by Heather Lang
Cooler temperatures fill the air. Kids are back in school and participating in all their activities. The time crunch of getting harvest done and attending all the annual county Farm Bureau meetings leaves me no time for cooking meals.
You can keep your pumpkin spice everything, I want soups and hotdishes! I appreciate my crockpot for the convenience of being able to throw something in early in the morning before each of us rushes out the door in opposite directions. Returning home to a fully cooked meal that is good for the kids when we get home after their school games is important. And it’s still warm when the hubby comes home late from the field while trying to get as much harvested as possible in between all the rain. I have yet to jump on the insta-pot bandwagon, basically because I am too cheap to buy yet another appliance to try to fit into my tiny kitchen.
I am not the best housewife. I’d rather muck out barns than clean the house. Our clothes, while clean are often never put away. You will usually find our clean clothes either still on the couch from when I quickly took them out of the dryer, threw them on the couch and put another load into the dryer while I was running out the door to tend to farm duties. On the rare occasion they actually did get folded, they get placed into laundry baskets for each family member and usually remain there until we wear them again.
I love to bake, but cooking is not my thing and trying to figure out what to cook is the hardest part for me.
I tend to gravitate toward one pot, easy meals that can be prepared with everyday ingredients I find in my pantry. Although I might use a recipe for inspiration it is hardly ever followed because I tend to improvise and use what I have on hand. Sometimes it works out, other times it’s a flop. Last week while I was trying to figure out what to make for supper, I was going through the fridge to see what leftovers I had so they could be re-purposed and not go to waste. That’s how I came up with this mouth-watering pasta dish that everyone raved about!
We had left over noodles from the night before along with a small amount of homemade breakfast sausage. With my main ingredients figured out it was simple enough to add some staple ingredients to it to create a hearty supper. I started dicing the onion, garlic cloves, green pepper, and opened a can of tomatoes my family had canned from the last growing season. I threw it all together and it was smelling great! My kids came into the kitchen asking what we were having for supper and I replied, “Creamy tomato sausage pasta.” My kids love to be in the kitchen and experiment, so they were excited to help. Our youngest was the one who had the idea to grab some fresh parsley from our little herb garden on the patio. The other two kids helped me figure out how we were going to make the creamy sauce that I promised the dish was going to have. One trip back to the fridge to see what was on hand and it was soon decided that with milk, lots of butter and some chicken stock we would have our sauce.
You see your meals don’t need to be fancy, elaborate, take all day to cook, and you don’t need a huge budget to prepare them. Convenience. Simple, few ingredients, with big flavor. Easy clean up. These are things I think of when preparing our family meals.