From Scratch

“You could have bought the peas for less time and effort,” my father said.

 

“But I like planting and harvesting,” I answered.

 

He frowned. “It makes no sense that you work in that field, when you could have a regular job and buy your food. I don’t like seeing my daughter as a subsistence farmer knee deep in animal manure.”

 

“You raised me to be self-supporting and hardworking. I love my farm. Besides, you’re my guest.”

 

He stomped off to the small, run-down farmhouse. Father would brag back at home about the wonderful meal and the animals and the fields. But he’d worked years to raise himself up from the farming grandparents, mill-working parents. He’d worked hard to educate his children, and it made him furious to see me doing manual labor.

 

I collected the rest of the peas and hustled into the house, where I began preparing lasagna from scratch. I’d actually started the meal months earlier. The baby shoats grew all summer to become round, fat pigs, later stuck and bled, cut, packaged and rendered into sausage. The ground had been tilled, hoed, raked, fertilized and sprinkled with seeds that grew into parsley, tomatoes, garlic, celery, onion and basil.

 

I made the noodles from artichoke flour traded at the whole-foods co-op for bookkeeping services. The eggs came from my own Rhode Island Reds and the milk from my beautiful goat herd. Only the olive oil and salt had been purchased from the store.

 

The main attraction at my farm was the 13 milking goats. They provided much love, as well as funding from sales of their milk, cheese and meat.

 

Mother asked, “Can I sit outside while you put the meal together? It is so hot with the wood stove going.”

 

“Sure Mom. Take a chair from the gazebo and put it out by the paddock and I’ll bring you some tea.”

 

I brought Mother some peppermint tea and left her to watch the farm. I rolled out the dough and cut the noodles. I simmered the onions, garlic and olive oil for a while before adding the scalded and peeled tomatoes, the basil and the parsley.

 

Then I browned the pork sausage. I always thought of the pigs living in the old Ford behind the pond when I cooked their parts. Pigs are nice animals, and many afternoons I’d sit by their sty, feed them apples, listen to their snorts and tell them all the disturbing things the other animals on the farm were up to.

 

I never named the animals I knew I would slaughter. But that didn’t keep me from knowing them.

 

The kitchen began to smell lovely. I had bread in the oven. My beige and lime-green wood cook stove had a high back with a shelf to raise the bread, curdle the milk and dry the herbs. It had four burners that lifted with a tool shaped like a bent fork. The oven was on one side with a big temperature gauge on the outside of the door, the fire box on the other side.

 

I’d learned to split the wood just right to lay it snug, so coals would form and keep the oven warm enough to cook but not too hot to burn. I’d gotten good at using this appliance­the only stove I had for eight years.

 

I finished layering the lasagna into a large glass baking dish I’d purchased at a discount store for this event. I took the bread out of the oven and put the lasagna in.

 

“Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” I heard my mother scream.

 

I ran to the back door and out into the yard. My mother was sitting as I had left her, dressed in her best hat and gloves and nylons and heels. I think beige and pink was the theme that day.

 

I let out a guffaw. There in my mother’s lap sat the pet goat Tag-a-Long I let roam the farm at will. Tag-a-Long wasn’t good enough to breed, so I made him a pet. He loved peppermint. He’d hopped right into my mother’s lap and stolen the tea bag off her saucer, depositing a small pile of droppings in her lap.

 

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” she kept screaming.

 

We got Tag-a-long off Mother’s lap, cleaned her skirt, and retired to the house for the meal. I set the table, poured the wine, cut the bread and cheeses, and placed the fresh-churned butter on the table with plates and napkins and silverware.

 

Then it was my time to scream, “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

 

The baking dish I’d bought for the lasagna wasn’t ovenproof. The glass had cracked right down the middle. The 20 pounds of from-scratch lasagna was stuck to the bottom of the woodstove oven. I scooped it into a bucket and served it to the pigs.

 

We rounded up the animals for the evening, shut up the barn, closed the chicken coop, secured the paddock and went out to eat.

By Stephania Pearce, Master Gardener

Posted April 13, 2010