I’ve written several books based on the Amish, and I never tire of thinking about their culture, their self-reliance, and most especially their food. Amish women prepare the kinds of meals I love to serve my family. Good, hearty fare, with plenty of the ingredients supplied from the backyard garden and farmyard during the warmer months and pantry shelves groaning with hundreds of home-canned jars of food come fall to see them through the cold winter months. The seasonal cycles are constant, and there’s a certain quiet pride in knowing one’s family will not go to bed hungry, no matter what the vagaries of inclement weather may be.
I think that’s a large part of why I love to write cookbooks and blog about cooking and home life. I have this unfailing hope that young women will heed the call to care well for their loved ones and be confident and proud of their homemaking skills. I’m not talking about housekeeping—having everything just so, and the house so clean you could “eat off the floor” as my mom used to say. No, I truly do mean homemaking—the making of a home—that one place a family can return to each day and know they will be loved and encouraged and valued and, yes, fed.
My hope is that you’ll try the recipes in this book. And if that endeavor spurs you on in your efforts to care for your family, then this little book will have been of good service. My prayer for all women—young or old, single or married, childless or bursting at the seams with little ones—is that, like the Amish, you will find great joy in your home life and “lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Timothy 2:2 KJV).
May God’s richest blessings be yours!
Georgia