Portage River Farm

One of the unexpected challenges of our new life on the farm has been the need to radically modify our cooking. Janet and I have always taken pride in the food we have provided for our family. We have always put an emphasis on things "prepared from scratch" and have accumulated a large cookbook of favorite recipes.

What I didn't realize ahead of time is that our family recipes were mostly based on the "from scratch" items coming from the supermarket. As the fresh produce piled up this summer, it quickly became apparent that we needed a whole new set of recipes! We are now in the process of starting all over again to find appealing ways to incorporate an abundance of fresh produce into our diets.

Along the same lines, I have also been struck by the sheer number of chicken recipes that we have used in the past that only utilized the breast meat. These recipes are either going to have to be modified or replaced with ways to use the whole bird. It took the experience of raising our own meat to make me realize how wasteful recipes that use only the choice portions of the animals can be.

Now that we have loaded up our pantry with hundreds of mason jars full of preserved food, we also have to find a way to use those. Prior to this, we simply picked recipes for the week and stopped by the store to pick up whatever we needed as if it were an infinite pantry. Although we will never completely eliminate our dependence on the grocery store, we look forward to relearning the skills of meal planning to gradually reduce it.

Black beans are another example. From the picture you can see the beautiful little harvest of black beans that we grew in our garden. We already had a favorite recipe for Mexican black bean soup in our cookbook, but it called for the use of canned beans from the store. As another step in our education, we had to learn to divide the weight of canned beans from the recipe by a factor of 2.5 in order to know how many of our home-grown dried beans to use.

As we sit down to enjoy our meals, we feel a sense of pride and satisfaction at the increasing frequency of ingredients that we have grown. I think it will be quite a while until we can resist pointing out those items to our children. They invariably pick up the conversation and start dreaming with us of the day when we can have meals entirely produced on our own land.