Snowshoeing and New Recipes

Yesterday Kim and I decided to do some snowshoeing around the town of Lowman. Lowman is a small town about 80 miles from Boise and is situated along the South Fork of the Payette River. We left our house at 8AM.

The drive up provided some great scenery.





Elk, deer and wild turkeys are common wildlife along this route.
We saw all three.






































When we started snowshoeing I had a little trouble staying upright, but no broken bones ensued. Just a torn fingernail, a bruised knee and ego. I'll survive all three.




I still had a good time. Our route included checking out Bonneville Hot Springs.







You can see the effect of the hot springs on the snow behind Kim; there isn't any.




Made me wish we'd brought towels. The water looked great and we'd been snowshoeing about 5 miles.
But we had company coming over for dinner.

We stopped in Lowman for lunch and made it home by 4PM.




Lucky for me I had followed Jaz' instructions and the main dish had been marinating all night. I just had to put the potato dish together.
Here's the link to her recipes at her blog OctoberFarm.

The recipes are for Pork Tenderloins and Potatoes Au Gratin. Trust me, you'll love these two. I've never had so many compliments on a meal before.

Here's the meat right out of the oven;



I bought two packages of pork tenderloin; there were two tenderloins in each package. I get the feeling they usually come that way. There were five people eating the meat course, two of them were young men who always have seconds when they like the food. (And they both had seconds last night.) We had one small tenderloin left over.

The potatoes were just as good. (I ate some of them.) To simplify the baking of both meat and potatoes, I cooked the potatoes along with the meat; 2 hours at 300 degrees and it worked out great.




I served a green salad on the side.

For dessert, you know me, I had to try something new.

Out of my SweetCakes Best of Fine Cooking magazine I tried the Ginger-Mascarpone Icebox Cake. (Read ginger flavored cheesecake.)





Even as a chocolate lover, this non-chocolate cake was delicious. Everyone loved it. Even Chris finished his dessert last night and he never finishes dessert.

Here's the recipe and it's so very simple:
(click to enlarge)






Thanks for sharing those recipes Jaz, and for including such great instructions!