It’s almost a given that middle-aged suburban moms want to buy a few acres in the country and live off the land. Seriously. Every mom friend I know mentions some kind of fantasy that looks a lot like this:
Live in the country on a couple acres that are both really secluded and close to a Whole Foods. Grow your own veggies in the summer, can them for the winter, make your own bread, raise a few chickens to run around in the driveway.
Other fantasies include finally reading those instruction books that came with our fancy cameras so we can take fantastic pictures of our kids. Oh, and to finally organize the playroom so it will entertain the kids for hours.
But back to the first fantasy, the one about growing our own food.
Our family had tried sporadic gardens in the past (the kind we forgot about when we went on vacation), but we never had one that actually provided us with real meals.
I hoped this would be the year we could start making progress on a garden in our little backyard. I already had a cute sign in our kitchen that said, “Eat Local.” Now we just had to start doing that.
When my friend, Lawsona, landscaped our yard, she made a little garden space for the kids to plant whatever they wanted. We put in squash, zucchini, green beans, and strawberries. We also planted an herb garden with a couple kinds of oregano, lots of sage and dill, parsley, rosemary, and basil that smelled like heaven.
Believe it or not…all this stuff GREW. Huge zucchini as big as our heads and so many funny-looking squash…just like they sell in the grocery stores. This WAS a fantasy. We had real food. We were practically ready to get a flock of chickens and sell the cars.
Or, at least, we were ready to pick some of the veggies and sauté them up for supper. This was just about as thrilling for the kids.
Here’s Nate cheesy-grinning while cutting a little dill and rosemary to flavor our dinner. Or maybe that’s sage.
If we were actually serious about eating local, or even eating healthy, I would have served the squash and zucchini raw. But once my kids tasted that, they would’ve given up on living off the land before we could even get started on the fantasy.
So, I cooked the veggies with lots of love—and enough butter to clog an artery or two. 
I’m embarrassed by the amount of pride I felt about cooking up this homegrown food. Who cares this dish was mostly salted butter and onions from Costco? We were also eating food we had grown in our own backyard.
At least I hoped we were. I wasn’t totally sure the kids would like the food grown in our own backyard.
Even though I’ve made squash millions of times for them, it was more important this time. I needed them all to join my fantasy that we were practically the Ingalls family.
So I added some eggs and cream cheese to the concoction and baked the whole mess in the oven at 350 for half an hour.
Let me tell you, we are practically the Ingalls family because everyone LOVED dinner. They ate double helpings and asked for more. I bragged to Mike about all the money we had saved not buying those $.39 squash and zucchini at the grocery store. We were doing it! Eating dinner grown (practically) in our own backyard!
Now to prepare the yard for that flock of chickens and find the manual for my camera…..
