Serving the community for 75 Years
Cookbook
SGC Publishes Cookbook to Benefit Simpsonville Beautification Projects
The Simpsonville Garden Club created a one of-a-kind cookbook entitled Favorite Recipes. Profits benefited beautification projects in downtown Simpsonville, such as the Clock Tower planter. Members of the Simpsonville Garden Club compiled their tastiest tried-and-true recipes into a single book that will be treasured for generations to come. This mouth-watering cookbook contains over 230 recipes…everything you need from appetizers to desserts.
Special features included Helpful Hints, Pantry Basics, Tips for Baking Bread, Desserts. Vegetables and Fruits, as well as napkin-folding techniques, measurements and substitutions and calorie counting charts.
Growing and Cooking With Culinary Herbs
Herbalist, Realitor, and Greenville native, Jane McCutcheon shares her tips on how to grow and cook with cullinary herbs.
How to grow tasty herbs for the kitchen was the topic of interest at The Simpsonville Garden Club’s February monthly meeting. Master Gardener and Realtor Jane McCutcheon shared lessons learned from her mother and her own experience growing and cooking with culinary herbs.
A native of Greenville, Ms. McCutcheon assured the audience that growing herbs requires just a little time and effort. To grow herbs, you need a garden spot which receives 5 to 7 hours of sun a day and well-drained soil with a moderate amount of organic moisture. An eastern exposure is ideal for growing herbs because it provides morning sun and afternoon shade. Ideally, an herb garden should be located near the kitchen.
Ms. McCutcheon brought along a few herb samples and demonstrated how to cut plants and how to remove herbs from their stems for cooking. She also shared some unique garden tools she uses for cutting herbs.
To learn what herb flavors you like best, Ms. McCutcheon recommended starting out by cooking chicken breasts with just one herb only. Each attendee received Ms. McCutcheon’s Herbal Notebook & Cooklet containing information about herbs and their uses as well as recipes and a bibliography of sources for more information about growing and cooking with herbs including Herbs in the Kitchen by Dill and Belsinger and The Barefoot Contessa - Back to Basics by Ina Gartner.
Back Yard Birds
Lorraine Brown, an international birder and member of the Carolina Bird Club and the Greenvillle County Bird Club treated the Simpsonville Garden Club to a wonderful introduction to the world of birding at the club's monthly meeting on January 17, 2017. Ms. Brown's lecture on books, field guides and other birding resources provided timely preparation for the upcoming 2017 20th Annual Great Backyard Bird Count that will take place internationally from February 17 to February 20th.
Launched in 1998 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, the Great Backyard Bird Count was the first online citizen-science project to collect data on wild birds and to display results in near real-time.
Now, more than 160,000 people of all ages and walks of life worldwide join the four-day count each February to create an annual snapshot of the distribution and abundance of birds.
The public is invited to participate. For at least 15 minutes on one or more days of the count, February 17-20, 2017, you simply tally the numbers and kinds of birds you see. You can count from any location, anywhere in the world, for as long as you wish. For more information go to birdcount.org.
Ms. Brown brought along her collection of field guides and books that help birders identify birds in the wild. Among her recommended sources were:
- The Smithsonian's Birds of North America
- National Geographic's Complete Birds of North Americas
- The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior
Websites she recommended include:
- Venture Birding's www.birdventures.com/
- Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds (This site has bird calls you can listen to on-line.)
Ms. Brown credits her father for her interest in birding. She's travelled extensively in both the U.S. and abroad, most recently in Australia and estimated she has probably viewed between 2,000 and 3,000 species of birds in her travels and her own backyard here in South Carolina. Ms. Brown is rarely without her binocular close at hand.
Lorraine Brown speaks to the SGC about her many experiences as an international birder.
