Indiana...Iowa

Ahem...Indiana, I apologize.  There are some states which have unfortunate timing in our schedule and show up at an especially busy month.  That was you.  2 VBSes, new baby frogs, a wildy addictive slip and slide.  I make excuse.  I wish we could have dug deep enough to really get to know you.

Is he gone?  ok,  there is another reason we didn't do much Indiana (but the busy factor was the biggest) - Indiana also turned out to be not all that different from Illinois.  More Lincoln, more corn.  They're even right next to each other!

We did read a book about the Indianapolis 500.  And Indiana has Hoosiers, which unfortunately has no interesting story behind it.  No one actually knows where the name came from.  But we had Hoosier Pie at the end of the month anyway.  It was very good. 

And speaking of corn...we moved on from Indiana to Iowa.  Iowa was a little more interesting.  July was a pretty calm month for us too. 

Iowa is the only state whose east and west borders are both rivers.  Probably the most interesting thing we read about in Iowa was a book about the Neal Smith Prairie Preserve. 

A friend of mine lived in Iowa for a couple of years and she assured me that people there most commonly eat meals made with condensed soup and have large amounts of jello for dessert.  I thought about it and decided to make pork with apples and onions and corn of the cob instead.

For dessert I scoured the internet, very much hoping that Iowa was well known for its double fudge brownies or its molten chocolate cake, but I only found Iowa Applesauce Cake - and it turned out we all liked it a lot :)

August finds us in Kansas and I'm already looking forward to the smoked BBQ we are going to have for dinner in a few weeks!