss hearing the live bands Staff Infection and the Red Hot Horn Dawgs?!! Holy horseradish! Well, if your town is not as progressively seasoned as Mt. Horeb and sadly lacks a mustard festival, you'll have honor National Mustard Day on your own. Seize the festival spirit and throw a mustard party. Dress in shades of yellows and browns. Serve friends brats, beer, and a whole variety of exceptionally spicy, sweet, mild, and hot mustards. If your guests aren't mustard connoisseurs already, they will be after you let them savor the sensational spices in gourmet mustards.

Let's not let this mustard festival end when the sun goes down Saturday. Life is too short to return to kiddie-sweet ketchup. We must keep the mustard motion going! Spearhead the revolution. Send mustards to distant places. Let's slather the country in spice.

Camping Food That Tastes Great And Is Easy To Cook

Camping might mean a bad night's sleep to some, but it doesn't have to mean bad food too. Sometimes food tastes best after a day in the great outdoors, that is unless it was bad food to begin with. Great food doesn't have to be prepared in a kitchen. The experienced camper can find simple foods that taste delicious, travel well, and require little to no time to prepare. Here's what Wisconsin campers recommend.
Let's start with dinner on the first night out. Whether by car, canoe, or foot, the first day of any camping trip is usually busy with travel. Upon arrival, tents must be pitched and supplies unpacked. The first night's camping dinner should be the easiest one to prepare. On this night, Wisconsinites often pull out the pre-cooked bratwursts. Bratwursts and wieners typically don't squash when transported in a backpack. Wrapped in bread or a bun, they don't require utensils to eat. A little mustard is a great compliment, but a sausage that tastes great to begin with can do without condiments.
Camping doesn't mean campers have to do without healthy vegetables. Campers just need veggies that don't need cooking. Pickled asparagus, green beans, mushrooms and Brussels sprouts provide low-carb, green nutrition and taste delicious. For easy, light-weight transport, seal the pickled vegetables into a Ziploc bag then insert this bag into a larger, Ziploc bag. Seal the outer bag with lots of air to serve as a cushion for the inner bag of veggies, - the method is akin to bubble-wrapping your side-dish. The light-weight bags can then be easily stuffed into a pack or cooler.
For dessert, pack cookies. No utensils needed to deliver great flavor and fun. Extra-special, decorated cookies will bring a smile to any reluctant campers in the group. Packed in tins, cookies will stay fresh, dry, and intact.
For breakfast, Wisconsin campers either go fast and light with high-energy breakfast bars, or do it up right with pancakes, Canadian bacon, and thick-sliced, applewood-smoked bacon cooked in a skillet over a campfire or on a Coleman stove. As long as grumpy-to-rise campers can get gourmet coffee with their breakfast, they won't be too particular about the rest of the menu.
Now, camping recommendations for the trail. Trail-mix is the obvious choice for the hiker or paddler. Nuts and dried fruit pack well and provide quick energy. Plus, neither squish nor leak like fresh fruit and they don't crumble like chips. Of course, they're also healthy. For easy lunches or late-afternoon snacks, break out some summer sausage and crackers. Summer sausage made from elk, venison, and buffalo is the leanest meat snack available. They're high-protein, low-carb food with great flavor. They pack well and only require a pocket-knife for slicing. Since summer sausages are cured meats, they are not as temperature sensitive as other meats and therefore can last a few days on the trail.
Just remember, great food makes happy memories. Even vacations on which everything goes wrong will be remembered with good humor and laughter if everyone ate terrific food along the way.

National Ice Cream Day is July 19th! - New American Holiday

July 19th is National Ice Cream Day! Ronald Reagan designated the third Sunday in July to be National Ice Cream Day and encouraged Americans to honor this new American holiday by consuming copious quantities of ice cream. Whether or not dairy industry lobbyists had a hand in crafting this new American holiday is either an irrelevant issue or an example of genius. Ice cream has been a favorite American food since revolutionary times. George Washington stored blocks of winter's ice to make summer's ice cream. And today over 90% of all U.S. households eat ice cream fashioned into cones, bowls, parfait glasses, floats and even on sticks. Ice cream is one of the few desserts made for strolling in the park on a summer's night.
Vanilla remains the most favorite ice cream flavor, with chocolate a distant second. Wisconsinites favor blue moon ice cream. Exactly what that flavor is defies description, but it's good! Living in America's Dairyland makes Wisconsinites choosy about ice cream. We love extra-creamy, super-duper rich and delicious ice cream, (read in high-fat content). Walk around the University of Wisconsin - Madison campus during the summer and you're sure to see people happily enjoying Babcock Hall ice cream. Babcock Dairy is part of UW-Madison and creates the latest-greatest in ice cream innovations of taste. A rival to UW's Babcock Hall ice cream is Madison's Chocolate Shoppe ice cream. This ice cream too is extra-creamy and creative in flavors. Black licorice, dark chocolate, and Mackinac Island fudge are served up beside America's traditional favorites. So what's your favorite flavor? I bet you have one. I do, it just changes day to day. And this Sunday, on National Ice Cream Day, you can be sure I'll be showing my patriotism with a dish of ice cream made in Wisconsin.

