Category: About these recipes

How we learned to cook

Toine and Helen cooking together in The Farm kitchen sometime in the 70’s

Helen’s Cooking story

 Growing up in a farming town, my life wasn’t really all that exciting, so I spent a lot of time visiting with my mom in the kitchen while she cooked. I learned a lot just by watching her. I remember helping her with the easy things, like putting the filling in the Kolache. 

 Once I married Jim and started helping in the kitchen at The Farm, I really started to learn what it was to cook for large groups of people. Toinie, Jim’s mother, was used to that. She was a very good teacher and always willing to explain things. For many years, I helped, and she made all the major decisions. What to make. How much. How to serve it. I learned all of those things from her as well as all her family recipes. 

Helen and her buffet

 Sometimes though, she wasn’t very organized, so I also learned what didn’t work and why. There were times  when we would be short on meat, so I perpetually make sure to have more than enough of everything. I’ve added a lot of recipes since Toinie’s time. My favorite recipes to cook and eat are simple ones with not too many ingredients that are good, wholesome, and tasty.  

 Because I don’t offer our guests a menu that they can chose from, I try to have a wide variety of dishes, which we’ll share on this blog. I like to give people choices, so everyone can find something that they love to eat on my buffet. I think I succeed in this with most meals, though, with kids, sometimes I have to get out the peanut butter jar.  

ANna’s Cooking story

I didn’t learn to cook until my early twenties after I got married. While growing up, I was always around my grandmother and mom as they cooked, but I was never part of it. A month after my wedding, my husband, who was in the Army Reserve at the time, was called up to serve in Kosovo.

Helen teaching Anna how to make a cake

I moved home while he was gone and worked with my mom in the kitchen. That’s when she taught me how to cook like she does. “Taste this,” she would say. “What does it need?”

I learned to cook by just doing it, tasting everything, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. People who have never tried cooking don’t believe this. I didn’t believe it either, but it really is one of those skills that you just can’t perfect until you jump in.

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Translating Helen’s Recipes

Anna and Helen and Helen’s “cookbook” with her own special “organization system”

 Here’s the problem with the way my mom Helen cooks: she doesn’t measure nor does she exactly follow recipes. 

 Anna: “Mom, I don’t think you’ve ever made it through a recipe without changing something about it.”

 Helen: “That’s not true.”

 Anna: “Really? Mom. You can’t even explain a recipe to me without changing it. Name one you’ve left as is.”

 Helen: “Well, maybe I do change something, unless it’s like a cake or something.” 

 It is a kind of magic, the way that she is always shifting ingredients here and making adjustments there. It’s what makes her meals so unforgettable and what makes guests come back year after year. But, how do you write that down? How do you record such a thing that is done by intuition, taste and experience? 

 Well, here is the answer: You guess. 

 Anna: “So how much garlic powder do you add?”

 Helen: “Well enough. Just so it’s, you know, covered.”

 Anna: “So like ½ teaspoon?”

 Helen: “Well, I’m not sure. Maybe. Or ¼ teaspoon. No maybe that’s not enough. Well it just depends you know. Maybe say ½ teaspoon. That should be fine. Or a tablespoon. That could also work.”

 Anna: ……  

 The recipes on this blog are the closest I could get to what my mom does in the kitchen. I followed many of them exactly so I could photograph the finished product, and my husband said the meals tasted just like they do on The Farm. I think we got pretty close, but pay attention and follow your intuition. If it seems like the recipe calls for too much of something or not enough of something else, go with your gut. It’s the only way to develop one.

Also, taste taste taste as you cook. Some people like a lot of garlic or none at all. Or a lot of salt or no salt. Don’t forget that cooking can be PLAY if you let it. And if you make a mistake, then you learned something the hard way, which means it will stick!

We’ll try to note when it’s a good time to do a taste check. Obviously, NOT when something is dangerously raw. LOL!

tips

1. My mom doesn’t own any frying pans that aren’t cast-iron or newer than 1943, so whenever a frying pan is used, assume it’s cast-iron

2. One of my mom’s favorite tricks in throwing sugar into savory dishes. She says that sugar blends the flavors of a dish, especially when you can balance that salt and sugar taste just right. That’s her favorite. 

3. When we say greased, what we mean is sprayed with cooking spray. She goes through cases of that stuff.   

4. My mom and I get almost all of our spices and herbs from Penzey’s Spices or local co-ops that sell spices and herbs.  It’s important to start with quality spices when cooking simply. So make sure you are buying the freshest herbs and spices you can find. You can tell how fresh they are by how they smell. If your spices have a weak smell or no smell at all, chances are they won’t taste much time anything either. Penzey’s does have a website you can order from if there isn’t one near you.  

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Introducing the Farm Food Blog

Anna and Helen with their cookbook at an event

In 2012, my mom Helen and I (Anna) self-published a cookbook called Farm Food of all the family recipes we serve to our guests at Palmquist Farm.

Now, it’s 2020, and we find ourselves faced with a global pandemic brought on by COVID-19. Like many of you, we had to make the difficult decision to close our doors for the safety of our family, guests, and staff.

We are disoriented by this new reality. We imagine you feel the same as we all try to come to grips with shuttered businesses, layoffs, social distancing, and sheltering-in-place.

If you’ve been to The Farm, you know it is a community and a gathering place. We eat our meals together at communal tables. At 6am, you can find locals and guests drinking coffee at the kitchen table with my father Jim and sharing stories.

Jim telling stories to the guests before dinner

We wondered how we could keep this spirit alive through this time of distance. How can we stay connected to our community of guests, family, and friends?

Perhaps, the answer is through food, through those farm meals, the ones where you sat down at the beginning of the meal with people you had just met and then stood up at the end of the meal as fast friends.

Our guests dishing up at the buffet

While we can’t sit down together at the same table and have Helen cook for us, I believe that through the sharing of the farm’s recipes, we can still connect. Many of us will be confined to our homes. Many of our favorite restaurants are closed. Some of us have been asked to shelter in place, only going out for groceries or emergencies. The time has come for us to learn how to eat at home again (myself included).

For me, cooking is a way to slow down, and re-orient to touch, taste, and smell. It’s something I can do when everything else is so out of my control. Cooking is an activity you can get your partner, roommates, or the kids involved with. A homemade meal can offer a bit of comfort to yourself and those around you during these uncertain times. My hope is that these recipes can bring you some of the same joy and comfort that they do when Helen makes them for you on The Farm.

Helen picking turkey meat from the bones for her home-made soup

The recipes we’ll be sharing are simple, made with easy-to-find ingredients (hopefully). They are the ones I grew up with. They were passed down from great grandma to Grandma Toinie and then to Helen and me. The ones that have been made for countless farm hands, friends, and guests over the past 100 years or so. They are that kind of home-cooked farm food that’s been lost in some ways. It’s hearty, simple comfort cooking that any level of cook can make. None of these recipes are technical. You only need to be willing and curious. They just require a little love. And plenty of granulated garlic. 

We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. In the meantime, let’s cook something tasty together!

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