View from the Cab: Ode to the field meal

By Kent Casson

This is my kind of article. I’m talking all about food this week – specifically field meals.

Have you ever eaten a home-cooked meal in the cab of the tractor or perhaps on the side of the road in the spring or fall? If not, you don’t know what you are missing.

Mom always prepared field meals for Dad and Grandpa when I was growing up and we’d always get that same meal at the kitchen table. Some favorites I recall include oven fried chicken with white gravy, meatloaf and bread crumb potatoes and pork cutlets with mashed potatoes. She would often pack a dessert and some bread and butter or rolls to go with the meal.

There was just something about enjoying that hot meal during a busy planting or harvest season. For a moment, we were comforted by Mom’s cooking and some conversation along the way. I miss those days and I miss Mom. I guess it’s one of those things in life you look back on realizing you didn’t know how good you really had it.

Mom would have turned 72 this month and she has been gone for nine years but her memory lives on. Grandpa has since passed as well but I look back and smile at those field meals and other farm memories shared over the years.

It just isn’t the same in the spring and fall as we often rush around more than ever when we should be asking ourselves what are we really rushing for? Sometimes the stress is high and tempers can get the best of us in a high pressure environment but we need to slow down and pause once in a while. I can almost hear Mom urging calmness as that was the way she was.

Someone told me at my daughter’s basketball game this fall that those soybeans will still be there to harvest later but these moments only happen once. He said you won’t remember how the beans yielded that particular year but you will remember that long truck ride with your daughter on the way to the game and all the memories that were made.

I certainly hope we are creating new memories for our children much like Mom created for us with those field meals and conversation.

A shout-out to some pretty amazing cooks in our lives who brought meals to the field this fall including Joy, Joni and Liz. Thanks for carrying on a most special tradition in our family. Rebecca’s pumpkin bars were a hit and I hear Curt’s meal was good, though I missed out on that one.

Bon appétit.