Do You Hear the Supper Bell Ringing?

1 Timothy 6:8 And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content.

Our preacher often preached about growing up during the Great Depression.  He said that they were very, very poor.  He joked that one night they would eat beans and rice and the next night they would eat rice and beans.  He praised God that they never went to bed hungry and that growing up in the country on the Cajun prairie of Basile, Louisiana, God took care of his family.

Last week I posted about picking and shelling a good mess of purple hull peas from the garden.  They were in a big bowl in the fridge.  Yesterday Tricia mentioned that she has meals all lined up for the week.  I knew that meant she was going to be cooking my favorite meal this week - peas and rice.  The boys and I love this meal!  Tricia always says we're easy to please.  During lunch today, I drove to a meat market and purchased a pound of smoked tasso to cook with the purple hulls.

When I drove home and opened the door, I knew that Tricia was way ahead of me.  I smelled the smoky aroma of purple hull peas flavored with smoked sausage simmering on the stove top!  I hurried to do the chores of moving cows from one pasture to another, milking cows, and harvesting ripe stuff in the garden.  Finally done, we gathered to say grace and eat!

A simmering pot of purple hull peas with smoked sausage, onions, jalapenos, and tomatoes

The okra are just starting to come in, while the tomatoes are starting to peter out.  We still have a few tomatoes to "cook down" with some okra and onions and that makes for a mighty fine side dish.

Now a non-negotiable in this meal is a good piece of homemade cornbread.  Cornbread compliments peas and rice in so many ways.  My bowl was overloaded with this delicious, simple country meal. 

I used the cornbread to sop up the last remaining fragments of peas and rice left in my bowl and then pushed the bowl out of the way.  But alas!  The meal was not done.  Benjamin and Russ pick blueberries from our bushes each day.  The harvest has been tremendous this year with nice plump berries.  For dessert, Tricia made a blueberry tart with homemade coffee ice cream.

I think I hurt myself eating this meal.  I'm going to bed with a tight belly!  Believe me, I'm not going to bed hungry.  The meal is nothing fancy.  It is made with simple ingredients grown right outside the back door.  The Good Lord indeed takes care of us and we truly thank Him for letting us eat like kings.

Good, Simple Food (Part 1)

“The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.”
― Wendell Berry

Mealtime is a special time.  Today many people eat in front of the television, or in their cars, or on the run, or gobble something down quickly while reading or surfing the Internet and either eat alone or ignore the other people that they may be eating with.  I don't get it.  I think suppertime, especially, is a sacred time - a time to hold hands across the table and thank God for blessing us with our health, our family togetherness, and asking a blessing over the food that He's provided for us and asking a blessing for the hands that grew the food and for the hands that prepared it. Somewhere along the way, mealtime became a task instead of an event.  We made meals just another job and ceased to be thankful for the meal and ceased enjoying conversing with one another task while we savored the flavors of a home-cooked meal.

Image Credit

Mealtime also became something that would be foreign to our forebears who worked hard to produce the food they ate.  Many times when we eat (as Wendell Berry points out in the quote above), we're eating processed food that is so far removed from its natural state that it is more of an industrialized factory product than an agricultural product.  This transformation of the 'ceremony' of mealtime into a job and the meal itself from a natural product to a factory widget has taken a toll on our lives from both a relational and a healthy standpoint.

We should be talking more during meals, learning from one another, discussing current events, and taking an interest in each other's lives.  Asking simple, crazy questions like, "If money was no object and you could travel anywhere on the planet, where would you go?" around the table and then listening and commenting as each person answers provides great conversation.  Slowing down, putting down the phone or the computer or the game and actually talking with one another allows us to reconnect with our families and build a family legacy.

One thing that we've discovered since we're trying to raise the majority of the food that we place on our tables, is that we're more thankful for our food.  When you grow it, you know the time that it took to milk the cows, gather the eggs, harvest the vegetables, and plan and cook the meal.  You are thankful to the Creator because a lot went into getting it to your fork.  You had to overcome hardships with weather, pests, predators and crop failure in order to eat.  When you really understand this, it makes you really thankful and you realize that He is the Source for all we have.  As a society, we don't know the farmer and many times the food is coming from across the globe.  The distance from farm to table has made us less thankful, I think, as a people.

Fresh from the Farm

This year, for example, we had unseasonably cold weather that ruined our cauliflower crop.  We absolutely love oven roasted cauliflower with garlic.  I'm telling you it is like candy!  Well, they'll be none this year.  The freezing conditions turned the ripening cauliflower heads to brown mush.  They weren't ready to harvest prior to the freeze or I would have picked them all early.  Such a shame.  I clipped the plants off and fed them all to the cows and they loved it.  At least someone got enjoyment out of the cauliflower!  The point is when we harvest cauliflower next year, we'll be THANKFUL!

Good, simple food grown and prepared at home and shared with those you love.  Can it get any better?  For the sake of brevity, I'd like to discuss the health standpoint of simple food in the post tomorrow.