Make Your Own Bird Food: Simple Recipes to Entice Birds to Your Garden(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016) by Mark Golley is a guide to creating the most popular and successful bird food recipes for your home and garden. Adapted from success stories, popular ideas, and childhood memories these recipes bring many different varieties of birds to feeders and tables where friends and family can enjoy their company.
This recipe uses only vegetable suet/shortening as one of its main ingredients. Many of the suet recipes included in the book are suitable for using either animal or vegetable suets. Obviously, if you wish to, you can use animal fat here, but the birds seem to like it as it is.
Ingredients
- 1 cup vegetable suet or shortening
- 1 cup peanut butter
- 1/2 cup shelled peanuts
- 1/2 cup raisins
- 1/2 cup cornmeal (or cornflakes/rice crispies)
- 1/2 cup maize/sweetcorn/cracked corn (use whichever you can find!)
Method
Take the vegetable suet and melt it down in a large saucepan over a gentle heat. Once this is done, add in the peanut butter and allow that to melt into the suet mixture. Once the two are blended together, slowly add in the remaining ingredients, one at a time. Mix them together well until everything has stuck together (yes, it is that simple!). Spoon the ingredients into a container (a baking tray, or paper cups with added string for tying to a branch) and allow them to harden.
You may wish to chill, or even freeze, them briefly. You can add anything to this (and many other recipes), with small apple chunks or wild bird seed always proving extra popular.
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Excerpted from Make Your Own Bird Food: Simple Recipes to Entice Birds to Your Gardenby Mark Golley. Copyright © Mark Golley 2006. Published by Bloomsbury, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. Reprinted with permission.