Wednesday, November 23, 2011

A Thanksgiving Farm Update


Mama pulled an old favorite from the love-battered recipe collection tonight.  Pork chops and potatoes take on a character of their own when boiled together with her savory onions and seasonings. The memories of warm winter nights spent in gales of family merriment and deep discussion around the table are called up at every bite.  Scroll to the bottom of the post for the recipe!
We are pulling up more than a few old standby recipes, along with the lists from years gone by that somehow gain value with age. “Remember the year when…?”  jumps out on every scribbled page.  I can read my own history in the nearly illegible cards covered in the well-known hand of Grandma or Mama or Aunt.
Long after the well-known steps to a dish are learned like the measured steps of a dance, those pieces of history...a handwritten inheritance…will come out every year to be touched and perused for their own sake.

Thanksgiving was less than two weeks away when I wrote that and somewhere between then and now the urgency of necessary preparations lit a fire under me.  With a list that grows until ”the eleventh hour" rather than shrinking, my philosophy is that it never helps to get markedly excited more than four days prior to an event.  Admitting anticipation of any kind sooner than that yields only a let-down of energy.  (I take full, and probably sole, credit/responsibility for this “preparation policy” in the Lenz household)  The first of these four days is characteristically spent in ruminating upon and composing the final schedule in a sort of hazy rush.  The third day is swept up in a flurry of dusting rags, brooms, vacuums and brushes.  The second day dissolves in a cacophony of mixers and clashing dishes in the kitchen while the farm out of doors undergoes its final overhauling.  The fourth day the foundation of the house remains alone unmoved as all else makes room for the stupendous dining table the surface of which is instantly requisitioned for extra dishes and fearfully-soon-to-be-wonderful decorations in motley heaps.
Thanksgiving morning is a run-on sentence.  (I know day four looked an awful-lot like one...but that is only because it serves as a prelude for the real thing.  If run-on sentences disturb you, take the matter up with Charles Dickens.  He seems formidable enough to appeal to.)

The plans for colors and table-settings began in October with foraging expeditions to the woods and shopping trips to town in search of appropriate decor and supplies.  Amidst the business of those weeks of early fall we start thinking about the turkey; and a walk through the grocery store will produce things in our cart that are nowhere on a list.   By the first week of November, the requisite additional supplies of flour and butter, sweet potatoes and seasonings are stashed away.  Already the space in the extra refrigerator is nearly hallowed ground reserved for feast viands alone.  In this manner the insurmountable Thanksgiving shopping list never materializes, but goes in and out with the everyday activities of our lives like a tide.  With a habit of opening our door to guests on a weekly or even daily basis, Thanksgiving becomes a climax of hospitality where the heaped-up abundance of a year of giving and receiving overflows into our lives in one short day of merry-giving and good-cheer taking.  Yes, there is a great deal of labor involved...but there is nothing good which is not well worth working for.

The food itself is a merely a gift of sameness given from one to another not only because it took a measure of effort, but because it serves to remind us.  Our beings are made to be fluent in aesthetics.  From an early age habitual languages of tradition pour identity and heritage into us.  There is, after all, nothing magical about the mountains of mashed potatoes, the specially cleaned home, candles or table adornments, or the third Thursday of November.  These are called into living, breathing and speaking eloquence by the powerful truth that overshadows the most simple of commonalities.

Five kernels of corn rationed every day through a winter that nearly obliterated them inspired an intrepid company of men, women and children to fall on their knees and rise again in thankfulness before the God who gives life and takes it.  Abundance of health and comfort should inspire no less in us, yet it often fails to do so.  Rich hearts can often complain of poverty in one thing: gratitude.  How is it that "fullness of bread" breeds in the human soul a bitterness and apathy that abundance of want with a measure of grace rarely brings?  It is my belief that in the receiving of gifts, discontent grows only in the one who cannot and will not acknowledge the Giver.

So, in recognition of what we cannot repay, from our little or great we pour out preparations proportionate to the demeanor of our hearts.  Each year can only succeed if it outdoes the last in some way.  The table gathers round itself a broad array of lives, each with his own loan of life to add to the smaller glow of beauty that reflects the greater glory of the Table "over the way".

Here we pile in bounty the rich and the ripe, savory and sweet.  Steam-shrouded platters of stacked meat overlook lakes of gravy; piping hot rolls amass in heaps beside fathomless bowls of creamed and seasoned vegetables and endless quantities of stuffing.  The language of abundance is expressive and even absurd.  It mocks the lackadaisical and pokes fun at the centrist.  If not otherwise, at least at the Thanksgiving table the lukewarm is worthy of disparagement.  Is this acknowledgement of indebtedness too effusive for some?  I hope not.  I will dare to say that we have yet to find the "fullness of joy" that comes from knowing just how poor we are in gratitude for the wealth we are daily given.

