Karen Jones Gowen - Farm Girl Country Cooking: Hearty Meals for the Active Family

Books by Karen Jones Gowen
Farm Girl Uncut Diamonds House of Diamonds Lighting Candles in the Snow
To Bruce,
who loves to eat and forever appreciates my culinary efforts,
and all of my creative endeavors About This Cookbook Although preparing regular family meals can be difficult, it is worth every effort. Dinner provides an opportunity to gather and refresh while spending time together around the table enjoying a meal. Karen Jones Gowen has collected and tested the books 100 recipes of main dishes, sides and desserts from years of experience cooking for a large family.

Whether youre feeding a family on a budget or need ideas on menu planning, this cookbook is the perfect companion for the busy, working cook. Hearty home-cooking using basic ingredients, plenty of fresh vegetables (and dont forget the bacon) you will return to these recipes again and again when planning dinners for your family or entertaining for company. Contents Introduction
I didnt begin domestic life knowing how to cook, or even liking it. What a messy, tedious, time-consuming, endless, thankless task is preparing daily meals for a growing, hungry family. If there had been a way to get out of it, Id have surely done it. Like if my husband enjoyed cooking.

Or if we had the money to go out to eat every day. Or to hire a cook. Or if our in-laws lived with us. My mother-in-law was a wonderful cook. When she visited we had an arrangementshed cook and Id clean upbecause Id rather clean the kitchen than cook the meal. Not that cleaning was my talent either.

But Id gladly clean the kitchen back then if someone else did the cooking. I started married life with a few items I enjoyed making: cookies, cake and home-made bread. My challenge was to figure out how to fill in the missing pieces and provide complete and balanced meals. Day after day after day. My mother grew up on a farm, where cooking was a part of the daily routine. Meat, potatoes, vegetables, home-made bread.

And that culture was ingrained into my family. You grow vegetables, you plan meals, you prepare food for the family. I took it all for granted when I was a kid. Then I got married and realized it was now my job. I had a lot to learn! There I was with a husband who went to work, repaired our cars, did the yard work, fixed everything that broke, but didnt cook. Small children who didnt cook.

No live-in relatives to cook for us. No extra money to eat out or even to buy ready-made dinners in a box. Clearly it was up to me. Being on a very strict food budget didnt help. The I hate to cook recipes out there use canned ingredients, processed ready-made food that always cost more. The more treatment a food item gets, the higher the consumer cost.

Packaged salad mix costs more than a head of lettuce. Instant mashed potatoes costs more per serving than a ten pound bag. You get the idea. To stretch our limited finances I had to peel and grate and chop and squeeze and simmer and saut and stir and do it all myself. And so I became extremely choosy about what recipes I used. They had to fit certain criteria: inexpensive, take the least time possible, nutritious, tasty, filling.

My husband is over six feet tall, and we had many sons, all of whom were growing fast and needing calories on a regular basis. I grew up with three sisters, no brothers, and had no idea of the quantities of food a healthy male appetite could consume. I learned that the hearty meals of my farm girl mother, my farmer grandparents and aunts were well-suited for the active group of sons and daughters that we were raising. Our children were our main crop, and the family recipes I developed over the years helped them to grow up healthy and strong, while maintaining my own sanity. I hope they will benefit your family as well. The recipes are all connected, with suggestions on what to serve with what.

I hope youll feel comfortable changing them around, tweaking the ingredients, and making them suitable for you and your familys needs, just as I did through the years. Happy meal time! A Healthy, Balanced Way of Feeding the Family:
How to Use This Cookbook
This book is for the working cook. For the busy person who wants to prepare regular family meals but really doesnt have the time, energy or interest to pull it off. And buying ready-made ingredients to make super-quick meals is killing your food budget. What to do? I feel your pain. Ive been there.

And through the years I collected and revised my own recipes and methods to create the family dinners that kept my food budget in control and my family satisfied. Each recipe in this cookbook has been tested on our own large family and passed certain criteria:

• Fast
• Filling
• Nutritious
• Delicious
• Inexpensive
• Easily doubled or tripled
• Simple directions that allow kids to help with the cooking

In addition, I use a lot of fresh vegetables, varied according to season, whole grains, a variety of seasonings and spices, alternative protein sources and less meat. This is what keeps the meals nutritious, inexpensive and still delicious and satisfying. A big part of meal preparation is knowing what to fix with what. Have you ever prepared a main dish and forgot to fix anything to go with it? Or get busy with other things and run out of time? You go to considerable trouble to make a dish, isnt that enough? Apparently not, because when its gone in three minutes, and everyone looks around expectantly for something else; well, thats not very fun for anyone, especially the cook. These main dish recipes come with serving suggestions of side dishes, all recipes included.

Ive also included different suggestions on the side dishes for variety, so theres more than one meal combination idea. Start out with three to five complete meals for dinners and expand from there, until you have a repertoire of dinner menus you can pull together that meet you and your familys needs and schedules. Many of the menus are also suitable for company dinners. The Rule of Three The best way to use this cookbook is to select a main dish, add a salad, bread or carbohydrate, and then a dessert if you wish. Four items at every meal makes a nice meal, five makes a feast. Most of our family meals had three items, following the Rule of Three, which I found to be the ideal number for physical and emotional satisfaction at dinner.

Less than three items and it seemed more like a snack than a meal. Four or five items provide a sense of abundancenice occasionally, but not what I wanted them to expect at every meal! The three items dont need to be elaborately created from scratch; you might open a can of applesauce to add to a sandwich and a glass of milk. Three items, its a meal. A hot dog by itself seems like a snack but top with chili, add orange slices to the side, and ice cream for dessert, youve got a meal. The Rule of Three also helped me create guidelines for teaching the children to cook. They knew that making a box of macaroni and cheese and serving it up didnt count for dinner.

They had to plan two additional items. The Rule of Three sounds simple but can be puzzling and really trip up the meal-planning; it gets easier with practice. This cookbook is designed to help with the Rule of Three when planning your menus. Preparing Satisfying Family Dinners As our children grew up and left home, my husband and I gradually began to eat differently, with a single protein like steak, chicken or fish, along with a vegetable on the side, often fruit for dessert. He and I dont need the dense combinations that made up our menu when I had to feed a houseful of growing boys. Back then, if Id served a four ounce chicken breast with a side of steamed asparagus for dinner, they would have left the table feeling starved and invaded the kitchen later, snacking to fill up.