Tag Archives: heritage

Cream noodles and how we connect here

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If you like food and cooking and some talk about making music, this week’s Podcast episode is for you. Listen here or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

 Have you ever had cream noodles?

Well, it is what it says it is, only add potatoes and onions fried up in boiling butter. Then hand-make some thick noodles and add heavy whipping cream and there you have it. Cream. Noodles.

These are the things we eat in January, Lord save us. Carb filled white things with cream and butter, give or take a potato or some chicken, add a side of sausage and save the consequences for later. And if we’re not eating it, we’re planning for the next excuse of a celebration and a reason to cook it up.

I hope we all have dishes like these, little indulgences and reminders of our childhood in our mothers’ or grandmothers’ kitchens. Cream noodles is that for my husband. His mom was raised by her grandmother in the middle of the state who still spoke German in the house and taught her granddaughter the subtle art of adding the milk to the egg so that it measures out properly with the flour.  Turns out there’s a fine line between a noodle and a dumpling and I may have never known any of this if I hadn’t started dating her son.

I wouldn’t have known about homemade cream peas either, and how well they go with mashed potatoes and pork chops, and thereby I would have been missing out on another winter meal staple that puts my husband front and center in the kitchen with me following behind as his cheerleader and potato peeler. It would have been a small tragedy.

The important role that food plays in the foundation of our lives is no big revelation here. It’s been studied and milled over, the poetry and music about it has been written. But the fact that one of my mom’s favorite dishes is now my husband’s cream noodles, so much so that he made them for on her birthday, is a sweet little unexpected connection that the two of them share.  And my husband, he takes the task seriously. If he gets in a bind or has a question it’s a great excuse to call his own mother. And it’s even more fun for him to call her after a successful meal. I don’t know how many times they’ve gone over the stories attached to these heritage dishes, or the subtle ways they’ve gone wrong or right over the years. I doesn’t matter. It’s a countless point of connection and it’s special.

Last month, before Christmas, my husband took the girls to his parent’s place for a baking day and on the agenda was kuchen, a German heritage custard filled dessert. They made up pans and pans of it to give away and store in the freezer for company or for a special occasion. Last weekend, I took one out of the freezer when our pastor came for a visit and let me tell you, having that dessert on the ready gave me an unjustified sense of ranch wife confidence that I needed in that moment. Now, it’s confidence I didn’t earn, but it helped balance the amount of shame-filled panic power cleaning and I did in preparation for his visit.

Maybe someday this Scandinavian-bred girl will learn the art of making kuchen the way I learned the art of making knoephla, but these days I’m just appreciating the fact that my daughters are interested in being involved in what is going on in the kitchen.

The other night my seven-year-old took a bite of her hot dish and declared, again for the fiftieth time in two days, that she wanted orange chicken for supper tomorrow. Because six months ago we had lunch at a Chinese food restaurant in the mall food court in the big town and she’s been searching for that high ever since.

Now if we lived in that big town this request would be a simple one to fill, but our nearest Chinese food restaurant is 60 miles away and that’s a little far for delivery. So, because she hasn’t let up, my quest to recreate her orange chicken experience starts today. I’m telling you now, I’m not equipped, but I guess that’s what the Internet’s for. I’m aiming for minimal disappointment. I’ll let you know how it goes.

If all else fails, we have a good excuse to make cream noodles.

To be a cowboy

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To be a Cowboy
Forum Communications

In a few short weeks, I will pack up my guitar and head for the desert in Nevada for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

It will be my second invite to this event that features cowboy singers, entertainers, makers and poets from across the country, each looking like the plains and valleys, mountains and foothills they were born to and all trying to answer and ponder the question — what does it mean to be a cowboy?

I close my eyes and I see him, my Great-Grandpa Veeder. I see him as a kid who came to settle this area with an ill father and a mother who had seven other children to care for. And so he took to it, helping to break up land, grow vegetables and raise horses for farming and threshing

I like to think that he was a man who, like the Badlands full of rocks and rattlesnakes, was not so easily tamed. And so he became the 50 mph winds, the biting, relentless horse flies, the dropping temperatures, the green grass and the rain that eventually fell with a promise that this all might work out if he was brave enough to endure it.

He couldn’t have known then that the work he was doing might someday be revered as sort of glamorous. He just took to it, like I said, and at barely 21, he bought his own place down the road and the rest is a history I walk by on my way to catch my well-broke horses or give my daughters a ride on their pony.

History like his old threshing machine that sits as a relic among the tall grasses and thorny tangle of prairie roses.

Threshing Machine .jpg

History like that humble red barn he moved in and rebuilt with his two sons, one of them my grandpa.

