Recipe Roundup

“Emmit’s a mini-Eric,” says Candace Sieg, the family’s matriarch. “He remembers everything and anything that comes out of Dad’s mouth.”

Emmit’s two older sisters, Isabel, 18, and Avery, 10, are also part of Eric’s fan club. You can see it in the way they look at their father and talk about one of their favorite family activities – hunting. All three children grew up hunting with their dad; Eric started them young.

“When they were 3 years old, Eric would dress them up at 5 in the morning, and they would go lay in the blind,” Candace says.

Even though the title eluded her, she surely exemplifies what it means to be a “county woman.”

“She is the vet, cook, fence fixer, gardener, rock roller, digger, truck driver, bookkeeper and, most important, mother and wife,” says her daughter, Stacy Adams.
 

“You can’t sit around here and do nothing, or you’re going to be crazy,” she told Dixie.

The tight-knit Keene community encouraged Dixie to open the café, knowing she had worked in restaurants since her teen years.

“My biggest fear was I didn’t know how to make soup, or omelets,” she recalls, knowing that soup-and-omelet making would be required by the job.

That’s because gelato is made with more milk than cream, compared to regular ice cream, and has about half the butterfat content. Gelato is also churned slower and warmer, Murphy explains, and incorporates less air, helping to keep it dense, fluid and creamy.

The daughter of dairy farmers from the Netherlands, Murphy’s heart was for dairy, but she didn’t want to be the farmer. She dreamt of a value-added agriculture enterprise.

For just three easy payments of $55.95, which I charged to Mom’s credit card without full disclosure, I was going to bring honor to the family. Things turned out OK for Mulan, but unfortunately, the same can’t be said for fourth-grade Cally after the Turbo Cooker purchase.

I remember making a lackluster breakfast pizza and steamed broccoli with a charred-bottom meatloaf before my mom let me retire the Turbo Cooker to the basement, where all household items went to be hoarded until the next rummage sale.

Preparing healthy meals around a fully loaded family life, a devoted career and unrelenting farm/ranch chores isn’t always an easy task. Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) Carrie Gerving has eaten her share of tacos in a bag during her children’s sporting events.

“There would be weeks where we wouldn’t be home any night except Wednesday and if it was the Wednesday of my school board meeting, then I wasn’t home at all, so it was always trying to think of something that was quick and easy,” Carrie says. “And the quick and easy things are often the unhealthy things.”

Lisa Rossow met her future husband, Wayne, in a seemingly perfect way for a girl from western North Dakota: at a boot-scootin’-boogie country bar after a Valentine’s Day rodeo. Besides the cowboy charm, it didn’t take long for the pair to find even more common ground.

Lisa grew up on a dairy and grain operation in Flasher. Her mother, Jackie Miller, is a longtime employee of Mor-Gran-Sou Electric Cooperative, and when she met Wayne, Lisa was working for Roughrider Electric Cooperative.

Mor-Gran-Sou Electric Cooperative member Annette Broyles drives 80 miles roundtrip each workday, to get from her home in rural New Salem to her classroom at United Tribes Technical College (UTTC) in south Bismarck. She doesn’t mind the drive, because she loves her job. In fact, she celebrated her 16-year work anniversary in December.

“Every job I have had has kind of led me to this,” Broyles says.

As a nearly 20-year active member of the U.S. Army Reserves, the Hazen native had been deployed before. She served in the 2008-10 campaign of Operation Iraqi Freedom, earning a Bronze Star Medal and a Combat Medical Badge as the executive officer of a forward surgical team.

“It was life-changing,” Ziemann-Bolinske says.