| | Below is an excerpt from my cookbook, "Around the Covenant Table", which I just finished for my family and friends. It took me about a year to get done and wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for "Katie the Great", who is our office manager and long-time family friend. Katie has that rare talent of making each person think that she loves you more than anyone else, but of course, deep down we really all know that's just one of her special gifts.
Be sure to check out the recipe after the excerpt. It's an amazing one that is simple, simple, simple. If you would like a copy of my cookbook, let me know. It's full of color classic artwork (which for the life of me I can't figure out how to load a picture here) in a three ring binder (so you can easily add other recipes), and features the best of the best in recipes from family, friends and beyond. There are lots of great quotes sprinkled throughout as well as excerpts from my grandma's letters, which always included something about food & cooking--her greatest love in life. The cost is a donation, which will be given to Providence Academy, the private school we are involved in.
Gute Essen--as we say in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country!
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For as long as I can remember I have been in a family where foods and cooking were a high priority, and why not? I grew up in Lancaster County, the garden spot of the world and home to the Pennsylvania Dutch, a people known for their wonderful cooking. My earliest memories of the covenant table center around my Grandmother Wenzel’s huge “summer kitchen.” In Grandma’s enormous eighteen-room Lancaster County limestone house, there were two kitchens: one for winter time and one used during the hot, humid Dog-day months of summer. It was an open air affair with screened in windows all around. Undoubtedly, the centerpiece of this airy light-filled room was a huge, oval oak table as permanent, stout and practical as Grandma herself. Benches on either side held up strong, bronzed and sweaty field-hands whom Grandma lovingly fed each day. She presided over all with a quiet air of dignity, saying little.
Grandma was a woman of few words. Mostly, you could hear her whistling as she worked in a kind of breathy, whisper. It seemed to go on for hours. Twelve field-hands around that table were not uncommon, especially during tobacco season. Despite the stifling, muggy summers, Grandma’s hot noon meal never faltered. Each day it was something new and delicious, but my most memorable meal consisted of mounds and mounds of mashed potatoes, her browned-to-perfection-fall-apart roast beef (straight from her barnyard), homemade bread slathered with apple butter, brown buttered lima beans and perhaps any one of a dozen or more choices of traditional Dutch salads (Pepper Slaw was one of my favorites). Of course, her pies grew legendary and they sat in a straight row adorning her deep windowsills!
This went on every day until the tobacco was put up. In between those wonderful meals, a host of hours passed as we worked putting up the produce from her enormous garden. Grandma Wenzel did all of her canning and freezing in that heavenly spot with its continuous breeze to fan us. This process demanded great discipline and perseverance (attributes I lacked in those days). Her two acre garden---hand tilled by Grandpa (using Louie, their plough horse) yielded bushels and bushels of every kind of vegetable. I loved running my fingers through a newly hulled bushel of peas, though I knew it would bring instant and sure reprisals. The texture, color and smell of the cool rounded legumes playing through my fingers were too tempting.
As I think about it, I am sure a good portion of the creative genes our family inherited came from Grandma. Though by nature a sober and practical woman, she was not content to have “just a garden.” Hers was a riot of color as well. Function, yes, but beauty must have compelled her, too. I remember the rows and rows of flowers, but particularly I remember her many-hued zinnias and, in particular, the neon ones which screamed out for attention in a grand cacophony of color. Dozens and dozens of butterflies hovered lazily above them like tiny hang gliders in the stifling afternoons of Lancaster County, and my greatest desire was to wander away from her huge table to stalk her garden rows in quest of a new variety of butterfly to capture. I often succeeded, but not without due punishment for my waywardness. As a child, I was not always fond of being there, but as I look back, I am thankful for that time.
What Grandma Wenzel started in her summer kitchen continues in this book of recipes and remembrances, making it a sort of family chronicle through the eyes of food, family, friends and faith, featuring quotes and verses to help along the way. When I started this journey of married life, I never imagined we would have been blessed beyond imagination as a family, but we have been. What God has done for us can only be called miraculous.
My prayer in these reaping years of my life is that each of you---my dear children---will continue on in the heritage begun all those years ago, much like a small bit of leaven in the rising dough in Grandma’s summer kitchen back in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. May that original “yeast” of home, hospitality and hope in God and His promises continue to grow into full maturity and overflow, spilling out around your covenant tables; in turn, being passed on to your children’s children---until we all meet again together around God’s great covenant table in Heaven.
Becky Hostetter (‘Marmie’)
Christmas 2005
Preheat oven to 450
5 large tomatos
3 T olive oil
2 T minced garlic
3/4 t salt
3/4 t pepper
1 1/2 lb shrimp - peeled
1/2 c fresh parsley
2 T lemon juice
1 c feta
- Place tomatos in baking dish - toss with olive oil, s & p and garlic
- Roast 20 minutes on top rack, or until tomatos begin to brown
- Remove and add remaining ingredients
- Bake 5 - 10 additional minutes, or until shrimp are cooked
Serve with crusty bread, or use as a sauce for pasta.
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