Lehman's Country Life

Cold winds are blowing, temperatures are freezing and below, snow is falling, and the ice on the steps refuses to melt. Sounds like the basics of weather this time of year. These conditions make it hard to be outdoors, but it’s a wonderful time for some rib-sticking comfort foods.

While researching this article I started by looking at what my family has been having on the supper menu the last couple of weeks. Although we are located in North Carolina, the temperatures here have been unusually cold, with nights in the single digits and days barely getting out of the teens. Our family meal choices have reflected the foods I grew up with in the Northeast.
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Quite often over the years people have asked me , “What do you eat? Or does it get boring eating from the garden all the time ?” So I thought I would share some of our favorite recipes with you from time to time. Let me say right here not everything we eat comes from the farm. About 90% of what we eat we produce. Some things I do buy at the grocery store but you don’t need a farm or garden to use these recipes as the ingredients are available at the grocery store.

Let me begin with breakfast because for us it is essential  to give us energy to begin the day’s work. Almost every day begins with oatmeal with other things added that are both nutritious and tasty. We do eat other things too sometimes.
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Did you know that pumpkins are really a fruit? They are members of the Cucurbitaceae Family (how’d you like that for a last name?), the same family to which cucumbers, gourds and melons belong. Indigenous pumpkins have probably been growing in the United States for at least 5,000 years. Not the same pumpkins of course. Unless you count the one grown by Dave Stelts of Leetonia, Ohio that weighed in at 1,140 pounds.

So, the question of the day is, if you were Mr. Stelts, and you had over 1,000 pounds of pumpkin sitting on your front porch, what in the world would you do with it? We asked our employees, friends and family here at Lehman’s for some of their best pumpkin stories. We will include some recipes, but we are talking unusual pumpkins stories.

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Carissa and the Crust

One of the first things that I noticed when I moved to this little corner of Northeast Ohio is that Sunday is NOT a good day to get things done that require going to a store. Obviously there are exceptions like the larger chain stores, for the most part, things are closed and the streets rolled up on Sunday. Believe me, this is a small price to pay for the return you get from living in Wayne County Ohio. So Sunday is as it should be in our household, family day, we still get things done, clean up the house (full time job), and cooking.

We have become quite familiar with the concept of a crock pot in a world dominated by a lack of hours in the day. You cannot lose, dump everything into this magic appliance in the morning and several hours later – out comes a dish that even the most picky eater (my son) cannot stick a nose up at. So the morning starts out with breakfast. Then the crock pots are put together and begin their journey, tempting our senses all day.
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Theresa

Sue Steiner with mural

We’ve been busy lining up a whole assortment of educational and interesting arts and crafts demos by Ohio Arts and Crafts Guild members for folks visiting Kidron, Ohio. We are just now heading into the peak of fall foliage as the trees begin to hint at the beautiful display of colors we can expect in the next week or so. As you enjoy the scenery on the drive to the store you can stop in and visit with local artist Dennis Lipp as he paints rural landscapes and local farms as part of his demo.

Last Sat. Theresa of ‘Mind Our Beeswax’ brought along her beeswax and handpainted Christmas ornaments. In the photo you see some of the process Theresa uses to create beautiful, heirloom quality ornaments. We pictured some Lehman’s molds which can be used if you’d like to give this a try at home.
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We’ve passed the autumnal equinox and now the light in the evening is dimming at an ever-quicker pace. Even though there may be more golden days, these past couple of mornings there has been a light shimmering of frost and a crispness in the air that is just a tad on the sharp side.

Artisan Wood-Burning Cookstove

This is when the cast iron casseroles and earthenware bean pots come into their own season. With our log burner glowing my appetite is ready for putting some ‘flannel’ around my own ‘lites.’

In Italy they have reinvented the antidote to fast food with the Slow Food Movement. This season is perfect for doubling up on using your heat sources. So if you have a wood cookstove like an Aga or Stanley, then the low oven is perfect for casserole preparation. You can leave, go out to work and come home to the yummiest, most soul-satisfying dinner. (A slow cooker suffices, too, but it won’t heat your house as nicely.)

Bearing in mind that cattle add to our CO2 emissions, it’s worth considering reducing the amount of meat from cattle we eat. This does not mean that you need to go vegetarian! But to lower your carbon footprint you need to consider supporting your local beef, pork and lamb producers. You can have your meat and eat it too if you reduce food mileage. It’s also important to support local food production from an economic point of view. The more we support local producers and spend money in our local communities we expend less in terms of CO2 emissions from our journeys to market globally. So look for local labels or patronise farmer’s markets where you can be confident of your food’s providence.
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October is Work and Family month, and as a working mom some days are easier than others to get a nutritious meal on the table that works with everyone’s schedules. This is the time of year I love to pull out the crockpot and get a main dish going in the morning so  when I get home at night all I need to do is add a salad or side dish and we are ready to eat.

Soups and stews are a great way to lower fat in your diet, extend the protein and save money! Recipes can easily be altered to include more vegetables and less meat and not lose flavor. In addition, high fiber items like barley, couscous and dried lentils can be included to increase the nutritive value. Remember, to make your dish as healthy as possible, refrigerate the finished soup overnight in a shallow container (no more that 3 inches deep) which will cause the fat to rise to the surface and solidify, making it easy to remove the unwanted fat.
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It is a perfect late summer morning – a Saturday, to be exact, and my favorite day of the week. The front and back doors are both propped wide open and a fresh, cool breeze flows through the full depth of the house. Once I’ve disposed of the day’s obligatory small rodent that the cats have dutifully left on the back porch, Barney is free to wander in and out and pick a vantage point to keep an eye on me as I set up for the first round of canning I’ve done in years. The Ball canning book and a copy of Stocking Up III were among the first of the cookbooks I unpacked, and they will remain out in a prominent place now until late Fall.

As the 20 qt stainless stockpot full of water approaches the boil, I slip the first dozen or so perfect, ripe Roma tomatoes in to blanch, and reflect on the cases of commercially canned goods I have collected over the past few months in a room set aside upstairs for storage. When I lived in hurricane-prone North Carolina, I made a practice of keeping at least a few weeks’ worth of basics, including food, paper goods, and some 40 gallons of well water in labeled glass jugs. When Hurricane Fran swept through the Piedmont, downing trees across roadways and knocking out power for days on end, I had everything I and my animals needed and the only real compromise was bathing with water dipped out of the spa tub (yeah, that was really hard….)
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I remember as a kid taking a stroll through the local neighborhood in search of a tiny mushroom no larger than a dime. No, I was not intent on picking and eating these mushrooms, for I knew nothing about them. My goal was to find and then step on them, because upon being stepped on the tiny little mushroom would release a neat plume of “smoke.” There would be a time or two when nothing would happen, at which time that mushroom be declared a dud. I showed all my buddies who then began their own assaults on the fungi.

It would be years later that I would realize there was more to this “smoke ball” mushroom. The mushroom was called a puffball, and under the right conditions they grew much larger, sometimes to the size of basketballs! Once I found out they were indeed edible, my curiosity turned into a full-blown love affair.
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