Let's take yesterday's Sunday lunch, for example. We had roast chicken with a tarragon sauce, boiled potatoes, corn on the cob, and a cucumber and tomato salad. Simple enough, right? Right. Except . . .
The chicken was one we had raised, slaughtered, plucked, and eviscerated ourselves. To say nothing of the breaking of the legs. Hours of work already there. Inside the cavity I stuck some random little onions I had thinned from the garden. Hours more work for planting, watering, weeding, and cleaning those onions.
The sauce included tarragon from the garden, which of course had been planted, watered, weeded, and then harvested, plus washed and chopped. The chicken stock for the sauce had been prepared by the MiL from the hearts, necks, and gizzards of the slaughtered roosters. She spent quite awhile carefully skinning and trimming those pieces before putting them in the pot to simmer.
The potatoes, in addition to the back-breaking work in the garden before they even grew big enough to harvest, had to be dug up, scrubbed clean, peeled, quartered, and then boiled.
You all know the work that goes into tomatoes, shallots, and cucumbers (although these weren't our cucumbers--the MiL bought some at a farm stand because we HAVE no cucumbers dammit) in the garden before they can become a salad. Same with the corn, which then has to be harvested, shucked, and de-silked before being simply boiled.
So for a relatively simple meal that was consumed in less than half an hour, I probably spent at least an hour in the kitchen doing the actual cooking, and there were untold hours to plant, grow, harvest, and prep all that food before it became, well, food.
It's kind of tiring to contemplate, but I'm sure I don't need to tell you that everything on our plates yesterday was the best possible example of that particular food. It was beyond delicious, and doing all the work yourself will make you appreciate your food a whole hell of a lot more.
That said, you should know we had leftover Chinese takeout for dinner. Because even I have my limits.
6 comments:
And then people wonder why veggies and fruits cost as much as they do in the stores.
Nothing beats the nutritional value and taste of home grown food.
My kids like to play a game at supper called, "Where did you get the...?" where they look at their plates and start naming everything. It is always fun when nearly everything comes from our garden or family/friends' livestock, but it has never been as completely home grown as yours! Sounds delicious!
How would you like a year with no TOMATOES? This year in MN all the tomatoes are green and hard; they are not ripening because of the strange weather! Mary in MN
No tomatoes in my part of OK, either! Luckily my parents' neighbors (in another part of the state) got some this year, so I've been getting *some* homegrown tomatoes. It's been too hot, too dry, and even the bees aren't flying!
You make an excellent point about all of the work that goes into food preparation. It's getting done somewhere before your plate, whether its agribusiness or your ownself.
word verification: repaphyb "I sure hope my repaphyb test comes back negative!"
Just when I was feeling proud of myself for cooking from scratch, you manage to outdo me. Completely. Well, I do live in the city; I only have so much garden space. But still, there's a cookbook on my shelf called "Best Fixed with Mixes" and I think I've opened it once. Maybe.
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