Homestyle Mennonite Popcorn!

No marm, it sure ain’t kettle corn! And although my family tends to like the popped-in-a-pan type popcorn, I wrote this recipe all for myself.

Ingredients:

-1 old microwave

-1 bag of microwavable popcorn

Directions:

1) Get your HUNGRY ON for some POP CORN!

2) Grab a bag of Microwavable Popcorn from the pantry cupboard!

3) DO NOT read the directions! Directions are for wussies! This is important!

4) Set the Microwave for 4 minutes, 30 seconds and leave the room!

5) Watch some educational programming on PBS until you see smoke coming out of the kitchen and smell something toasty!

6) Run into the kitchen in time to see toxic looking yellow and brown smoke pouring from the microwave!

7) Hit the CANCEL button on the microwave!

8 ) Put the microwave on the back porch!

9) Open all the doors and windows and wait for the stench of burnt corn and failure to waft out! (Hint: it never will!)

10) Consider your life as you search for a new microwave at your local Walmart.

Keep on Potluckin’

Potlucks are very important. Not only for Mennos, I know! But I’m going to write about them nonetheless. Do you want my job? Okay then. Here we go.

Potlucks happen at churches and family reunions and for this we are glad. All sorts of delights are to be had at potlucks. Mostly the various casseroles are what makes potlucks fun. It’s extremely tense when you have two or three variations of the same casserole next to each other. Which will have the most success? Who will be left with their culinary expertise in question and their self confidence in shambles? (And yes, there is always a clear winner.)

Mennonite potlucks are good places to get in touch with traditional European Menno food and also with recipes that came from many places in the world. Yes, that’s right, all over! Fun fact: most Mennos today are not European and do not live in the United States. Where is the largest population of Mennos outside of the US and Canada? In the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As a result, church potlucks can provide a good array of tastiness that has been affected by culinary traditions overseas. Here’s a fun little anecdote: when I attended a certain Mennonite college, a visiting poet was taken to a Menno potluck to welcome her to the community. I guess there were a couple curry dishes on the table, because she wondered if curry was a Mennonite tradition. We all had a good LOL over this later, believe you me. Mostly because we had run out of genuinely funny things to LOL at. And because while our European ancestors didn’t use curry in cooking, nowadays it is a pretty common part of some Menno’s meals. I guess you could say we are the Borg of the culinary world. Assimilating curry and whatnot.

As aforementioned, old recipes from Europe can also be found at potlucks. Bread roll recipes past down from the middle ages. Pie recipes created in secret in basements across Pennsylvania and the Dakotas. A spread of homemade pickles. For Russian Mennonites, I hear borscht is mighty popular. (But this sentiment only seems to turn up when someone is writing a poem or book about being a Mennonite. Which I find mighty shady.)

And chicken pot pie OMG! What is a traditional “chicken pot pie” for Mennos? Well I’ll tell ye.

In my family, chicken pot pie is not so much a pie as a pot filled with chicken stew, veggies, and large noodles (comparable in size to those used in lasagna.) It’s entirely from scratch and I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that my grandma makes it the best, hands-down.

Potlucks are awesome and we could do with more of them altogether. The end.

Homemade Ice Cream: Yes We Can!

Every spring my church has a massive, outdoor potluck. The highlight of the event? Copious amounts of homemade vanilla ice cream. It usually causes a massive stampede and we lose a few old people, but that’s just the circle of life for us. Birth, homemade ice cream, marriage, 15 kids, and then death either by farming equipment or homemade-ice-cream-induced stampede at the church’s spring picnic.

Homemade ice cream is one tradition that I’ve seen being important both to my family and Mennonites in general. Remember the homemade ice cream and pie booth I mentioned during Relief Sale week? OH yeah.

There are pictures in my mother’s photo album, dating back to the late 1970s, of her brothers and sisters either making ice cream or watching it get made. There are no pictures of them eating the ice cream. That is because once the ice cream is being served, no one wants to be stuck crapping around with a camera.

I’m sure that if anyone in the family had a camera, say, during the Depression Era or before, we’d see the same basic photos, a couple of people turning the crank on a rickety old ice cream machine, while the bystanders are absolutely still and concentrating on the wonder about to take place, forgetting completely to try and keep the look of starving coyotes off their faces.

But what’s an old fashioned ice cream machine like, you ask? And how does one make the ice cream?

Well, I’ll tell ye.

A REAL ice cream machine looks like a bucket with a smaller, lidded bucket inside. You put the ice cream ingredients in the smaller bucket and ice and rock salt in the outer bucket. There’s a CRANK that must constantly be turned with HUMAN HANDS, mixing the ingredients in the smaller bucket, or the adults will get pissed at you for ruining the ice cream.

