Long-time readers of The Amish Cook column may remember various mentions of “Pon Hoss” through the years. This Amish pork favorite is usually enjoyed around butchering day.  In many Amish settlements, February is prime butchering time.  Butchering a hog is a messy affair and you really don’t want to be doing it on a hot July day, so many Amish families make an all-day event out of butchering.  Pon Hoss is made up of some of the scraps from butchering time.  Some people know this dish as “scrapple.”  How many of you have heard of or tried scrapple.  This is a video (some of you have have seen it on the old site) I made on a visit to Lovina’s last winter.   Makes for a yummy breakfast along with some eggs.   The school-age children had left for the day, so it was just Rachel and I and Lovina and some of the older ones…makes for a quieter time in a usually pleasantly chaotic kitchen:)

I’m always going to have a strong emotional pull to Berne, Indiana because that’s where the late Elizabeth Coblentz was from.  If you’re new to this site and the Amish Cook column, Elizabeth – now deceased – is Lovina’s mother.  Lovina writes The Amish Cook column now.  The Berne area is where I spent so much time building the column, watching the Eicher family expand and grow, taking the Coblentzes and Eichers to the grocery…I could go on and on….I was 18-years-old when I first met Elizabeth and I would visit there on and off for the better part of the next 15 years.  There are just so many memories and “firsts” for me in the Adams County, Indiana Amish settlement..Ironically, as many deeply personal memories and attachments that I have to the Berne,  Amish community I can’t say that it’s one of my favorites.  It probably wouldn’t even make my “Top 10″ list.  Each Amish or plain settlement gives off a certain “vibe” and I just never got the best in Berne. To me, there always seemed to be an aloofness to the Amish (certainly not all) in that settlement that made it difficult to build bonds.  Anyway, enough about Berne for the moment.  I just was thinking about the settlement because I found some snapshots I took probably back in the mid-90s (remember actual film and snapshots?).  The first photo below is of the “church bench wagon” parked outside of Elizabeth’s home.  The church bench wagon moves from place to place wherever services will be held next.  This church bench wagon is black, but I have seen them colored white in some Amish settlements and gray in others. The wagon contains the church benches, the songbooks, and maybe a lost and found box for those bonnets or gloves inadvertently left behind.  Ha, here’s a funny story:  cell phones are allowed in some Amish churches, not allowed in others, and in many places they are tolerated or sort of allowed for business, but not home-use. I know of an Amish family that once held church in their home and after services and everyone had gone home they found a cell phone underneath one of the benches.  Since the battery was dead, the founders couldn’t determine who it belonged to. Of course no one ever came to claim it because they really weren’t supposed to have cells in this particular district.  .

The next photo is a closer-up shot of inside the bench wagon at a church songbook (known as the Ausbund).  The songbooks are stored in heavy wooden boxes.  At the time I took these photos, back in the mid-90s, they stirred a little controversy within the church, which viewed them as a bit intrusive (I had been given permission to photograph them).  I think today they’d barely cause a blink.  How times have changed.

My grandmother is a sweet almost 87-year-old presence in my life. She shares a home with her younger brother, my Uncle Pat. We’re very grateful to Pat for his help in keeping my grandmother independent and living at home, where she’s happy and never dull. It’s funny because they both sort of get more subdued as soon as the video camera clicks on, but I still think they’re fun to watch and in episodes to come, I’m sure they’ll loosen up a bit. Click here to watch my grandmother and my Uncle Pat (both first generation Americans, their mother was from Calabria, Italy) sample some Amish and Amish-style foods.  It’s just interesting to watch two very different culinary cultures collide on camera. By the way, there are now ads on all of our YouTube videos.  It may be mildly annoying but it’s a relatively painless way for all of us to contribute to the Amish Cook column’s existence, so enjoy!:)

No, I am not referring to The Amish Recipe Project.…that’s a pretty cool cookbook that’s brand new and choc full of recipes.  You can click The Amish Recipe Project photo on the right to order a copy of that:).

I am instead referring to the admirable antics of Jake Reilly, a 24-year-old student in Chicago, who dubbed his attempt at “disconnecting” from the world “The Going Amish Project.”   According to Forbes Magazine back in October Reilly suspended his service with Verizon, deactivated his Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts, put an “away until January 1, 2012″ auto-reply on his email, and generally did his best to stay away from communication devices (except he did get a landline per his mother’s insistence).  Jake called the project the “Going Amish Project” (although, in truth, some Amish are more connected that he was during that time).

It’s ironic that I discovered Jake’s experiment this evening because I was just commenting to my wife over dinner tonight that sometimes still, even after all I have learned about the Amish and their imperfections and often overly romanticized ways,I find the idea of just getting a plot of land somewhere and living a very minimalist existence deeply appealing.   And she commented:

“You don’t have to be Amish to do that.”

