A Garden Meal

Okay, so it wasn't precisely a garden meal; after all, there was actually only one ingredient from the garden which actually was ready to be in the meal, but still, it was the first harvest from our garden, so I thought I'd write up a post about it...especially considering Br. Thelonious and I were recently lamenting about the lack of cooking/food posts on the site.

There was a time, in the not-so-distant past (6 years ago), in which I would not have batted an eye at eating a meal where all of the offerings had come already prepared from a box, tube, jar, or some other container. Add water, heat, and "enjoy". Fortunately I've traveled a long way since then, to the point where it's highly unlikely that anything in a meal has been pre-prepared, pre-made, etc. For the vast percentage of Americans, however, this is not their reality, and it hurts my soul to think about. Wendell Berry sums it up best when he writes:

"The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous, substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality."

Yes, it can take time to make a meal from scratch (though it doesn't always have to), but the reward of knowing every ingredient that is in the meal, and hopefully from where it came and how it was produced, far outweighs the reward of convenience.

This meal consisted of two offerings: a Spring garden salad with goat cheese, and oven-baked macaroni and cheese. For the salad, Katherine and I harvested radishes from our garden and to them added carrots which we had peeled into thin slices. "But where are the greens!?", I hear you asking frantically. Worry not: we simply cut off the tops of the radishes, chopped them up, and used those as the greens. To that we added goat cheese, then combined lemon juice, melted butter, salt, and pepper and tossed it all together. The result, of course, was delicious:

 

The macaroni and cheese was also fairly simple (Katherine suggested this), which required neither a bechamel sauce nor par-boiling the pasta: combine the liquid with the pasta and the cheese; bake it, and you're good to go. I ended up blending milk, yogurt, butter, spices (I used salt, pepper, nutmeg, and habanero powder), then mixing in the pasta with some smoked cheddar and provolone, and baking for an hour in the oven. Again, the result, paired with Sierra Nevada Torpedo (seen in background):

It was a fantastic meal, made even more so because it utilized our first garden harvest. I look forward to the day when we can harvest multiple things at once, and make an entire meal from them all. 

~Br. Abelard