The Amish Cook

Editor's comments: I love the way Lovina describes the children's eyes "lighting up" when they see candy bars being passed out at a wedding....in our electronic-saturated society, something as simple as candy bars don't often have the same impact on non-Amish children.  

And, grape pudding?  Sounds interesting! I told Lovina to see if she could procure the recipe for me so I can share it with all of you! - Kevin Williams, Editor

THE AMISH COOK

BY LOVINA EICHER

Today, September 12, is Jacob and Emma’s oldest daughter Elizabeth’s 15th birthday. She is done with her school years now and Emma is glad to have her help at home.  We are getting back into the school routine.  Listening to the younger children read their books and helping the older ones with their homework is mostly how we spend our nights now.  

Kevin, 6, seems to be handling the full day of kindergarten well.  Needless to say it doesn’t take him long to fall asleep when bedtime comes.  On Thursday I will take Verena to the hospital to get her cast removed.  After 5 weeks she is more than ready to have it off.  She has it covered with a lot of signatures. 

 After a cloudy morning the sun came out on Friday making a nice wedding day for Glenn and Miriam. Miriam is a girl from our church district, but she and Glenn plan to make their home in a neighboring church district now.   The wedding services were held on one end of a new large pole building.  On the other end,  tables were set to serve the dinner.  Their wedding dinner menu consisted of homemade bread, butter, and strawberry jam, mashed potatoes, gravy, dressing, meatballs, corn, pasta salad, angel food cake, pumpkin and peanut butter pies, and grape pudding.  Candy bars were also passed around.  It is always interesting to see the little children’s faces light up when they see the candy bars come around.

We plan to do laundry today.  We had rainy weather the latter part of last week so we couldn’t get our laundry done.  I usually try to do a laundry twice a week.  But today we will have an extra large laundry because of last week’s rain.  The sun is shining and it looks like a very nice drying day.

Saturday we assisted Emma and Jacob with their work.  Church services will be there next on Sept 25.  Joe and Jacob and the boys hauled manure all day while the girls and I and Emma cleaned her basement.  We cleaned all her canned jars of food and washed off the shelves and so forth.  The girls and I plan to go help again this week.  Joe is on 4 day weeks at the factory now so he will be home on Friday.  The last week in September he doesn’t  have any work so maybe he will be able to get the garden tilled while he is home.

I still have red beets that I need to pull and make into pickled beets.  We still have tomatoes, peppers, and popcorn but otherwise my garden is pretty much history for 2011.  This is the first year we have tried growing popcorn, so we’ll be interested to see how it turns out.  My jalapeno and serrano peppers are still doing well so I want to make homemade hot pepper butter soon.  I won’t add as many hot peppers as the recipe calls for so that it is not too hot for the children.

We ordered our coal for the winter.  Joe wants to get the coal stove hooked up again for when the cold weather sets in.  One morning last week our thermometer showed 45 degrees, so winter is on its way.

 The mornings are cool and the heat from our propane lights feels good.  Another job that needs to be done soon is making grape juice.  I need to call the local U-pick orchard to see when the grapes will be ready to pick.  We are almost out of rhubarb  juice so it will be nice to have homemade grape juice on hand.  Another refreshing drink we look forward to each fall is cider.  Cold cider and popcorn is always a favorite around here.  I need to get busy, it is just too nice outside to be sitting in the house writing.  There is also plenty of work that needs to get done.  

God’s blessings to all.

I made this cabbage soup last week so I will share the recipe

HOMEMADE CABBAGE SOUP

1 large onion, chopped

1 nice head of red cabbage, shredded

1 to 1 1 /2  pounds browned and drained hamburger

1 can red kidney beans

1 quart tomato juice

Salt, pepper, and garlic and seasoning salt to taste

Combine ingredients in a deep pan and simmer for 1 1 /2 to 2 hours covered. The longer it simmers the better it tastes. If you want to you may use half red onion and half yellow onion and you can use half red cabbage and half green cabbage to give it a great look and texture. reprinted with permission from www.amishcookonline.com. Richard from Amish Stories

New post on Friday from Ohio's Amish settlement along with a homemade potato pancake recipe from our own Jean.