She’s right, and that is exactly what Jake Reilly was trying to prove during this 90 day experiment. The thing is, though, that being Amish gives you a “structure”, a framework, reference point, and “reason” for living that way.  Many non-Amish who try to embrace such a minimalist existence are viewed as eccentric or odd and out of the mainstream whereas if you’re Amish you’re just doing your job.

Would you be able or willing to replicate Jake’s experiment?  What modern convenience would you miss most if you decided to disconnect and become Amish?  I think I would miss the internet and it’s endless information….but some of the other stuff, not so much.

So….pink slime in McDonald’s meat?  Ewwww….do you just eat the stuff and not think about it? Or do you avoid it?   I’m not someone that likes labels.  I don’t like being called a Democrat or a Republican (I have strong tendencies towards one party, I’ll keep silent on that:), BUT if I like an issue, I’ll ABSOLUTELY embrace it no matter what party it originates from.  I’m never going to say “I don’t like country music” because there are, in fact, some country artists I really enjoy listening to.    I lean strongly vegetarian, but not totally.  I say lean strongly vegetarian, because if you bring me some fresh caught fish or some venison, I might eat it.  If you say to someone “I’m a vegetarian”, they’ll say “oooh, you can’t eat meat.”  Drives me bonkers when people say that.   I CAN eat it, I’m just choosing not to and there’s a huge difference.  I can do whatever I want and that’s very empowering.   While I think life without some boundaries can be dangerous, living too much boxed into labels can be very confining.  I think it’s about balance. Finding the right balance in life, now that’s what’s tricky.  If anyone figures it out, please let us know:)

But this is precisely why I shy away from meat:  McDonald’s has confirmed that they have discontinued to using ammonium hydroxide – an ingredient in household cleaners, fertilizers and roll-your-own-explosives – in their hamburger.  Oh, darn, where I am going to get my fix now of fertilizer?  No, thanks, I’d rather not ingest that.  Intellectually, I just can’t think that the human body was designed to ingest fertilizer over long periods of time and not experience some harm even though we may have not been doing it long enough to realize what harm.

Amish culinary culture has unfortunately trended towards processed, prepackaged foods, but certainly not in all areas.    Lovina and her mother always have espoused freshly-butchered home-raised meat because “you know what’s in it” and I definitely concur.  Again, I don’t want to act like I’m being sanctimonious with this post because I drink Coke which has an ingredient list that I couldn’t begin to pronounce (but I don’t like myself for doing it).

So, what do you think?  I’d love to hear what others think about food and ingredient labels?  It’s something I struggle with…am I alone in the struggle?  How do you handle it? Or do you just eat whatever’s out there, hang on, and hope for the best? (God bless my wonderful Grandmother who is 86 and has ingested probably everything out there that you shouldn’t and she’s still ticking…by the way, stay tuned for another “Amish Meets Italian” episode soon)..

An Ontario newspaper today ran a story with the headline “Mennonite Buggy Stolen.”   That’s a shame and strange.  Who the heck steals buggies?  The thief left the horse unharmed, but the buggy was gone.  Bizarre. But the story also raises another question:  is “Mennonite buggy” grammatically correct?   Some Old Order Mennonites in Dayton, Virginia that I visited with once told me that they get annoyed that everytime one of their church members makes the news the local paper identifies them by their religion.  An example would be “Mennonite child struck by car.”   The newspaper would never run a headline that says “Catholic Child Struck By Car.”  So why does the media single out the Amish and Mennonites.  One could make a journalistic argument that anything different merits a mention, but that would seem to hold true in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where Mennonites are quite populous. Yet there are examples of objects that are modified by a religion.  For instance, a Catholic shrine or a Jewish temple or a Baptist church.  Yet none of those preceding examples are live, so can a temple be Jewish? Grammatically, technically, probably not.  Can a buggy be Mennonite?   No…. I try to use terms like Amish-owned buggy, but that can be cumbersome and there are different religions that use buggies: Mennonites, Amish and a even a few German Baptist congregations.   Soooo, what’s the verdict here….is “Mennonite Buggy” correct? Incorrect?  Do I just need to get a life if I am thinking about these things?   And, gee, I hope they find the buggy!

Just a few recommendations for those seeking fun reads in the blogosphere. I really like the blog “Spain in Iowa”, the author combines simplicity, Midwestern sensibility, with a splash of Spain.  The result is some wonderful recipes, great photography, and musings on simple living.  Check out “Spain in Iowa by clicking here.

One of my favorite blogs, as many of you know, is Little House Living.  Today Merissa posted a recipe and how-to-video to make homemade gummy bears.  How cool is that?  Check it out here.

And from within our own ranks of readers, I discovered “The Accidental Anabaptist” blog this evening.  I am not a theologian, my interest in the Amish comes from much more of a pop culture perspective.  The Accidental Anabaptist deals with some of the theological elements of the movement that I don’t often address, so check Kelly’s blog out here.