Farm Kitchen Chronicles: Desperation Soup
Operation: move out-of-state to live and work on a farm this season, and save up enough money to buy a house, a farm, or land (or just live here forever, I guess!).
Well, folks, we made the semi-last minute decision to accept a job in upstate New York for this season, so here we are, in a town nestled in the Catskill mountains, where we all pulled up to a house no one in our family had yet even seen pictures of, to work on a farm. While my job is being figured out, Alex is the Assistant Director of Farm Operations at the Center for Discovery, a non-profit that has an organic and biodynamic farm to feed all of the residents and staff. Reasons we took the job was that it paid well enough that we will actually be able to save money this year (I hope!), they provided us with a house (we finally sold our RV bus, so that was no longer an option!), and we get to go back to what we really love to do, which is holistically farm and feed people. I will say, dear readers, when we pulled up after twelve hours of driving, in the cold, grey rain, my first thought was, “oh no. We’ve made a mistake.” Alas, it was dreary, like English moor-Wuthering Heights dreary, but I just felt this surge of “omg what is this place, what is this town!”. Though the house backs up to one of the farm fields (our yard borders the deer fence), we live in an actual town, one where we have neighbors and we are down the street from a tiny Main street, the kind with actual storefronts and a restaurant or two, some empty dilapidated buildings mixed in, and even a small movie theater. Since Hurleyville is a mountain town, our house is on a hillside, so not exactly flat (good for sledding in the winter though, I suppose!), so it is a stranger yard than I am used to, and I am trying to figure out how to have a garden and chickens here. (That said, we do face a mountainous view, so pluses and minuses.).
Inside, our house is very old (I am destined to live in houses that are over 100 years old I guess), which is fine, but I also saw right away has some of the old farmhouse problems we have gotten accustomed to. We couldn’t afford to get a pod to bring actual furniture here, so we just packed up our “things” in a box truck (farm tools, kitchen stuff, books, toys, clothes), which, in retrospect, was very annoying to come here with no furniture at all, and it is something I will not do again!
I have also just accepted that moving time is take-out time, so we have had pizza three times in 5 days, which I am not ok with. Two days ago, I was so desperate to not have pizza or any take-out (most take-out is pizza here—guess I have to go to New York City for Ethiopian!), so I unpacked enough kitchen things to work on a recipe I wanted to create. I started the oven, pre-heating it to 350. Upon starting, a horrible smell began to fill the house. It was only the boys and me that were home, and River came out of his new room he was setting up to ask what on earth I was cooking. “Something residual I guess. I’m sure it will burn off in a few minutes!” I told him, the desperation permeating my whole body. I just wanted to cook real food, for the love of God! As we waited, the smell seemed to get worse. It also, I realized, was a smell I recognized: a dead animal. Frantically, I started looking in the oven for some sort of dead rodent I was accidently cooking; in the broiler, or underneath the stove top. Nothing. When Alex finally got home, it had been off and the windows were open, but he still said, “what is that?”.
After still looking and finding nothing, we figured it was likely a dead mouse somewhere that had just crawled in somewhere weird that we couldn’t locate. Long story short, we did call someone from the housing maintenance department (a new stove is being ordered for us?), but it really put me in a horrible mood; the shock of a new town, feeling unsure about a house, not sure about how we are going to grow in this yard, and now I couldn’t even roast something in our new, extremely cluttered kitchen! I went full-blown “I wish we never moved here!” to Alex, which was very unnecessary, but I couldn’t help it. I am better now, but we still have no oven, so I cooked this soup on the stove, hence the name, Desperation Soup.