Posted by Sheila
I feel a little silly showing up back here. It has almost been a year since I last posted on what began as a shared blog, and after so much time, I can’t help but wonder if there is a way back through the door. There are, in fact, so many more reasons to not continue being a part of this blog than to start trying to contribute again, that it has made it doubly hard to get back at it. There is the ever present busyness of life, the really boring (in a blog world kind of way) food we eat, the lack of recipes used or created to share, the willy-nilly-free-for-all that cooking is for me; I have had too much time to reflect on all this in the year since I last posted that I can’t help but feel that I was naive to think I would have anything worthwhile to write on a food blog.
No one that reads this blog now probably even remembers that when we started this project, it was going to be a collaboration. I have felt a lot of guilt about asking Lisa to start this and then leaving all the work to her. But life happens, and I happened to lose both my parents within days of each other in the worst week of my life last June. When I got home, I didn’t want to write anything at all. And although I had to keep up with things a bit more on our farm blog, my heart wasn’t in it. The same was true for cooking. We all ate of course, and ate healthy, local, tasty food; but I was surprised to find that I was going to go through a grief process no matter how reasonable I tried to feel about death in my mind, and that part of this process meant feeling pretty lackluster about most things, especially food and farming. Luckily, I felt a renewed and very intense joy in that which is most important of all, my children and our family. That made for happiness in the midst of sadness, and that focused energy towards them has found us all in a more joyful place than ever as we start a new year.
Now that time has healed, I have been trying to find a way to start posting here again. And although I can’t say I am convinced that my cooking in the kitchen is anything spectacular, it is homey, healthy, and a good picture of what eating locally looks like in a simple, down to earth style. And that, coupled with the fact that I still have that nagging guilt about my absence from here and because Lisa surprisingly still wants me to contribute and because I really do love to write, has gotten me here. I am going to try to find ways to share our farm and home’s little bit of mindful eating again.
And for all my worry about what I will write about, I have at least started to try my hand at meal planning. This winter was lean in our fields and freezers, and planning things for the week really helped me figure out what we were going to eat. Right now, our fields are in transition. We have tilled in most of our over-wintered produce, that we could still be harvesting from, in order to fill the space up for a big spring since we are not going to be harvesting for our CSA or Farmer’s Markets until the last week of this month. We are excited for the farm business, but it has left less to harvest from for the family right now. We normally don’t buy vegetables, but because we have had so little and because we are nourishing so many, I have been buying potatoes from a local farm and mushrooms grown in the county to round things out. Here is what this week’s menu looked like, a picture of how we eat when we don’t have much new spring produce yet and have exhausted most of our preserved produce. We normally eat, and encourage folks to eat, so many more vegetables than we are eating right now; but sometimes, we have found, that we have to give a little from our ideals, with both vegetable and meat amounts, in our effort to live off our land or our neighbors’.
Monday:
Breakfast–Fried Eggs and Rye Toast
Lunch–White Bean Soup with Spring Onion, Kale, and Sausage
Dinner–Polenta (made with chicken stock) with Sauteed Spring Onions and Kale
Tuesday:
Breakfast–Oatmeal and Sausage
Lunch–Leftover Polenta with Leftover White Bean Soup
Dinner–Gluten-Free Chicken, Mushroom, Onion, and Sage Pot Pie
Wednesday:
Breakfast–Egg Scramble with Chives and Kale
Lunch–Eating somewhere in Portland (suggestions accepted!)
Dinner–Lamb Sausages with White Bean and Savory Puree and Sauteed Kale
Thursday:
Breakfast–Poached Eggs with Hollandaise and Gluten-Free English Muffins, topped with Chive Blossoms
Lunch–Chicken, Mushroom, Onion, and Mung Bean Noodle Soup
Dinner–Meatloaf with Mashed Potatoes and Spring Lettuce Salad
Friday–
Breakfast–Buckwheat Pancakes with Sunflower Seed Butter
Lunch–Salmon Cakes with Spring Lettuce Salad
Dinner–Taco Night (which has sadly replaced Pizza Night due to food allergies) with Sprouted Corn Tortillas, Refried Pinto Beans, and Sauteed Onion and Kale