The entire ice cream making endeavor generally takes one person to mix the ingredients, three people on hand to turn the crank, one person to sit on the little bucket, and about seven others standing around making obnoxious comments about how these first five aren’t getting it right. These seven or so serve as the “committee” of the entire endeavor.

The mixer is a person of great importance. They must be a very Type A, very awesome gastronomic expert. If the mixture does not turn out to have a good flavor, people will make comments about what should have been done differently. But not to the person’s face, of course. Because that would be mean. If the mixer is disappointed with his or her work, you will listen to self-deprecating comments for the remainder of the evening. But it usually means you can have MORE ICE CREAM because the mixer “sure as hell” doesn’t want any more of “that crap.”

The crankers are usually young people with decent upper body strength, or me. There has to be more than one, with three being an ideal, because ice cream making is tricky, hard labor so you WILL need a break, but the cranking also CAN NEVER STOP until the ice cream is done completely.

At some magic point during the cranking process, the sitter comes along and sits on the little bucket with the ice cream in it. I kid you not when I say that they just kind of sit there, and I think there was supposed to be a reason for it originally, but at this point in the process everyone is just so freaking ready for ice cream that it’s almost like a taunting gesture. Everyone’s eyes just get bigger and they know, they KNOW the ice cream is almost done.

“Look,” the committee members say. “I think it must be near to gettin’ finished.”

“I don’t think it’s been long enough though…”

“I would have stopped minutes ago.”

“KEEP TURNING THE CRANK!”

“He shouldn’t have put those blueberries in it.”

“SLOW DOWN, YOU’RE GOING TO WORRY THE DAIRY!”

Then the ice cream is finished and everyone shuts up for the first couple bites. After that the comments start flying again, but you don’t even care. Because homemade ice cream is coursing through your veins and somehow eating homemade ice cream with silence and a smile is better than all the fireworks and parades in July.

RELIEF SALE WEEK Part 3: OTHER FOODSTUFFS OMG!!!!!!!11

In my previous post, we explored the two main “meals” of the Relief Sale. Now I’m going to give you all a general overview of all the terrible, beautiful things you can eat outside of these meals.

Because I lack creativity, lets pull up Ye Ole Mappe again:

Okay. The green “X,” the two white strips of building across the street from it, and the pale-blue tuber (??) shape beneath the “Park” area are the main places of non-eventical foodular activity.

If I had to label something as the “nucleus” of food for the fest, I would have to go with the pale-blue tuber. In real life, this blob is a large tent that holds many of the event’s culinary highlights. These include: egg rolls, strawberry shortcake, and homemade before-your-eyes applefritters. (The applefritters are a spectacle to behold. They’re made with old fashioned apple-peeler-cranks by sad looking young children that don’t get paid and aren’t allowed to eat them. This makes the fritters taste better somehow.) Other awesome Menno food at the tent:

Welsch Cakes: Haven’t tried ’em, but I hear they’re good.

Egyptian Stuff-In-A-Bowl: Some gutsy Menno, no doubt inspired by my pioneering work in Stuff-In-A-Bowl recipes, tried their own spin on it. Their version has lentils, which I’m not too fond of, but it’s healthy, filling, and worth a try if you’ve never had Egyptian food.Or Stuff-In-A-Bowl.

Indian booth: has mango milkshakes, which is a plus. The food tastes authentic, which means it’s too spicy for me unfortunately. Again, worth a try.

Pulled Pork Sandwiches: Always worth it.

****Sandwich Wraps: DON”T, Don’t, DO NOT get the sandwich wraps. I forget what I was thinking at the time, but once I got one of these. Nasty. Cardboard.  Not the kind of stuff you would eat ’til you die. Not Mennofood at all. If my ancestors had been eating these sandwich wraps, they never would have made it to Canada.

Other foods to be had, under the green “X” and white stripes:

Kettlecorn by Old Orders: I hate kettlecorn. That is all.

Cotton Candy: I don’t get it because after two bites I get seriously ill.

Cheese Booths: Run by a bunch of BAMFs. THE BEST CHEESE EVER. Mennonite Cheese. Watch out for the Veggie, but gotta love the Pepper Jack and Lacey Swiss. This stuff is for real.Get there early to insure you’ll get the kind and amount you want. Bring a cooler and ice so you don’t have to carry it around and spoil it.

Apple Cider: Yes, please.

Pizza: No! High price for something commonplace.

Mennonite Sausage: So famous it has it’s own stand in the Goat barn. I shit you not. You can buy Mennonite Sausage in bulk. It’s a good plan. Stop asking questions.

