A Traditional Farm Life
By Shasta Hamilton
Greetings from Enterprise, dear friends! This may come as a shock to you, but it’s
raining again this week as I write!
Fortunately, this time I can look out our window and see our garden is
fully tilled. After somewhat helplessly
watching those weeds grow for what seemed like weeks on end, the feeling of
satisfaction and relief of looking out on black earth is indescribable. Let is
rain!
Weed control activities have not been limited to our garden
here on the farm this week. The boys spent a morning this week helping their
friend and business partner Dean Hansen hoe around their 183 tomato
plants. In my mind that feat is amazing
in and of itself, but in the course of the same morning they also put cages
around 120 of those same plants! This
turned out to be the most difficult job, as it took two men just to get each
overgrown plant into each concrete reinforcement wire cage—one to gather up the
plant and the other to carefully put the cage over the top. Some labor was saved, however, by using the
bucket of a Bobcat to insert the stabilizing posts in the ground.
While I was baking cinnamon rolls this week for the
restaurant, Michael packed up a crew of five children and headed to Detroit to
see if some friends who grow watermelons for local Farmer’s Markets needed any
help with weed control. It turned out the melon patch was in pretty good shape,
so the children grabbed hoes and helped in their vegetable garden.
The children also spent some time in a local cornfield one
hot afternoon this week, gathering some of last fall’s field corn for this
year’s squirrels. They are harvesting
from a corner of a field that was unable to be picked last fall, and the owners
have generously given the children whatever they can glean from what’s left in
the field. This time they shucked it out
in the field, and have bagged up the dry ears for sale as squirrel corn at the
Farmer’s Market.
We have felt the Lord’s blessing upon our home this week as
I have been able to shift from restaurant duties to domestic duties around the
home. The girls and I have been engaged
in a massive decluttering effort as we seek to make up for lost time away from
home.
I’m also trying to make up for lost time in the sewing
room. I guess it is no surprise that as
the girls get taller their dresses get shorter.
My free time on Monday was spent drafting patterns as necessary and cutting
out garments to be sewn in snatches of free moments throughout the week. Yes, it takes time and effort to sew our
girl’s dresses, aprons, and bloomers, etc, but we find great joy and blessing
in doing so.
We recently stumbled upon a new way to use Friday night’s
leftover baked potatoes from the restaurant for a weekend meal at home. The back of the Lipton Onion Soup and Dip Mix
box had a recipe for Onion Roasted Potatoes.
While it called for raw potatoes, we substituted our baked potatoes
instead.
I saved the empty box in the pantry for future reference,
and today as I went to the pantry to find it for this week’s recipe I
discovered it missing. This, friends, is
the one downside I have found to our recent cleaning spree. Certainly the one straightening up the pantry
saw no need to keep an empty Onion Soup and Dip Mix box!
Thankfully, it’s a pretty simple recipe and easily doubled
for a larger crew. The recipe would, or
course, be the same if you use raw potatoes, although the baking time may be
longer.
Now, you might be wondering why folks who usually cook from
scratch are using convenience food.
While it might be that using a purchased dip mix doesn’t quite qualify
as “old-fashioned farm food,” being thrifty and using leftovers to make
something new for the family is an age-old rural skill. Waste not, want not!
Roasted Baked
Potato Chunks
4 leftover baked
potatoes
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 pkg. Onion Soup and
Dip Mix
1. Preheat oven to
425 degrees.
2. Cut potatoes into
1” chunks.
3. In a large mixing
bowl, combine the potato cubes, vegetable oil, and Onion Soup Mix; mix until
evenly coated.
4. Spread in a single
layer on a greased baking pan. Bake
30-35 minutes, until golden brown and crisp to your liking. Yield: 4 servings.
Copyright © 2015 by Shasta Hamilton
Shasta is a fifth generation rural Kansan now residing in
Enterprise, Kansas. She and her husband
own and operate The Buggy Stop Home-Style Kitchen with their six home-schooled
children. You can reach The Buggy Stop by
calling (785) 200-6385 or visit them on the web at www.thebuggystoprestaurant.com.
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