Happenings on the Ranch

I have long maintained that living and working on a farm teaches great lessons to children.  The value of hard work, how to care for something other than yourself, and to understand that an animal relies solely on you for its health and well-being are all lessons that will carry them through to adulthood.  There are also the lessons about where our food truly comes from.  The eggs come from the chickens, not the case at the back of the grocery store.  No matter how attached you are to a particular food, if it was meant for butcher, it goes to the butcher.  You know the name of the pork chop you’re eating.  You also know where it came from, how it was raised and how it was treated during it’s lifetime.  You learn how to grow a tomato from seed to fruit, along with every other vegetable imaginable.  And, as a result, you learn to appreciate your food – good food.

I didn’t learn to cook as I was growing up.  In fact, my brother and I weren’t allowed in the kitchen unless it was our turn to do the dishes.  Meals were placed on the table at the exact same time every day and snacks were very planned.  The unfortunate part of this is that my mother has never been an exceptional cook.  She never learned what seasoning was (and, to this day, removes the salt from any recipe she makes).  She also turned into the Microwave Queen in the early 80′s and never looked back.  My first husband’s family was mortified when I was at their house at age 15 and made scrambled eggs in the microwave.  I’ve never lived that down.

It wasn’t until well after I was married that I began to experiment with cooking.  Many, many of those dishes were absolute disasters.  Like my mother, I didn’t know how to spice food.  I had grown up on bland food and overcooked meat, so getting past that took a very … long … time.  But once I started to experiment and truly let myself go in the kitchen, I found that I had a knack for creating dishes.  This came in very handy while I was a single mom raising three kids on military pay.  Whatever happened to be in the cupboard turned into that night’s dinner.  Occasionally a fellow Marine from the barracks would come for a good home cooked meal and I was always rewarded with high praise.  Which only made me want to cook more.  Now, I enjoy cooking and baking and continue to experiment and tweak recipes to this day.

Which is why I’ve always had my kids in the kitchen.  I thought it would be a good idea to get them off to a good start by teaching them the basics early on.  They’ve alway enjoyed it and our 14-yr-old son especially took to baking … and all kinds of weird experimental concoctions have come out of it.  (Alien green cake, anyone?)

Tonight, Tess (11) and Megan (13) pooled their efforts and created a fabulous fruit salad.  Watermelon, cantaloupe, peaches and apples, tossed with walnuts and seasoned with fresh mint leaves; it was just the perfect cool meal on a hot summer night. 

The finished product was delicious.  The girls took the rinds from the melons and used them as bowls for serving.  Pretty creative for a quick meal.  Well, with all the goofing around it actually took them over an hour to get it done, but it was worth the wait.