Saturday at 4:30pm:
Watermelon is cut. Brownies are ready to go in the oven. Lasagna mixture is prepared and ready for me to assemble. And my nerves are high. All week, I’ve been excited, and now nervous, for cooking dinner for the guys in the field. I brought them dinner last week from my son’s preschool fundraiser, but all I had to do was scoop the food into Styrofoam boxes and deliver them, not actually cook the food. Tonight’s mission was a new one for this city-gone-country girl.
My mother-in-law prepares two meals for the guys almost daily: she sends them off with a cold lunch and cooler full of drinks to last them throughout the day, and then she delivers a hot meal to the fields at night along with a restock of drinks. Oh, and there’s almost always a yummy dessert. Usually there’s a pizza night thrown in there as well. How she does it, I don’t know. My sister-in-law also pitches in throughout harvest preparing meals, but my mother-in-law does the majority of the cooking.
Knowing how time consuming cooking is, and cooking for five to six grown men that have labored all day, I figured I’d take the stress off of her by cooking a meal this weekend. Since I’m a full-time teacher with two toddlers at home, and currently without a husband at home to help with the kids, I knew that bringing a meal during the week was out of the question. Now it’s Saturday, and I’ve been dreading cooking all day. The excitement has turned to dread...What if it doesn’t turn out? What if they don’t like it? What if I don’t have enough? I called my husband this morning when he was already in the tractor and said that if it didn’t work out, I’d be stopping by the gas station to pick up pizza on my way to the fields. They’d just have to deal.
I planned to make a new Buffalo Chicken Lasagna recipe I just discovered and serve it with a small salad, fruit, and a bread roll. But then I realized that I’d have to make dessert because they’ve been used to it every night. Let me tell you, they are WELL fed!
My first, and only, time cooking a field meal for my husband was my first harvest on the farm after we were married. I decided to make a linguini with peppers dish: one of my family favorites. I was so excited to cook for my hard-working husband that I hadn’t seen for a few days, that I didn’t even think about the logistics of brining a fancy pasta dish to the field. By the time I was able to get to him in the tractor, the pasta and peppers were cold, the oil was runny, and he was still hungry. It was a disaster. I never realized that field meals had to be prepared a certain way and could only include certain foods. The meals have to stay warm, still be good if they get cold, be easy for them to eat while they drive equipment, and be filling enough to last them into the long hours of the night. Hmmm...this was much more difficult than I had ever imagined. Again, I’m baffled by how my mother-in-law does it daily.
So now it’s six years later, and I’m trying again. And for the past six years, whenever a field meal has been delivered to me while I’m taking a tractor ride with my husband, I’ve been taking notes on what works for food items. But tonight, I’m not just cooking for him, I’m cooking for all of the farmers and my mother and sister-in-law. My mother-in-law knows exactly who likes what, who will eat what, and each of their favorites. I, however, do not. But I’m thinking, ‘What guy wouldn’t like Buffalo Chicken Lasagna on a beautiful fall evening?!’ I’ll have to let you know.... and if it fails, at least there’s gas station pizza I can pick up on my way. Oh, and warm brownies straight out of the oven.
7:30pm:
Mission dinner-in-the-field was a success! Everyone loved the meal. Instead of the typical drive-by-and-pick-up-my-food night, the guys were leaving one field and headed to another, so they took some time to get out of the tractors, combines, and trucks to stand and eat around the back of a pick-up truck. Since tonight was a success, I’m trying to think of the next meal I can take to them: how about fajitas?!...oh, and some type of dessert!
Here are pictures to document the assembly. I cooked the food at my house but then took it to my in-law's house so that I could use their Styrofoam boxes and utensils (they buy them in bulk). Plus, my lasagna needed 20 minutes to sit before serving, so the 30 minute drive to the farm was perfect.
Food is ready to dish out
I felt like I was cooking for a dinner party- look at all those boxes!
Tada!
My grandfather and his siblings grew up on a farm in rural Iowa in the 20’s and 30’s. Throughout my childhood in the Chicago suburbs, holidays, birthday parties, and family gatherings were full of stories of the farm. My grandfather and his siblings would sit around the dinner table, card game, or birthday cake retelling stories of their farm days. As a Chicago suburban girl, I had only those stories and children’s picture books to understand what farm life was like. I imagined a farm to be a dirt road leading to a white house surrounded by corn, wheat, and livestock. I assumed every farmer had chickens, pigs, cows, hens, and sheep, just like Old MacDonald. 
As a little girl listening to their farm stories, I never would have thought that nearly 20 years later, I would fall in love with a farmer and live on a farm. What I knew of farming was only what I had heard as a child and what I saw on I-57 while attending the University of Illinois. During those drives to and from college, I marveled at the beautiful sunsets, the golden colors of the changing crops, the farmers out late at night harvesting or planting their fields, and the wide distance between farm houses. In the years since I met my husband, I’ve watched multiple sunsets from the porch of a white farm house, drove down countless dirt roads, taken tractor and combine rides late into the night, and learned about the crops they tend and the pigs they raise. Although my husband’s family doesn’t make their own sausage, stomp their own grapes for wine, or have close encounters with gangsters or aliens, I appreciate the stories of the good ole days on the farm whether they are from my family or my husband’s relatives. Even though I grew up in the suburbs, farming and country living is in my blood, and I like to think that I’ve returned to my roots, where there is always a good story waiting to be told.