Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Dear husband made coddled eggs and sweet potato biscuits for dinner on Sunday. You can see, some of us followed that up with pound cake. Life is good.

Dear girl got a deep case of the giggles while we were eating because she said the eggs smelled like horses. My mother scolded me for "putting your nose all over everything" when I was my daughter's current age. But I smelled the eggs myself and it was true, they smelled like livestock. Our chickens get no feed other than forage and our kitchen scraps, so it wasn't corn we were smelling. As I was thinking about it, Dear husband mentioned ladling cream over the eggs before they were baked. Ah, that smell.

The milk we drink is hand milked in a field. The farmer throws down some grain, turns over the grain bucket to sit on, wipes the cow's udder and his hands off with a wet paper towel, and milks faster than the cow can eat. The milk we buy has cream nearly as yellow as our kitchen walls with the consistency of eggnog and nearly that sweetness. I guarantee there is no richer milk for sale in this state. I am flooded with gratitude every Wednesday morning when I get to go to the farm and buy this milk. I pay more than he charges and bring my own jars, already sterilized. If necessary, I would pay even more.

What Dear girl smells in the cream is the farmer's hands. Or rather, the cow's udder transferred to the farmers hands, and then to the milk. I know this, because its the same smell on my own hands when I milk. Maybe this is the real definition of local food? Tasting the farmers hands.

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