My Day as a Mennonite

Yesterday, I had a very Mennonite day (for me). I slept in til 9, walked the dog, made granola from More With Less, worked on a quilt, did the laundry, ate leftovers for lunch, and fixed hash from MCC:FFR. Then I drove a half-hour to my work place of Starbucks where I talked with another barista, who is also a bartender, about all the T'n'A he's going to see tonight at the bar for MardiGras.

Despite all my contradictions, I am still Mennonite. I am not sure what exactly this means. I have come to realize that I have something that my ancestors do not: a sense of self-awareness that being Mennonite means something, and I often curse this introspection. The fact that I can take a tally of my day and say, well here I was a good Mennonite, and there I was not, is not something my ancestors had the privilege of. They only knew one way of life, and it was all-consuming. To be part of the community was everything, and to be outside of the community was death. Certainly a permanent divorce. Now we have grown to be analytical about our ethnic identity: to the point that we are blogging about our ethnic food! Obviously, I enjoy participating in this thought process, or I wouldn't be writing about it. But I sometimes wonder if all the self-awareness robs us of some of the experience. Isn't the point or our ethnic identity that we own it without questioning it?

For me this is not, nor has it ever been, an option. But when I look at people I consider to be true-blue Mennonite, their lives are very linear - straight and narrow, one could say. And I admire them at the same time that I look at my own zig-zag path and say, "What happened?"

What Exactly IS Hash?

This is a question whose answer you have all, undoubtedly, been dying to know. Well wallow in ignorance, no more! The definition of hash, according to Webster is

2hash n (1662) 1: chopped food; specif : chopped meat mixed with potatoes and browned 2 : a restatement of something that is already known 3 : a confused muddle

Hopefully the definition itself is not a hash for you educated folks, however, I myself had no clue what it was until fixing Texas Hash, pg 60. After said experience, I would have ventured a guess that hash is a medly of over-cooked meats and vegetables resulting in an amalgamous mixture of questionable taste and texture, and I wouldn't have been far off.

Actually, lest I do more harm than I intend to my hash, I should say that upon taking it out of the oven I was mildly disappointed. It tasted like a bland chili, and the texture was something like undercooked oatmeal. Little pieces of meat and veggies and rice hanging out together on one eating utensil. However, when I ate it later on that evening, it tasted like honey from the gods (possibly the fact that I was hungry made a tiny bit of a difference).

I picture hash as a quintessentially Mennonite dish: to enjoy it properly, I would have to sit down to a table with a hunk of ripe Swiss cheese, overcooked peas, homemade applesauce, freshly-made bread served with butter and jam, a jello-mold salad and at least 6 other people, and fill my plate to the brim with all the different dishes until all the juices run together in the middle and intermingle. And I would mop up all the extra grease from the hash (since the recipe didn't call to drain the meat) with my bread that was already soggy with butter, jam, and other food juices, and love it immensely. This is how my grandpa ate all his meals, when he was living at home and eating more than nursing-home food, and this is why when my grandma makes a small lunch she pulls out like 6 different sides from the refrigerator.

Sometimes when I'm cooking from MCC:FFR I think, "We've come a long way baby!" But other times I think, "What have we lost?"

Saved by Mary Emma!!!

Okay before I tell the tale of my new recipe (which YES I have cooked for this month, thank you very much), I would like to share with you all how mennonite cooking saved me. My very favorite auntie was visiting the area with brother chuck & his daughter, and we were having them over for dessert. Being the oh-so-pretentious hipsters that we are, we decided to fix creme brule', which we would all have the pleasure of carmelizing the sugar on our individualized portions with our kitchen torch (a gift from said auntie).

So I fixed a double batch of creme brule' before hand and put it in the fridge to chill the 4-6 hours. 5 hours later, creme brule' looked more like little puddles of cream with a skim on top instead of the decadent custard it was supposed to resemble. Not good. (I figured out later that I should have increased the oven time since I was doing a double batch). Fortunately I discovered this in time enough for Joe to run to the store and grab me some dates and voila! 45 minutes later we had some delicious date pudding steaming from our oven. Thanks Mary Emma! And my aunt and uncle were impressed, not by my gourmet cooking skills, but that I knew how to serve up a dish that they hadn't had in over 40 years.

But on to new adventures... haven't been feeling too inspired by MCC:FFR, but decided to venture into new territory, the "salad" section of the book. I put salad in quotes because the name seems to connote jello-molds and carb-&-cream-heavy-concoctions more than it does the leafy greens we currently associate w/ the word salad. I finally decided on Macaroni Salad (pg. 197), which I did with still a fair amount of skepticism (I've never had Mac salad w/ lettuce in it). Surprisingly, it turned out very good, although more a dish for a summer picnic than sub-zero comfort food. Maybe someday I'll even be bold enough to brave a jello-mold (the only problem being that we don't own one, and Joe turns his nose up at such silliness).