Wedding wagons make it a lot easier; You don’t use your own supplies

It is 5:15 a.m. and 18-year-old daugh­ter Eliz­a­beth just left for her job at the fac­tory. My hus­band Joe left over an hour ago for his job. Eliz­a­beth started at the fac­tory a cou­ple of weeks ago. She works five days a week. Her clean­ing job didn’t have enough days of work each week for her. At the fac­tory they make camp­ing trail­ers. I miss Elizabeth’s good help here at home, but Susan and Ver­ena are done detas­sel­ing corn now so they can help.

School doors will open in a few weeks. The six youngest will all be in school then. This will be Verena’s last year, Kevin will be in the first grade, Lov­ina in sec­ond, Joseph in fourth, Loretta in sixth and Ben­jamin in sev­enth. Time is going by too fast.

Yes­ter­day was a long but enjoy­able day as we were attend­ing the wed­ding of Albert Jr. and Louanna.

It is a lit­tle bit harder to get started today after such a long day yes­ter­day. I was a cook at the wed­ding. I was happy that I man­aged to get my new dress sewn before the wed­ding. We had to wear a hunter green col­ored dress. Eliz­a­beth and her friend Tim­o­thy were table wait­ers. She had to wear a dark sage col­ored dress. Makes it so much eas­ier for me since she has learned to cut out and sew her own dress, cape, and apron. She worked on it after­noons after work.

We hired a dri­ver to go the 22 miles to Albert’s for the wed­ding while Tim­o­thy and Eliz­a­beth drove it with the horse and buggy. It took them a lit­tle over two hours to get there but they made it back home in 1 hour and 45 min­utes. Seems the horse always knows when it is com­ing back home and wants to travel faster.

The cooks are all assigned dif­fer­ent jobs and my job was to help make gravy. My sis­ters Liz and Emma were also assigned to this job. We made many gal­lons and gal­lons of gravy for the day. Then we also had to help the table wait­ers at table nine wash their dishes after each setting.

The cou­ple had 24 table wait­ers to wait on the 12 tables. A boy and a girl were assigned to each table. Three hun­dred peo­ple could be served at one time. A deli­cious meal was served for both meals, the noon din­ner and evening supper.

On the menu was grilled chicken, mashed pota­toes, gravy, dress­ing, mixed veg­eta­bles, salad, home­made bread, but­ter and grape jelly, grape Jell-O pud­ding, mixed fruit, and pecan, peanut but­ter, and apple pie. For the evening meal they had baked chicken instead of grilled, ice cream and straw­ber­ries instead of mixed fruit, with most of the rest the same menu as dur­ing the day.

It really rained around noon but it quit and was cloudy. Made the weather cool for us cooks who work in the wed­ding wagon. With seven stoves going in there it seemed pleas­ant with the nice breeze the rain brought.

Sup­per was at 5:30 p.m. for the adults and 7 p.m. for the youth. After the meal the youth sang songs the cou­ple chose to sing. While singing, the wed­ding cake was cut and passed around. Our ride to go home came at 8:30 p.m. Cer­tain cou­ples were assigned to get the wed­ding dishes back into the wed­ding wagon. Wed­ding wag­ons sure make it a lot eas­ier to not have to use one’s owns pots, pans, and dishes for the wed­ding, It also comes with tables, stoves and a cooler. The church benches are used for seating.

On Mon­day sis­ter Emma and I went to Albert’s to make crusts for the peanut but­ter and pecan pies. Jacob and Emma had church ser­vices at their place on Sun­day so the last two weeks have been extra busy ones. Today, wash­ing laun­dry and can­ning tomato juice is on our list. I will share a recipe made for our break­fast recently. I like to try dif­fer­ent recipes, this one is called Coun­try Brunch Skil­let. I used peeled and cooked pota­toes out of our own gar­den, but you can use frozen.

COUNTRY

BRUNCH SKILLET

6 strips of bacon

6 cups frozen hashed browns

3/4 cup chopped green peppers

1/2 cup chopped onion

1 tea­spoon salt

1/4 tea­spoon black pepper

6 eggs

1/2 cup shred­ded ched­dar cheese

With a large skil­let over medium heat cook bacon until crisp. Remove bacon, crum­ble and set aside. Drain, reserv­ing two table­spoons of drip­pings. Add pota­toes, pep­pers, onions, and salt to drip­pings. Cook and stir for two min­utes. Cover and cook and drain occa­sion­ally until pota­toes are brown and ten­der about 15 min­utes. Make six wells in the hashed brown mix­ture, break one egg into each well. Cover and cook over low heat for 6 to 8 min­utes or until eggs are set. Sprin­kle with bacon and cheese.

Read­ers with culi­nary or cul­tural ques­tions or to share recipes write Lov­ina at: Lov­ina Eicher, c/o Oasis News­fea­tures, P.O. Box 157, Mid­dle­town, OH 45042. To learn more about Amish cul­ture and the Amish Cook col­umn and to sign up for the twice weekly newslet­ter, visit www.amishcookonline.com or “The Amish Cook Fan Page” on Facebook.

Posted by Lovina Eicher on Aug 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.