Comfort and Joy

“In November, the smell of food is different. It is an orange smell. A squash and pumpkin smell. It tastes like cinnamon and can fill up a house in the morning, can pull everyone from bed in a fog. Food is better in November than any other time of the year.”
― Cynthia Rylant, In November

I've lived in a lot of cold houses. The house in Orland Park with no basement, the chilled brown tiles atop the concrete foundation laid across the frozen black earth of northern Illinois. The unheated second floor of the sandstone farmhouse in Calloway where we breathed frost into the air if our noses escaped the mountain of wool blankets. Our first house on the farm with neither furnace nor basement, where the electric baseboard heaters fought a losing battle with drafts from above and below and we preheated our bed with the electric blanket every night.

We fought back. With lath and plastic, hammer and nails, Blake covered every window, shrouding us in a blurry world until spring returned. It was not a pretty sight. When we moved out to the windy hill by Deadman's Hollow, our situation improved with the comforting on and off of the furnace blower and warm air coming out of the register. But I still covered the windows...on the inside this time...and felt virtuous and smart when the plastic breathed in and out like it was alive every time the wind attempted to get in.

This old house on Spruce plays by its own set of winter rules: slippers for everyone, an electric throw for Blake's uber cold feet, the friendly hiss of the gas log in the front room. The new windows thwart the sound and fury of winter with one exception: the sun porch upstairs where the houseplants go to spend the winter. And that's where I spent part of this glorious November afternoon, swatting away sun resurrected houseflies and late season lady bugs, spreading out cellophane and double sticky tape like generations have before me. When I am finished, the sun porch is winterized and the plants as cozy as I can accomplish. One more November task put to rest.

November is full of satisfactions like this. Harvest continues, but the acres are piling up behind the combines and there is cautious talk of an end in sight. The sun greets us in the mornings for a few days after the time change and helps compensate for the long evenings of work after the sun sets when other folks are headed home. By November, the mum mess has been picked up...groundcloth piled under bricks, irrigation lines rolled up, fertilizer machines and pumps put up where they won't freeze and break.The greenhouse work revolves around emails and phone calls and web sites.

This leaves time to cook. After six weeks of harvest meals, it takes some invention to present something for dinner ála Rubbermaid that hasn't been eaten recently and "travels well". Sandwiches are so summer cold cuts. Salad days are gone to frost; time for slow cookers of chili and stew, pot pies wrapped in dish towels, baked pastas of Italian extraction. Food that can be scooped with a spoon or cut with a plastic fork. Food that can be wrapped in foil, eaten in a cab, and doesn't spill enroute. Comfort foods....garlic bread, corn bread, soaking up sauce, mopping up honey.

As the calendar days pile up in November, the days fade and the temperatures wane. There's no better way to warm chilled hands than to put them to work stirring or peeling or soaking in hot dishwater. Cold mornings are an incentive to cook. All the meals in November are just a countdown to the most splendid meal of the year: Thanksgiving.

Sunday morning finds us women folk gathering after Sunday school to pool resources in the kitchen. There's a new recipe to try, a chicken enchilada casserole that promises to feed 12 people. In our line of work, a dozen is always an option, so I screw up my eyes trying to read the capacities of the largest casserole dishes in my cupboard...there it is! Found one....4.5 liters is the winner. The bean dip appetizer is partly for the meal...and partly to accompany the preparation of the meal. The cooks dip Fritos; the oven pings as it heats; the conversation warms as the kids check on dinner's progress and the dog sneaks in from the back porch to sit on someone's feet and be sociable. It's an anti-Martha kind of kitchen, crowded,noisy, busy, steamy, made more so by the growing stacks of dirty pans and the overflowing trash can.

Good news! The harvest crew is switching from corn to beans, leaving an hour free to shut down the machinery to eat while the beans dry on this November day. No paper plates today and no Tupperware! Spread out the tablecloth and count the forks...I'll make the tea. Crumbs and stains and seconds are emblems of plenty. Family AND dinner at the table...not out of a hatchback.