Barn in snow

Time has passed us by enough now that we are wondering what to do with it. Should we tear it down or rebuild it? Has there ever been a truer metaphor for this generation of ranch families?

A relic that reminds us we have entered another realm entirely. A realm where steel siding and roofing and concrete would serve us much better, just like the new tractors with GPS and Bluetooth connections that we will likely never be able to afford, no matter how hard my great-grandfather, and my grandparents and my parents, worked to get us to this place where we can ponder.

Are we cowboys? Not like him. Not like Great-Grandpa Eddie.

Cowboy

As a kid, I spent my winter nights sitting on the pink carpet of my room inside the walls of my parents’ house tucked in the hills and oak trees of a ranch that has now been in my family for over 100 years. Behind my guitar, with a pen in my hand, I would attempt to work out the mysteries of the place in which I was raised, and will myself to understand how I was meant to belong here.

guitar

I wasn’t strong enough to open gates on my own. I wasn’t patient enough to break the horses my father broke. I wasn’t gritty enough or savvy enough or ballsy enough or grown-up enough to do the very thing that I wanted to do, which was to jump in and be brave.

But I love the sound a horse makes when she’s clipping the green grass from the ground. And the smell of the clover and the way a hay bale rolls out in the winter snow behind an old feed pickup and the black line of cattle following it.

feeding

I love the creak of a saddle, the scum on an old stock tank and the bite of the wind on the hilltop and the weather that changes up here like the light and the seasons and how it feels to really be out there in it.

Knowing it. Working it. Caring so desperately about it.

winter barnyard

And so on that pink carpet, I wrote it all down. These cattle. These horses. This land and the big sky and this overwhelming sense that this might be our purpose, no matter how completely uncertain it is.

To be a cowboy.

See ya in Elko.

Click herefor a full line up of performances and where you can catch my dad and me performing.

 

Sunday Column: My great grandmother was Strong Man Johnson

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A few weeks ago I gathered a group of women together for coffee and a visit at the pioneer museum in town. I was asked to craft a story that featured farm woman advice for city girls and, while I had a few ideas, I thought it would be wise to get the conversation flowing from  the minds and experiences of women of all generations.

So I called my friend Jan, who grew up with my dad on a ranch down the road, and she called her mother, the woman who raised her out there, and taught Jan enough about making chokecherry syrup and canning salsa that Jan could be of help to me in one of my  “canning emergencies…”

The two women joined me, my mom and another three generations of women to talk work and worry, weather and washing machines and what it was like, and what it is like,  to raise children and crops and cattle out here on the edge of the badlands.

Really, I could have stayed with them chatting all day and into the night. The history and knowledge, the fortitude and respect and connection to place was palpable. But so was the humility. They were all so humble when faced with questions about their accomplishment and hardships on a land and under a sky that could be so beautiful and so brutal all at once.

I asked them what they learned out there so far away from the conveniences of town, and what it was like without the help of today’s modern technology when there was so much on the line.

My friend’s grandmother, who homesteaded her place, and then helped her sister follow suit before falling in love with a town boy and moving him out to the farm with her, gave the end all answer:

“You just roll up your sleeves and do what has to be done. There is no other choice.”

And so this has been on my mind as I’m working to extract all the wisdom and lessons and strength in these women’s’ stories.

And I’ve been thinking of my own grandmother, and her mother, a first generation Norwegian immigrant who arrived at Ellis Island when she was only 16 and made her way west to Minnesota before marrying and moving out to their homestead in Western North Dakota when she was only 18.

She raised twelve children and lived well into her 90s.

I was a young girl when she died, but I do remember visits to her room in her nursing home, her teasing the grandkids with her cane and this photo that set on her night stand, the youngest on her husband’s lap added to the photo later to make the family complete. My grandma Edie, dad’s mother,  is the girl in the middle with the bow.

I wish I would have been old enough to ask her things. I wish I would have known her.

Now all I have is stories and other people’s memories, my dad’s particularly, of a woman who used to call herself “Strong Man Johnson” before heading out the door of the house and pretending to lift it off its foundation at the grandkids’ delight and horror.

So that’s what this week’s column is about. My Great Grandmother Gudrun, Strong Man Johnson.

Coming Home: Winters on the prairies took immense strength
by Jessie Veeder
Forum Communications
http://www.inforum.com

And now, after it’s been published, I’ve received a few emails from those who knew her, one in particular from a woman who cared for her in the nursing home and remember’s Gudrun’s story of baking five loaves a bread every day.

The spirit of these women drives me. It inspires me and it reminds me that I am braver and more capable than I think I am. Because it’s in this heart that pumps this blood, the blood of strong women.

May we raise them. May we praise them. May we be them.

My grandma Edie. One of Gudrun’s five daughters