A lot of Amish kitchens have two stoves: one gas and one wood. Gas stoves are heated with kerosene (called oil) or propane.
Miriam’s beautiful, shiny, pale green and white wood stove is nearly a hundred years old. She keeps a small box beside it filled with kindling, recycled cardboard boxes, and old newspapers. In winter she keeps the wood stove going all day and cooks meals on it. In spring and fall, she’ll start a small fire in the morning to knock the chill out of the air and to percolate coffee, but by noon she lets it go out. She doesn’t use it at all in summer.
Cooking on a wood stove presents special challenges. There’s no way to turn the heat down, so Miriam moves items to spots where she knows the stove isn’t as hot, or she holds the skillet an inch from the heat while the food finishes cooking. A wood stove’s oven heats unevenly as well. So Miriam times the rotation of each item that’s baking, whether it’s casseroles or meats. She doesn’t even try to bake bread or cookies in the wood stove. That’s a job for the gas stove, which sits just a few feet away.
Miriam uses a stovetop waffle iron, popcorn popper, and percolator. I own a top-of-the-line coffee maker and an electric grinder to grind the coffee beans, but, in my opinion, Miriam’s stovetop percolator makes the world’s best coffee. At home I drink one cup of coffee in the morning and don’t want any more. When I stay with Miriam, I drink about six cups—and always want more! Of course, that’s partly because she cooks breakfast in shifts—a necessity to get everyone fed and out the door on schedule. By the time her youngest ones are off to school, she’s cooked three or four rounds of breakfast, and I’ve enjoyed a cup of coffee and a chat with each group.
Every spring Amish women plant gardens that produce enough vegetables to sustain the family throughout the year. The gardens are tilled by hand or with horse-drawn equipment. If a garden yields too much of any one thing, the women may set up roadside stands and sell their extra produce. If there’s a food they don’t grow themselves, they’ll buy bushels of it from a farmers’ market and can it.
I hadn’t realized that people even can meat until I became friends with Miriam. Her husband and five sons hunt according to the season and bring home meat that she cans for the winter.
Even with all their gardening, farming, and hunting, the Amish do purchase items like toiletries, cereal, sugar, and flour from local grocery stores. Although many homes have the means to make butter, not every family chooses to do so. Whatever they don’t make, they buy.
Miriam has a sister-in-law, Maryann, who bakes dozens of loaves of zucchini bread each week throughout the winter for a famers’ market. So Miriam gives her all her leftover zucchini, and every year Maryann cans between two and three hundred quarts of fresh zucchini.
Here’s Maryann’s zucchini bread recipe.
ZUCCHINI BREAD
3 eggs
1 cup oil
2 cups sugar
3 cups grated zucchini
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ cup nuts (optional)
Grease and flour two 8″ × 4″ pans. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. In a large bowl, beat eggs until light and frothy. Mix in oil and sugar. Stir in zucchini and vanilla. Combine flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and nuts, and stir into the egg mixture. Divide batter into prepared pans. Bake for 1 hour or until tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in the pan on a rack for 20 minutes. Then remove the bread from the pan, and cool completely.
From Miriam
After my garden is fertilized, plowed, and tilled—which is around the last of March when all chance of frost is past—the fun begins.
Potatoes are the first items I plant. I take a twenty-pound bag of potatoes and cut each potato into fourths, making sure every piece has an eye in it. If the piece doesn’t have an eye, a potato plant won’t grow. Twenty pounds of “potato seed” will feed my family of six all winter long.
Onion sets are planted early too.
Between the middle and end of April, I plant green beans and sweet corn, two fifteen-foot rows of each. A few weeks later I’ll plant a few more rows of corn. Staggering the planting allows us to have fresh sweet corn on the cob throughout the season as well as enough for freezing for winter use. I don’t can sweet corn because it spoils too easily in jars.
At the beginning of May, I buy my tomato and pepper plants at the local greenhouse. My daughters-in-law start their tomato and pepper plants from tiny seeds. I haven’t had the patience for that art yet. I’m not the aggressive gardener that some of our people are, but I do enjoy gardening. This year I have twelve tomato plants. That should be enough to can dozens of quarts of plain juice and dozens of quarts of both pizza and spaghetti sauce.
Planting and harvesting red beets and cucumbers are a must since we serve them at our church dinners. It takes about eight quarts of pickled beets and eight quarts of pickles for each church meal we host at our home, plus I can extra for our own use.
About that same time in May, or sometimes toward the middle of the month, I plant carrots and zucchini.
Throughout the growing season, the garden requires a lot of weeding, hoeing, cultivating, and more weeding. I like to do the weeding first thing in the morning while it’s cool and I have the most energy.
When there’s a dry spell, I take time each day to water the garden. Our water supply comes from a well on our property. It runs into the home through pipes and out using faucets and spigots. I pull the sprinkler into the garden and let it run for an hour or two each morning and each evening in dry weather, moving the sprinkler to different parts of the garden as needed. I enjoy working in the garden by myself, but if I get behind in weeding, the children help me. Even Daniel and the older boys pitch in on occasion.
