Ranch Raised Recipes

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! It’s county fair season! What else could you have possibly thought I was talking about.

I have the rest of my life to find a purpose for the other 10,639 buttons of hers that I am happily holding on to! 

Summer is National Championship Season, at least it is if your kids are involved in the greatest sports on dirt.

Until one Monday, in mid-March, 1999, the last 600 head of cattle would sell through the ring.  The last gavel fell that day, ending an era that put Omaha on the map as a hub of agriculture in the United States of America.  

For more than a decade Chicago had been the center of meat production in the northern great plains.   In 1955, Omaha’s livestock market became the largest in the world, moving 6.7 million head that year and that would not even be the PEAK of sales receipts.  A few years later at the end of World War 2, they would move 7.7 million head.  

A few years ago, my daughter did her history project on the Omaha Stockyards. So I give her credit for these facts Im going to share this week! 

This week I am off to Grand Island, NE to watch my girls compete in the Daddy of Them All and I am not talking about Cheyenne Frontier Days. That is the theme for the 25th Anniversary of the National Junior Hereford Expo and what a treat that we could host this historical event in my home state!  

So we will just keep pulling on our boots and saddling up to face life’s storms because as they say, “if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.” So here is to the making the best of the back half of the year. 

I love to use mulberries in place of blueberries in muffins and banana bread and even making mulberry sauce for ice cream or cheesecake. But this past weekend my creativity ran wild when I found a recipe that I modified into Mulberry Cheesecake Cookies.  

This weekend when you are grilling some steaks throw a couple of extra steaks on, like I do. It makes a great start to week night meal on those busy nights. This week I made BBQ steak flat bread pizza and it was amazing!