Visiting a Family Farm in Rural Nebraska

Going to the source of our food is something I love to do with my kids.  We are blessed to live in a town with an abundance of farmers markets; there we can meet hardworking folks who produce food for our table.  One farming family we've gotten to know sells natural meats, with an emphasis on lamb.  We've ordered half a lamb in autumns past, but we love to eat lamb so much that we ordered a whole lamb this year.

Although we've been wanting to see the farm where our lamb comes from, its location, two hours away from the city where we live, made it hard to get there.  Yet providentially, we were going to be passing near the farm on our way back home from Kansas City this week.    So we called up, got directions, and found ourselves tooling along a dusty gravel road until we reached the farmhouse and neighboring store.  Here is the store:

It's an old country schoolhouse that's been moved and renovated by the owners of the farm.  I found out during our visit that the farmer's grandmother had attended this one-room schoohouse back in her day.

Kittens galore!

A few minutes after we arrived, we were met by a couple of the children.  They were clad in rubber work boots and chatted with us until their father made it up the hill.   The two of them carried our meat out to our minivan and then showed us around the farmyard.

A working pitchfork

My children enjoyed feeding the pet lambs.  The main flock was out in the pasture.

Geese and several other kinds of birds scooted away from us as we approached.

Teaching our children the importance of a good work ethic has been a big focus and challenge in our home lately. While they enjoyed the animals, I think it was even more valuable for them to see kids who were busy with lots of daily chore responsibilities.

We also want our children to understand and appreciate that what we eat takes a quite a bit of work to produce.  It is not just a matter of plopping items into a grocery cart!

While we can't afford to buy the best of everything, certain items, like ethical meats, I believe are worth the extra cost.  Furthermore, getting to see where our food comes from gives us both an education and greater peace of mind as we navigate the many choices involved in raising a family.

10 Nestle Products to Avoid Buying this Holiday Season

1. Libby's pumpkin
2. Tollhouse morsels
3. Carnation milk
4. Nestle hot cocoa
5. Maggi seasonings
6. Stouffer's frozen foods
7. Dreyer's or Edy's ice cream
8. Haagen Dazs ice cream
9. Gerber foods and clothing
10. L'Oreal cosmetics and hair products

To find out more about the boycott, read Activism Across Party Lines: The Nestle Boycott.

This post is linked to Top Ten Tuesday.

A Sloppy Joe Recipe for Omnivores: Pita with Lentils and Local Beef

This week I discovered a lentil sloppy joe recipe; it inspired me to combine leftover meat loaf with the lentils to create my own version for lunch.  Our sloppy joes turned out well, and thus I am happy to share the resulting recipe.

What delights me about the lentil-beef combination is that I can use less meat and still enjoy the great taste of our favorite sloppy joe recipe. Perhaps some day we'll try the full vegetarian version.   At this point, however, I remain a vegetarian wannabe who still eats meat, in part because I defer to the preferences of my husband and children.

In January I decided that I could not, in good conscience, buy cheap feedlot beef any longer. Driving past a blackened feedlot crowded with cattle was the disturbing impetus for this decision.  So we have been enjoying our freezer full of venison cuts as our primary source of red meat for many months.

My oldest daughter really misses eating meatloaf and sloppy joes, however. These two favorite dishes just don't taste the same when we substitute ground venison for beef.  After gulping at the price of grass fed ground beef in the health food stores, I resolved to find ethical meat at the farmer's market when it opened this month.

Success! We bought four pounds of local ground beef for $3.99 a pound last weekend. After our long beef hiatus, we thoroughly savored homemade meatloaf for dinner on Saturday.  And now we have another way to enjoy the meat in sloppy joe form later.

Lentil and Beef Sloppy Joe Recipe

Ingredients:
1 cup lentils
6 to 8 oz. ground beef, cooked and browned
Chopped onions, sauteed in oil
Pita pocket bread
Cabbage, optional
1/2 cup to 1 cup tomato ketchup
1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp. apple cider vinegar
Mayonnaise, optional
Salt to taste


Directions:

1. Cook 1 cup lentils in 2 cups water for about 30 minutes or until tender and liquid is mostly absorbed.  
2. Add ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and vinegar and simmer for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.  
3. Next, add ground beef and onions (or crumbled leftover meatloaf) and simmer for 5 minutes or until flavors have blended.  Add salt and additional ketchup, worchestershire sauce, or vinegar to taste.
4. Cut pita circles in half and spread a layer of mayonnaise.  Fill with one layer or torn or shredded fresh cabbage (optional). Then add lentil and beef sloppy joe filling.  
5. Serve and enjoy the tangy goodness with a smile.  Makes about 6 sandwiches.

Wondering what to put inside the rest of the pita bread?  Check several other ideas in this slideshow.  For other nourishing recipes that you can afford to make, head over to Pennywise Platter Thursday at The Nourishing Gourmet.   Friday Food and Food on Friday have even more recipes to explore.