The potato plants are dead by mid-August, but the potatoes themselves can stay in the ground and be harvested as needed until mid-September. Most of my garden items—corn, carrots, green beans—stop producing by the end of August, but I’ll usually have fresh tomatoes and peppers until the frost hits in late October or early November.
Although I devote a lot of time to the garden, I know that even the best-cared-for gardens would produce nothing without God’s blessings of sunshine and rain. That’s another reminder of how helpless we are and how dependent on Him.
When there is an overabundance of a vegetable from my garden, that’s a great time to pull out veggie-friendly recipes. This one is a family favorite.
ZUCCHINI PIZZA CASSEROLE
3 cups grated zucchini
1 cup Bisquick
½ cup oil
½ teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1 medium onion, chopped
¼ teaspoon baking powder
2 cups grated cheese, divided
1 pint pizza sauce
meat of your choice—ham, hamburger, sausage, or bacon (cooked and drained)
Mix together all ingredients except 1 cup of the grated cheese, the pizza sauce, and the meat. Spread in a greased 9″ × 13″ pan, and bake at 350 degrees for 30–35 minutes. Remove from the oven, and top with pizza sauce, the remaining cup of grated cheese, and the meat. Bake at 350 degrees for another 15 minutes or until heated throughout.
THE FLIP SIDE
And the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men, even as we do toward you.
—1 THESSALONIANS 3:12
From Cindy
I’d been married a little more than a year when Tommy did something that absolutely infuriated me. I stood in my kitchen dumping biscuit ingredients into a bowl while he sat in the living room reading the newspaper. It was all I could do to keep from throwing the bowl full of flour and buttermilk across the room—preferably at his head! Instead, I plunged my hands into the dough and mixed with indignation.
I managed to maintain outward restraint, but inwardly I rehashed how wrong he was. My list of griev
ances grew longer and longer until I thought I was going to explode.
How could he just sit in the next room, enjoying his newspaper, ignoring how wrong he was? He’d made some halfhearted apology without even trying to understand the scope of what he’d done wrong. I slung the dough over, tossed a little fresh flour on it, and pounded my fists into it again. Can’t he see how wrong he is? I fumed.
A voice of reason said, Everybody’s wrong at one time or another. You were wrong just a few weeks ago.
I wasn’t this wrong! And it’d make my life a whole lot easier if he was never wrong.
If he were always right, you’d be the only one in this relationship who was ever wrong.
I stopped kneading the dough and mulled that over. If he were never wrong, he’d be like a god. And I’d be at fault way too often.
Anger drained from me. I dumped the overworked dough into the trash, rinsed the bowl, and started fresh—this time thinking how awful it would be to live a lifetime with a person who was always right, making me the only one who was ever wrong.
Thanks to that revelation, I’ve never become as angry as I was that day.
The funny thing is, within a year or two, I couldn’t even remember what he’d done that had made me so furious. I only remember the lesson—that we are both imperfect, both in need of correction, grace, and forgiveness from each other.
Over the years I’ve had seasons of needing more grace and forgiveness than he did. At other times he’s needed more than I have. But neither of us has had to grant more forgiveness than God grants to each of us every day.
Below is an Amish biscuit recipe that is similar to the one I was using that day. Tip: If you overknead the dough, you’ll have a flat and tough biscuit. And if you overdo the anger, you’ll have a flat and tough life.
BUTTERMILK BISCUITS
2 cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
¼ teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
½ cup butter or margarine, chilled and cut into pieces
⅔ cup buttermilk, chilled
Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Cut in butter or margarine until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Make a well in the center, and add the buttermilk. Combine until a sticky dough forms.
Place the dough on a floured surface, and gently fold it over itself three or four times to make layers. Pat the dough out to about ½″ thickness. Dip a round cutter or the rim of a drinking glass in flour, and then cut the dough into rounds. Gently knead the scraps together, and repeat the process until all the dough is used. Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for 10–12 minutes; biscuits will be light golden brown on top and bottom. Makes six to eight biscuits.
From Miriam
With mixed emotions my sister Rebecca put away the last of the groceries in her pantry. Someone had left another box of food on her doorstep. Wiping tears away, she bowed her head in gratitude.
When the economy crashed, her husband’s work had slowed. So, like the rest of the country, the Esh family tightened their belts and tried to get by with less. They were staying afloat until their thirteen-year-old invalid daughter, Lydia, needed medical attention.
Lydia was born with Rett syndrome, and over the years she has developed scoliosis (curvature of the spine). Hospitalization and surgery were recommended to correct the problem, but first Lydia needed to be x-rayed. To the surprise of Rebecca and her husband, this required an hour and a half of sedation and a full MRI, which resulted in a shocking bill.