The new recipe is a success, even if Abbie and Josh would rather eat corn than casserole. After cake and ice cream, the guys pile into the pickup and head back to the field. There is a city skyline of dirty dishes in the kitchen. This is November's legacy, November's gift: the comforts of a busy kitchen and the abundance of a big home cooked meal for hard working people. The joy of preparing good food and the satisfying work of cleaning up afterwards.

O tidings, of comfort and joy...welcome, November....

Posted with Blogsy

What Does the Farmer Eat?

 

It was a happening, ranking somewhere between hosting your kid's future inlaws and Airforce One landing at the Gould Petersen airport on the bottom just east of Tarkio on the terror and anticipation scale.  CNN was coming to our farm....the same CNN that every home in the US tuned to for coverage of Desert Storm.  But this time, the reporter, the tech guys, were going to film our farm, a feel good seasonal story about a family farm during the golden days of harvest back in 1991.

The pictures in the field we all call "Dad's Big Bottom" could have been taken any year...and it was the perfect location for a long sweeping iconic panorama shot of combines rumbling through the mile long rows as the tractors with auger wagons brought the corn up to the trucks.

  Just Because Farmers Grow it....

I don't know why the Smithsonian article I linked to above brought the CNN episode to mind.  Perhaps it was the references to the hectic hum of harvest, the eating on the road, the irregular hours, the long days. Perhaps it was the odd presumption that farmers are still somehow at a subsistence level, living off the seasonal bounty of the land rather than taking their products to market, to the elevator, to the auction, to the gin, to the mill, to the rail head, to the packer, to the processor.

Or perhaps I connected this brief article about farmers and their meals with the fixation the guys from CNN had with our family's daily bread more than two decades ago.  What does the farmer eat? And when and how?  The CNN guys stuck their cameras right down into the eggs and sausage I cooked that morning for Blake to catch the sizzle and pop of grease and heat...even though the kids waiting for the bus had long since finished their cereal and milk.

The CNN guys were also quite adamant that we eat dinner out in the field because they thought that's what real farmers would do.  At least farmers they would show to the public.  Fair enough. Some dinners are eaten on a tailgate, but when the tailgate is long gone, a hood will do. 

 I don't remember what we prepared that day, but I do recollect feeling quite self conscious about the paper products threatening to fly away and become litter.  As you can see, harvest days may be warm, or cold, but they are always windy.  So sometimes the farmer will opt for shelter of the family SUV... 

or the pickup cab.

The crew at CNN filmed a good long segment in the front yard of Millie and Charlie's house, a bucolic setting beneath the two big pines.  The whole family gathered for noon meal and I am positive as I can be that we had Millie's homemade potato salad and sweet corn and beef from our freezer. 'Cause that's what the farmers eat.  

This is Sunday dinner Hurst harvest style 2013.  Two combines, a tender truck, the tractors and auger wagons, several semis, and fourteen other family vehicles.  The CNN crew would have had a hay day with this event.

We rural cooks do have disadvantages.  I can't always get the ingredients at my local store necessary for more esoteric or complex recipes.  That type of dish requires planning, not just a quick run by the HyVee after work for mushrooms or sour cream.  On the other hand, if I want to grill steak anytime during the six months of the year I can cook outdoors, I can...

 Making pasta or chili is just a matter of beans and pasta in the pantry and walking down the stairs.

 Even though its January, there are a few good apples from this past fall...time to bake them up though!

It may be simple fare but we farmers find plenty to eat during the cold months of wintertime..probably more than we need to fuel up during the cold days....

But  in summertime, living off the land really gets easy.

So, despite rumors that we all rush from a slab of cold Casey's pizza to potato chips to a hearty repast of York Peppermint Patties, the folks that provide your daily bread appreciate fresh, hot, tasty, and home grown meals themselves.  Whether putting the crop in or taking it out,

at daybreak

or after the sun has gone down....

there's only one more thing you have to know....

The farmer will always choose home made ice cream....