Farm Challenge - Day 7

The last day!

Saturday breakfast

Why cook when there are so many leftovers to choose from?  How about some quinoa salad and tilapia ceviche?  Mmm yes, that sounds good...

Saturday lunch


This lunch was notable for several reasons:

1. It was our final farm challenge meal!
2. Even though it was our last farm challenge meal, several new ingredients showed up: peanuts, sesame seeds, and chicken feet!

Chicken feet being readied for the fryer

Because it was a Saturday, many of us were around to help out with lunch.  Fried fish was on the menu, along with fried chicken feet, goat and tomato soup, and a salad.  LauraCatherine created a delicious sesame-lime-peanut sauce to go with the fish, and Andy whipped up some mashed sweet potatoes.  Another supreme meal, but it's no longer a surprise.

Jen and LauraCatherine shell peanuts harvested from the Monsoon garden

LauraCatherine ground the peanuts in a food processor along with half of a jalapeno pepper, some freshly threshed sesame seeds, a spoonful of oil and a healthy dose of lime juice.  This was a delightful creation that went well with both the fish and the mashed sweet potatoes.  I'd highly recommend it!

The mashed sweet potatoes were pretty good on their own, too!

The complete meal:

Papaya-grapefruit smoothie at the bottom, tomato-goat soup in the upper right.

When our 5:00 finish time arrived, it did so without the mad dash to the sugar shelf one might have expected.  While we did later enjoy a celebratory meal of wheat, dairy, bacon and chocolate, none of us were really starving for these ingredients.  Andrew popped an olive at 5:30, I nibbled at the cheese we were grating for the pizza dinner, and somewhere on a plane headed to Nicaragua, Kate enjoyed a piece of chocolate.  We're glad to have these ingredients back, but we're also less dependent on them than we once were, more comfortable cooking with the seasonal abundance around us.  It has truly been a blessed week, one which has taught us just how much abundance we really have, both in the volume and variety of food growing on our small farm, and in the creativity given to our fellow interns.  These are not things we created ourselves; much of the food was harvested from perennials planted and nurtured by faithful interns and staff in years past, growing in poor soil enriched by years of care.  We don't take these blessings lightly.  Many of us desire to work in communities whose land does not produce so abundantly, whose people are not as well fed as we have been.  It has been good for us to experience first-hand the bounty of a land that has been blessed through the faithful lives and work of its laborers.

Saturday dinner

Celebratory pizza & key lime pie

"Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow" - James