"Thou wilt show me the path of life: in Thy presence is fulness of joy; at Thy right hand are pleasures forevermore." Psalm 16:11
Skillet Pork Chops
(serves 4)
4 pork chops
2T butter
2 T flour
½ t salt
1/3 c parmesan cheese
¼ t pepper
4c thinly sliced potatoes (you don’t have to peel farm fresh potatoes!)
1 onion thinly sliced
3 beef bouillon cubes
¾ c hot water
1 T lemon juice
Coat chops with flour and brown in butter.  Dissolve beef cubes in water.  Add lemon juice.  Set aside. Combine 2T cheese, salt and pepper and sprinkle on chops.  Cover with potato slices and 2 T cheese. Add onion.  Pour beef broth over all.  Sprinkle with remaining cheese.  Cover and simmer 40 minutes or until done.  I find it is done in 20 minutes if I precook chops in crock pot (make sure you add drippings to skillet).  If you have grocery store pork chops you may want to skim the fat before adding drippings.  Also, when we double the recipe we use 4 bouillon cubes and a little more water.  You don’t need 6 bouillon cubes.
We like that we can make Skillet Pork Chops fairly quickly…and there are potatoes, onions and pork chops in abundance on the farm this time of year!

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Dull and quiet, the sky of looming winter hovers close to earth most days now; a blanket of peace settling on a landscape that has ceased to strive in abundance and ebbs to rest in latent age.  No more will the hosts of vibrant colors vie for attention in splendid panoply.  The time of completion and maturity lends to simple monotones of grey a noble elegance and softened beauty.  Highest of births, greatness of growth and experience of fruition will yield the realization of a hoary crown needless of more testimony to labor.
The year is completing its last work in laying away the seed of a new birth yet to come.  Aubrey gave the iris their annual “hair-cut” while I completed the annual window-swabbing yesterday.  The wood pile has grown, albeit a little sluggishly due to the greater looming project of root-cellar building.  We pulled up enduring tomato plants with their cages and posted strong picket lines of the ungainly wire contraptions like sentries around apple trees and blueberry bushes against the onslaught of hungry deer.  Sam plowed the garden under the other day and all that remains of the bounty are ragged scraps of vine and drab mounds of bare earth.  The tractors already sport their winter chains and Mama mulched the blueberry bushes with pine-needles (blueberries love nice acidic soil), while I still need to mulch my hydrangea bush and cut down the last of my flower garden that sports frost-seared spikes.

The lively business of readying for winter around here would probably resemble a disturbed ant-hill from the perspective of an aerial view time-lapse.  All the activity is a tacit acknowledgment of an urgency not unlike the spirit that hastens men to hustle into ranks at the call of a commander before a battle.  No one takes firm hold of a spade unless he intends to dig, or buys seed unless he intends to plant.  Only a fool gathers wood and block to build nothing, or collects books he does not intend to better himself by.  And we never gather everything together and put it all away and tie this down and cover that up without the firm assurance that we haven’t ever done it quite soon enough to beat the invading rush of the arctic.

Especially in the woods, there is the general sense of “battening down the hatches.”  Like the lights of a house blinking out at night, everything curls up and retreats for a long sleep.  The ruddy “berries” on the right are a woodsy herald of fall just as Bloodroot is the first sign of spring.  Some of you probably recognize the brilliant seed-pod of the exotic wild orchid native to Minnesota, the Jack-in-the-Pulpit.  Most don’t know the baneful mosquito proves her worth in being the only species that can pollinate and thus propagated this remarkable plant.  Needless to say we were not short on mosquitoes this year, since forest floor around the farm is literally bespangled with these Christmas-red pods.  Plants and animals, with the blessed gift of instinct from the Creator, know better than to wait until the first snow flies to prepare for the coming lack of food.  This is the second year in a row that our raspberry bushes have bowed under the weight of late autumn berries after the first frost; and yesterday two squirrels chased each other madly across the yard, one with his face full of a nut, the other very apparently wanting one.  Extra bounty at harvest is never a mistake, and the wise observer doesn’t disregard the hint.  The cold is not great yet, but it is settling in with a kind of determined energy. 

The biggest race against time this week was the root cellar roof.  The boys poured a thick concrete slab that will be insulated with at least two feet of earth. If they can manage to put the door in soon, we will have the capability to dispel pyramids of jars and mountains of potatoes among which we are nearly buried.
Frankly, the cellar is an engineering masterpiece.  It couldn’t be anything else with Daddy on the team.  Everything he builds stands as a lasting and sturdy testimony to his painstaking work.  When they troop in to dinner, the men wear daubs of cement with dustings of gravel and sand and scratched and dented fingers permeated with the distinct odors of tractor fuel and musty earth.  I washed Ben’s jeans yesterday and found a few determined gobs of hardened concrete yet clinging tenaciously to them when I pulled them from the dryer.

It is our earnest hope to finish the project in the next few days, and in the spirit of the “lighthearted” Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, “the bright side of it is...” if cellar is finished, as long as we don’t faint from exhaustion in a Minnesota winter tramping the extra 50 yards to fetch a can of tomatoes, at least we won’t die from lack of exercise in the next six months.  “Very likely…” what with being tired of canned tomatoes and mashed potatoes, and having next to nothing to do and living in such close quarters for such a long time, “we’ll hardly notice the weather!”  J

To be quite honest, rather than having “next to nothing to do,” I find that my list of winter projects has grown so prodigiously, I am already relegating some to next year’s toll.  What winter undertakings are on your lists, I wonder?

This year is about to roll over one more time to tuck his chin in under the covers and then we too must nestle in to short cozy days and long warm nights indoors. 

 Dull November brings the blast,
Then the leaves go whirling past.
Chill December brings the sleet,
Blazing fire and Christmas treat

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows