A day of "not trying"

Tuesday, May 31, 2011. A day for the history books. Deborah and I will be taking a serious look at houses in Columbus (the one in Indiana). I think we'll make an offer on a house on Oxford Drive. It is currently overpriced. Its been on the market for a long time. 11 months ago it was listed for $50k less than now. We like the house but can't/won't pay that much.

What this means here is that food isn't a focus. We'll probably have something easy for lunch and the boys have a date with Grandma Fogt at Chick-fil-a for dinner. They have an indoor playground and milkshakes.

Come Wednesday I'll try to figure out where something came from. Maybe the milk my boys drink so much of.

Nope, let me tell you about our chickens. I led a discussion on May 21 about how our food choices reflect our values. A big portion of that had to do with chickens. I'd love to have chickens, broilers and hens, at our house. I think it important to remember that food is not a birthright. One house I found had two chicken pens. I mentioned that in the workshop and I got more questions the next day.

Well today, the boys got leftover chicken and noodles for lunch. Tristan dove in head first, literally. He even ate what his brother left behind. I like to think that this means that an appreciation for the gift of food will be easy to teach, a lesson difficult to even know about for most of us.

But I'm sure we won't have chickens at our next home. We may keep bees, but chickens wouldn't be good where we're headed. I just need to find a chicken ranch we can visit so my boys can know their farmer and their chicken.

Memorial Day treats

I wish I could tell you where this watermelon came from.  But since it's May and this is a watermelon, I'd rather not know.

So it's bratwurst, today.  Back to Hawkins Family farm and their wonderful Tamworth hogs.  Some of which go to W&W packers in Andrews, IN to be turned into tasty sausages.  The hogs are used as a machine as well as a table item.  They root through the land they occupy in search of tastey roots and seeds.  This turns up the soil like an organic rototiller, aerating the soil and mixing in the nutrient rich compost they also provided weeks earlier.  Pigs are good... and tasty!

Ah, Grits

Sorry, no pictures.

We made up for Saturday's fast food with real food on Sunday. For dinner, I plopped a chuck roast in a casserole with a bit of oil, herbs and spices and a bag of frozen pearl onions. It went into the oven (225F) before noon for dinner at 5.

I waited until 3 to think about polenta. We have a pound of Indiana corn meal ground at the Metamora Grist Mill. The first recipe I found was easy, 1c corn meal, 4c water, 1c cream cheese stirred in after the corn gelatinizes. Straight forward and I didn't need to buy anything. Plus it used up a package of cream cheese from the house stash. But halfway in, it was just corn, so it got salt, pepper and garlic. In the end it was pretty good, but bland-ish. I picked up some grocery store broth for the next time.

So we don't know much about the corn, but it was ground as part of a demonstration of what takes to make flour and meal. I appreciated it whether or not anyone else did.

A Missed Opportunity.

I thought it would be easy. I really did. If I got a week of easy posts in, I'd have the momentum needed to get through the "tough part" when we'd have two residences and a lot of commutes. Well, we elected to spend Saturday at the railroad.
Connersville, IN is home to the Whitewater Valley Railroad. The old train line runs between Connersville's downtown train depot and an old lock in Metamora, in almost constant view of the river and canal. The ride drops you off for a 2 hour layover in the old canal town, which is advertised something like Roscoe Village in Coshocton, OH or Nashville, IN. The publicity advertises an old canal town with some historic exhibits and boutique shops. I actually thought we'd have a tough time seeing everything or fighting crowds inn the perfect weekend.
I thought we'd find somewhere to get fresh-made ice cream or cookies or something. Instead, there were signs for a brand I'd not seen before where there wasn't a For Sale sign, anyway. So no luck on that front. But the balance was that the 100 or so passengers on the train accounted for close to half of the day's tourist population. So what was open was pretty accessible to our 3 year old and the umbrella stroller bound toddler.
Three highlights of Metamora:
1) Words &amp; Images</p>
This is a little old book store listed in the directory as an antique shop. What beconned us was it's side show as a toy train store. Some of the engines they sell go for more than $200. The proprietor reminded me of Tim West, a pipe maker in Columbus, OH. Very knowlegable and frank. I think that if you weren't expressing interest in one of his few hobbies, conversation would nearly impossible. Lots of fun for us, though.
2) Ice Cream

Of course, I have no idea where it came from, but we got the obligatory ice. Cream at a store filled to capacity with antique cookie jars. Deborah got Duncan a chocolate cone. His first as far as we know. He quickly got bored wither the ice cream and started eating his cake cone. "What a mess!" he exclaimed, a cigar store indian for frozen treats.
3) The Grist Mill
Metamora's reason for being is a huge stone grist mill. In the 1830s, the grist mill took grain from canal traffic and made it into useful flour, grits, and meal for sale and consumption. In the 20th century, IDNR bought the mill as a historic living museum and established a canal boat ride. They take corn and grind it into meal throughout the day. They also sell that and we took a bag home. More on that through the next week.
So the missed opportunity was that our trip caused the toast and cereal we had for breakfast to be the easiest to trace to the source. Golden Grahams, while complying with Michael Pollan's rule of not coloring milk, is probably made from Midwestern wheat and corn in a factory somewhere in the Midwest. Our toast might be easier to stalk. Some Aunt Millie's bread is made at Perfection Bakery in Fort Wayne. We'll just take an incomplete and pretend that it was from there.
And yes, our other meals were mass market chain fast food. If its good enough for Amish...

"You've got to begin at the beginning...

... when spinning a story or a prayer ."

I can't remember much more of that song from an elementary school cantata from way back. But it's a good rule, as is the Good Samaritan parable it introduces. I've thought often about how our family has made food choices. That has intensified with our move to a different region of Indiana, a weekend with Norman Wirzba, and trying to eat on a budget in an apartment.

Lets get to the meat of the matter, first. I'm planning to document the source of one food item we eat each day. The goal has two influences. First, I like sharing our sources for most of the food we eat. But, also, by knowing I will need to track down the source of some of our food, I'll cheat and look at sources in advance. The goal isn't to eat local, but to know whose labor and love has gone into making our meals possible.

So, for this first day, I present lunch for myself and the boys.

This is chicken and noodles. The noodles and carrots are bagged and canned. Just raiding the pantry there. The chicken is another story. The last two nights' dinners have featured parts of this chicken from Hawkins Family Farm. Wednesday, I carved away the thighs and wings to bake on a bed of wild rice and condensed chicken noodle soup. Last night, the other meaty bits were pan fried. This morning I took the left over carcass and made a quick stock, removed the bones and meat, added some elbow macaroni and added the meaty bits back in with left over canned carrots. For me, it was too peppery, but the boys loved it. Above, you see Tristan hovering over Duncan's second helping with joy.

But, the chicken... It was a Cornish Cross from the Hawkins Family Farm CSA. We trucked a good portion of last year's share to the apartment and a new, small, chest freezer. This bird was on the small side, weighing around 4 pounds. It was raised by Jeff Hawkins in a pen called a Chicken Tractor. This bottomless cage houses 50 birds without a bottom. Hanging from the partly open roof are a waterer and feeder. Each morning, the tractors are moved one length through pasture, giving the birds access to fresh bugs and grass (yes, they're omnivores).After something like 7 weeks, Jeff takes them to a USDA poultry packer which takes care of the messier bits. Last year our CSA share included 20 of the tastey birds.

So back to why I'm trying to do this. Way up top, I said that this comes from a move, a visit and a budget. We are in transition from Fort Wayne, a place I've lived for 5 years and my wife for 15 plus other years of childhood, to Columbus, Indiana. Columbus is familiar because it is close enough to Bloomington, where Deborah's mom is and Deborah went to High School. But it's not home, yet. We'll need to carve out our niche over time, but also quickly to make a good transition for our boys, 18 months and 3 years old. Getting food similar to the way we did in Fort Wayne could be an important part of that.

But I also spent some valuable time with Norman Wirzba last week. Norman talked briefly about his new book, Food & Faith, A theology of eating, as part of Plymouth UCC's Parry Lecture series. I was key in making it happen and got some extra time with Norman through that. Norman's talk about both Sabbath and Food made something clear to me. When I first connected with the Hawkins Family, I was in search of local food that supported an economy. What I crave most now is a connection, not so much with the food or terroir, but with the people and the ecology of place. Hopefully, I can make that clearer as I go along.

And so I close this edition with a photo of Norman Wirzba at the Hawkins Family Farm and the hen house.