Family and friends, Amish and English alike, rallied around them. One generous family offered to host a benefit supper providing fun for the whole community, lots of great food, volleyball games for the youth, and great fellowship.
Normally Rebecca enjoyed attending these suppers. She was always the first one to support a good cause. But when the tables turned and she was on the receiving end, she discovered how hard it can be to accept other people’s hard-earned money. Money she would most likely never be able to repay.
As Rebecca struggled with this, the thought came to her mind that this situation resembled the plan of salvation. God’s grace is not something you earn, and you can never repay it. You simply accept it.
As she reflected further on this, she realized that God’s love is often carried out through His people. God had just showered her and her family with more love than she could ever imagine. And, as with His grace, all she needed to do was accept it and be grateful.
LIFE INTERRUPTED
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life.
—1 JOHN 1:1
From Miriam
When Joseph and Mary desperately needed a place for the night, innkeepers turned them away again and again. All the inns were full. Finally, acknowledging Mary’s obvious needs, someone offered them the use of his stable.
We like to think that if Mary, in labor, knocked on our door, surely we’d give her our own bedroom. We certainly wouldn’t turn her away completely. But how often do we miss great opportunities? I can think of a few I’ve missed—or almost missed. One especially stands out in my mind.
Several years ago after having had company all weekend, I was anxious to get back to filling the orders I’d received for my crafts. I have a craft business and make all sorts of items to sell at craft fairs or to put on consignment in various stores. I was already behind on several agreed-upon completion dates, but before I could sit down to resume my previous week’s work, an English neighbor stopped in and asked if we’d give her visiting nephew a buggy ride.
I am ashamed to admit it now, but for a second I felt annoyed. What did she think we were, an amusement park? Not only was the timing bad, but our horse was out in the far end of the pasture.
I was about to say, “Sorry,” when I noticed her leading the boy carefully by his hand, watching his every step. The child was blind. Shame washed over me for thinking I was too busy.
As quickly as I could, I fetched the horse and hitched it to the buggy, then gave that little boy the ride of his life. With each squeal of delight that escaped from his lips, I promised myself to never hold my work as a higher priority than a golden opportunity to serve the Lord in a simple act of hospitality.
From Cindy
In 2002, years before my first book was under contract, my youngest son and I boarded Amtrak in Georgia at midnight, and we made our first visit to Miriam’s home. Four years later, as I started writing the second book in the series, When the Morning Comes, I expected my earlier traveling experience to be sufficient research for the opening scene, when Hannah stepped off that same train. But each time I tried writing the opening, it didn’t sound the way I wanted it to. I’d write five chapters and delete five chapters, over and over again. It finally became clear that I needed to see and feel what Hannah would as she stepped off that train. I had to see the Alliance, Ohio, depot in person.
So I made plans to board Amtrak in Gainesville, Georgia, and change trains as needed until I arrived in Alliance. I checked online to see how long the ride was and discovered that the train would arrive in Alliance around two in the morning. I could deal with that.
But as I attempted to finalize my itinerary, I kept hitting dead ends. I called Amtrak several times and spoke with different people, trying to locate a cab company or bus line so I could get to a motel after arriving. No one was able to help me, and I couldn’t chance landing in Ohio at two in the morning without a solid plan.
I told my husband we needed to drive there. Being the agreeable man I married thirty years ago, he took my word for it and made arrangements to take time off from work.
A few weeks later we pulled into the Alliance train depot. The night sky swirled with snow, but the thin white blanket couldn’t hide the eeriness of the run-down, abandoned building. A white and blue sign near the tracks in
dicated a pay phone. I climbed out of the car. Snow and gravel crunched under my feet as I walked toward the sign. The wind whipped through my coat as if it wasn’t there.
I reached the sign but didn’t find a phone.
As I stood at that bleak, desolate depot, Hannah’s life unfolded before my eyes, and I couldn’t take notes fast enough. By the end of our week’s stay in Alliance, I knew more than how a traumatized teenage Amish girl managed to survive away from her home, family, and community. I also knew who she became and why.
I found Hannah. And all it took was getting to the place where I could see what she’d seen, hear what she’d heard, and feel what she’d felt. Basically we’d driven to the place where I could slip into her shoes and walk a mile.
May I be that willing to make the necessary sacrifices to walk in a friend’s, a neighbor’s, or even a stranger’s shoes. I must figuratively, and sometimes physically, remove myself from the comforts of home, travel to wherever that person is, and allow my heart to open to his or her reality. No judgment, no frustration, and no coldness of heart allowed. Just an open mind and heart and a willingness to be fully present as I offer an embrace as God has embraced me.
LOVE AND PRAYER AND SO MUCH MORE
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
—MATTHEW 7:7–8
From Cindy
At times, when my family is still asleep or no one is home, I walk the floors of my home with my Bible open, and I pray Scripture. It does more for my inner joy than if I went on extended exotic trips, were the perfect size, or had a maid—none of which are a part of my life!
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