Earth Month Challenge

April is when it really starts to feel like spring. I start to notice all the natural beauty and enjoy the outdoors again. With Earth Day on April 22nd it's also a time to think about our impact on the world around us and try to be a bit kinder to the environment. This year I am challenging myself to think of everyday ways I can make a difference. One of those efforts is to phase out corn syrup. I will be replacing corn syrup in all my caramel recipes with locally produced honey.

A little information on corn and our environment from "When a Crop Becomes King" By Michael Pollan from the July 18th, 2002 NY Times

"We know a lot more about what 80 million acres of corn is doing to the health of our environment: serious and lasting damage. Modern corn hybrids are the greediest of plants, demanding more nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop. Corn requires more pesticide than any other food crop. Runoff from these chemicals finds its way into the groundwater and, in the Midwestern corn belt, into the Mississippi River, which carries it to the Gulf of Mexico, where it has already killed off marine life in a 12,000 square mile area.

To produce the chemicals we apply to our cornfields takes vast amounts of oil and natural gas. (Nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, pesticides from oil.) America's corn crop might look like a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food, but it is actually a huge, inefficient, polluting machine that guzzles fossil fuel - a half a gallon of it for every bushel."

I have been working for the past several weeks to reformulate all my recipes with honey instead of corn syrup. The results have been good, they turn out a bit different than the usual corn syrup variety: a little bit softer, the color of the candy is affected by the color of the honey, and there's a bit of a honey flavor too.

Honey Treasury

Many Thanks to LivelyHood for featuring my Lavender Honey Caramels in this beautiful treasury: oh honey!

Caramel Community

My Dad is the Editor of a small independent newspaper here in Missoula, called The Regular Joe . For February's upcoming edition he is running several stories about the local ski hill, Snowbowl. One of the stories is about the wonderful sense of community there and my tasty caramels are mentioned. I've included the article by Bob Tutsky below:

“Community” - (with a capital “K”, oops, make that a capital “C”) is what makes Snowbowl special. Besides the “where everyone knows your name” Cheers like atmosphere, I had an experience recently that I thought summed up what Snowbowl was all about.

About mid-afternoon last Sunday, just before hopping on the Grizzly chair, Mija the pass checker, a beautiful young lady by every definition, offered my friend and I homemade caramel candies. She said another fellow skier had given her more caramels than she could eat. The homemade caramels, were made by the daughter of another hardcore Snowbowl skier. We hopped on the chair and ate our caramels as we rode up, they were just the sustenance we needed to finish off an afternoon of Bowl skiing. Besides being awfully tasty, I was struck by the sense of community that the homemade caramels represented. It all came full circle - they were made by another hard core Snowbowl skiers daughter’s as shared by her dad with a lifty and then shared by the lifty with other Snowbowl skiers. That seems like a pretty good description of “community” to me.

Bob Tutskey