The next Food Network show...

...should be Real Cooks on the Farm.  In it, contestants would have two hours to calmly prepare a healthy meal but everything, except for five ingredients of the contestant's choosing (seasonings, olive oil etc) , would have to be from the farm s/he was plopped down in and NOTHING would be prepared ahead of time (including the butter).  Now, on this farm, there would be a dairy cow, and plenty of poultry.  There would also be beef cattle, sheep and pigs, but I highly doubt you could process these larger animals in the amount of time given.  A huge vegetable garden would be available, and you would hope it would be high summer so that there were actually yummy vegetables in it (you can only do so much with greens and asparagus and the show isn't titled "Extreme Farm Cooking").  There would also be an orchard and berry brambles to find fruit in. If you were lucky to be in a farm in the south, you would have citrus available as well.

We don't have cable, so we don't regularly get to watch the Food Network, but we were staying at a place that did have television this past weekend.  And I confess, I am a little bit of a Food Network junkie.  So this new food show inspiration came to me the other evening when I was in a rush to create a good, substantially portioned meal for my family (sometimes I am accused of making "tapas" sized portions).  I had no time for advanced planning as we ended up being gone all day, but I did know I had a plethora of food available to me.  I'll be damned if I just caved and said "let's go order a pizza".  We have been traveling a lot the last few weeks and the "dining out" category of our budget was literally bursting at the seams. 

So, luckily we had some marinating venison in the fridge (a gift from a friend last fall which we had thawed earlier in the week).  I realize this would be cheating on the new show, but chicken would be an equally good protein and I am confident I could process one of those in about 20 minutes. Knowing the venison needs mere minutes over high heat to cook, I first headed to the garden to gather greens.  I have plenty of different lettuces, but to spice it up a bit, I added arugula and beet greens, some oregano, sage and rosemary.  I also pulled our first three carrots from the garden and picked a few pea pods. 

I had also noticed that the black caps (wild blackberries) were in abundance by our creek, so I went and gathered those (somewhat labor intensive as the berries are small, but so tasty).

I threw the lettuce, herbs, and arugula in the bowl after three washes in the salad spinner (to guarantee that no slugs remained), shelled the peas, chopped the carrots and then added the black caps.  We had bought some River Rat cheese up in Clayton, NY when we were visiting the Thousand Islands, so I added some chunks of that (I guess that would be one of my five ingredients off the farm).  I then added almond slivers (another off-farm ingredient).  For the dressing I used a raspberry vinegar and avocado oil (I know, strange combination, but really good).  I then cooked the venison over high heat (for about 4 minutes total) and put 8-9 pieces on top of the salad. 

There, done.  Probably 40 minutes from start to finish.  If I was doing chicken, it would take a little longer as the bird would have taken about 1 1/2 hours to roast--still within the two hour time limit though.  It's interesting to think about what wouldn't be possible to make in a two hour time slot: bread would be difficult as you wouldn't have time to process the grain into flour. And your main protein would be turkey, chicken, and eggs (or you could do the wild thing, and go for squirrel, possom, muskrat, frogs, I suppose).  It would certainly be entertaining to see what people came up with.

All jesting aside with the Food Network show, it is possible to put together a good meal from scratch, and despite the time pressure, it was actually enjoyable.  Meal time can be stressful and/or monotonous, two adjectives I'd like to eliminate from my vocabularly.  To simplify things, after five years together, my darling husband and I have finally decided to take my mother's fine strategy and prepare a weekly dinner menu.  We will then go one step further and decide who is cooking it each night.

As Julia Child would say, "Bon Appetit!"