Mennonite Sausage Sandwiches: In recent years, these have become the highlight for me. The bun is lacking (it’s a hotdog bun and therefore flimsy.) You have the choice of with or without onions. Get it with onions! They’re cooked. There are also other condiments to put on the sandwich. DON’T use these. They will just mess up the sandwich. Man that Mennonite Sausage. I told you once and I told you before.

Baked Goods: Why not. I hear the pastries are really good? Get there early because stuff runs out.

Homemade Pie and Homemade Ice Cream: Two things that are very important to Mennocuisine, at one easy spot. The ice cream is stellar, but DO NOT get the pecan pie! This past time around mine tasted funny. I figured out that some saboteur was using light corn syrup in their recipe. Heresy, I say!

Nelson’s Port-A-Pit: For those of you that don’t know, Nelson’s Port-A-Pit is a company with a chicken truck for hire. Sometimes groups will hire a Nelson’s chicken truck and charge people for chicken and keep the profit for the group. The chicken is amazing. I am disgusted with factory chicken, but I love Nelson’s. Though I haven’t gotten any in recent years, I’ll have to rethink this policy for next year.

And that is all I can think of for foodstuffs. Some words to the wise: yes, the food can be ridiculously overpriced, even for as good as it is. But, as mentioned in the first post, the whole point of the Relief Sale is to raise money to help those in need. And I sure as hell am not making my own apple fritters.

Don’t be shy about:

RELIEF SALE WEEK Part 4: Nonperishable Items!

RELIEF SALE WEEK Part 2:FOODSTUFFS OMG!!!!!!!11

Ah yes, foodstuffs. The staple of every gathering of importance. Especially the Relief Sale.

Sad is the one that walks with hunger at the Relief Sale, for feed is plenty. There are two main meals that everyone wants a piece of, and in addition to these there are places continually serving up “snacks” to the masses.

The main food “events” are the Haystack Dinner, which takes place on Friday night, and the Pancake Breakfast, which takes place on Saturday morning. Looking at the handy map I found, the Haystack dinner takes place in the little yellow building and the Pancake Breakfast is in one of the long, pale red buildings under the green “X”.

At the Haystack Dinner, you get overcharged by a troupe of old orders for a heaping plate of goodness, known as a Haystack. What is a Haystack? More importantly, what can Haystack do for you?

A haystack begins with rice. From there you add some sort of tomato-based sauce (like spaghetti sauce.) If you’re like me, you don’t like it with meat. But usually the sauce that’s available has meat in it. Then you add toppings to it. In my family, the general spread includes shredded cheddar cheese, chopped onions, salsa, sour cream, fresh spinach (or lettuce,) and black and green olives. At the relief sale, they are also things like beans, green peppers, and nacho cheese. It’s crazy.

From what I can glean, this same troupe served haystacks at some other Menno event I volunteered at. Goldenrod Benefit Auction I believe? They might be a strange new schism. Haystack Mennonites? I’ll have to look into it. Which will be hard since I’m guessing they don’t have a church website. They probably live in a wagon and live by the Book of Nachocheesus, a scripture recovered somewhere near the Dead Sea.

Aaaaand the Pancake breakfast! Look at the map and imagine a line reaching from the Pancake building up to the red block and south beyond where the green “X” ends. Imagine getting to the Pancake Breakfast at 8 in the morning and being caught in such a line. It will happen, if you make the mistake of “sleeping in.”

The Pancake Breakfast isn’t run by a radical traveling Pancake schism. It’s all normal-looking septuagenarians and pre-retirement agers. The meal can be a good deal, depending on how much you can eat. You get your choice of fruit juice box, tomato juice can, or milk box with the meal. This is your first big decision. The next is whether or not you want sausage with your pancakes. The answer to this is always yes. I hate meat, and I am telling you the answer is yes. This is no ordinary sausage, folks. This is Mennonite Sausage. I can hear you laughing. Keep on, by all means. Ain’t no sausage in the world like Mennonite Sausage. And that’s a fact.

You get two sausage links and two pancakes for starters. You sit yourself down in a cafeteria-like seating section, in the open barn building, and eat with your fellows. There are endless abounds of syrup on the tables. There are people wandering around while you eat, offering coffee if you have a cup. There are also people with platters of pancakes. That’s right. All you can eat pancakes. You can eat your money’s worth, if you’re prepared. The Pancake Breakfast.

Keep in mind you only have two sausage links to last you the meal. They don’t go around distributing more of these. They know where the gold is at. It’s the sausage.

Save your ticket for:

RELIEF SALE WEEK Part 3: OTHER FOODSTUFFS OMG!!!!!!!11