Tribute To Oscar Mayer - The Man Who Made Wisconsin Hot Dogs With Mustard An American Icon

This week Oscar G. Mayer died in Wisconsin. For most of his 95 years, Oscar G. Mayer was in the hot dog business started by his father and uncles in Chicago in the 1890's. The Mayers began the company selling their German-homeland inspired bockwurst, weisswurst and liverwurst sausages. But under the son's stewardship, the company became world famous for its Oscar Mayer hot dogs. Oscar Mayer moved to Madison, Wisconsin; became the state's largest private employer, and grew into a 1 billion dollar business. Through its strategic branding, ahead-of-its-time emphasis on food safety, and genius jingles, Oscar Mayer became a name sung in homes throughout the U.S.A. Generations of American parents have raised their children on Oscar Mayer hot dogs.
Young children typically start out enjoying their hot dogs plain, but then move on to squirting the hot dogs with ketchup, often LOTS of ketchup. But at picnics, sporting events, circuses, and side-walk sales, many adults are enjoying their hot dogs with mustard. Mustard is the traditional condiment for German sausages. Whether sweet, spicy, or hot, mustard best compliments the complex flavor of cured meats.
And just as Wisconsin is recognized for its frankfurters, it is also recognized for its mustards. Or at least there are those in Wisconsin who revere the fine taste of mustard. In fact, the nation's Mustard Museum is located here in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, and daily draws tourists to view the hundreds of mustards on display. Some mustards are relic jars from America's past, other jars are fresh and for sale in the museum gift store. And above them all are posters of happy people holding hot dogs slathered in mustard and having fun watching America's home-grown sport, baseball.
Baseball, apple pie, and hot dogs with mustard, - that's our culture. Good people having a good time, eating good food. Gotta' love it. Enjoy.

Summer wedding attended by curious cows in Wisconsin

Summer wedding bells wake up Wisconsin cows, or so I've been told. Last Saturday a Wisconsin farmer didn't find his dairy cows in their usual resting area outside the barn. Slightly worried, he went to look for them. He found them on the other side of the hill, standing in a row, lifting their heads over the fence. The farmer's dog ran over to them, but this time, the cows didn't turn to snort at the dog. What were they looking at so intensely?

The farmer strode to the fence and to his surprise, he saw 75 people in formal wear standing in the neighbor's alfalfa field. The neighbor's cows were no where to be seen, and neither was the neighbor. In fact, the farmer didn't recognize any one in the field except the local pastor.

The pastor was just raising his hands to give his blessing on the newly-wed couple. The bride and groom kissed as the attendants cheered and the cows and farmer watched. The farmer wondered why his neighbors would go to all the trouble to plan a wedding then put it in an alfalfa field. But then, he considered, it was cheaper than renting the church and supper club. Slightly hurt, the farmer also wondered why he hadn't been invited. He and his neighbor been friends for years. Had the farmer made an unintended slight and caused a falling out between them? The farmer looked for his neighbor in the now bustling group, but still didn't spy him. Moments after the ceremony, the wedding party wandered down to the road and drove away in cars. The farmer and the cows tacitly watched them depart.

Yesterday the farmer ran into his neighbor at the post office. Not wanting to put his neighbor on the spot by asking why he hadn't been invited to the wedding, the farmer chit-chatted politely about the weather and the milking. The farmer kept expecting the neighbor to mention the wedding, but he didn't. Then the two men went their separate ways.

Later that afternoon however, the neighbor called the farmer and told him that the farmer's cows had gotten into the neighbor's field and trampled his alfalfa. The neighbor was quite upset, even to the point of suggesting the farmer compensate him for the damaged crop. The farmer defended his cows, and insisted that they had always been where they belonged. The farmer's denials aggravated the neighbor to the point that he insisted the farmer come to his field to see for himself the damage his cows had done. The farmer agreed and went to the field the neighbor had specified.

The two farmers met in the neighbor's alfalfa field exactly where the wedding had been. Yes, the alfalfa was badly damaged. The farmer was even more puzzled now and getting annoyed himself. Why would he pay for damages done by a wedding party when he hadn't even been an invited guest? No more polite tact, the farmer fumed. He told his neighbor that if his neighbor had the lame-brain idea of holding a fancy wedding in his alfalfa crop then he'd have to suffer the loss. Furthermore, next month when the farmer's own daughter was going to wed, the farmer insisted, she would be married in a church and the neighbor was now un-invited! The neighbor was suddenly speechless. The farmer felt that swarmy satisfaction of having won a round in a heated argument. The neighbor looked at the farmer sideways and said, "You know, I've never known you to be a creative man. But it sure takes some whopping imagination to spin that fancy wedding story. So why don't you go on and tell me more about that "wedding" you saw in my field."

This insult and evidence that the neighbor would deny he hosted a large wedding in his own field and then try to get money for a lost crop really irked the farmer now. The farmer told his neighbor in several choice words exactly what wedding he had witnessed.

The neighbor listened, then asked, "And did you see me?"

"You?!" the farmer fumed.

"Yes, me," the neighbor now calmly questioned.

"No! I didn't see you!" the exasperated farmer protested.

"Well, If I were holding a wedding in my own field wouldn't you have expected to see me?"

This time the farmer was speechless. The neighbor began to inspect the ground. He found footprints left by high-heels. Then he found a pink carnation which he showed the farmer. The farmer began looking at the ground too. He found a wedding program. The program named the bride and groom. The two men stood looking at the names and shaking their heads. Neither had a clue who these people were. They agreed they'd better consult the pastor. The neighbor was still unhappy about the field damage, but soon the men couldn't help but chuckle and wonder who the lame-brain city-folk were who had thought it romantic to marry in an alfalfa field. To each his own they decided, and agreed to meet again next month at the farmer's daughter's wedding...in the church.

Looking for unusual wedding gifts and favors? Invite Wisconsin cows and please the crowd.