Mark Reed

We do both, single dish meals like soups or stews are great in winter, I think. A role or some corn bread is probably included too. In summer a lot of one dish salads with lots of different greens and other veggies but also probably some bacon bits, grilled chicken and probably some cheese.  Fried chicken probably needs mashed potatoes and green beans. Baked chicken needs stuffing and a baked sweet potato. Fried fish needs French fries or tater tots and another vegetable. Asparagus and wild rice go nicely with baked fish.   Roast beef goes with roasted veggies, but they can pretty much all be cooked together. When I'm by myself I often go with the one dish thing, but it has a of different things in it, and I usually make enough to have it for lunch the next day too.  

Mine is just beef or deer dusted with wheat flour and browned on all sides. Also, a big onion sliced, floured and browned. That all goes in a kettle with water and cooked until meat is tender, and juice is deduced to a gravy consistency.  Then goes in carrots, potatoes, celery, more onion and just a little garlic, all to cook a little more. And salt to taste and a small dose of rosemary. I serve it with a skillet of cornbread and cottage cheese on the side. Peas can be added to the stew, but I cook them separately and add when serving because I think they taint the other flavors if cooked together.

I know from historical accounts that Indians in my area did grow corn. A white woman, captured by Indians in Virgina in 1755 and brought to this immediate area described the most beautiful river she had ever seen, the Ohio, and the largest corn fields she had ever seen, growing in the valley beside it.

I wonder though if the pestles I have were used for grinding, due to the size it would have taken a very long time to grind more than a tiny amount. I wonder if instead they were used to crack hickory and walnuts, I've used them for that myself and they work great for it. I've also never seen anything indicating Indians here used corn in a similar way as they did in the southwest. I've heard of a dish made of dry corn and beans, but nothing made from ground corn flour.

I also don't know how long ago corn was introduced here, and the archeologists say 95% of my relic collection is more than 2000 years old.  Two places where I used to hunt account for all of my pieces less than 2000 years old. They are actual arrowheads, small, triangular and very finely worked. Pottery fragments, and bone tool fragments are found with the newer arrow points but the grinding stones, if that's what they are, came from spots where the other relics are closer to 5000 years old.

I think it may be a false assumption that Indians east of the Mississippi and especially north of the Ohio used corn in the same ways as those in the southwest and Mexico.

Here is what the pestles found around here look like, or at least all those I've seen look like this and are about the same size, just right to fit a hand. I remembered I do have what might be a mortar too, but not sure where it is right now. It is too small though to have been used with these. Is a very circular stone, very flat on both sides with a depression in the middle on both sides.

I have an off and on little YouTube channel about my garden, mostly concerning sweet potatoes. I spend no time editing, couldn't care less about professionalism. Just little what you see is what you get stories from my garden.

Here is an example, I Don't expect win any Emmies anytime soon.

I have a number of pestles in my collection of Indian relics. The coolest one is made of pink granite, which isn't naturally occurring in the Ohio Valley. I found it in the same place as some points made of black obsidian, also not natural in the valley. The archeology folks at IU said there are also sites in Colorado and other places even farther west, where artifacts made of our naturally occurring flint are found. Pre-Columbian Indians did not have horses, that's a long walk carrying rocks.  The rest of my pestles are made of a dark bluish/black stone, abundant along the river. They are not like those in the pictures from Mexico, rather they are bell shaped with a flare at the bottom.

I've never seen the mortar side of the apparatus; I'm not sure Indians here made them. In Spring Mill St. Park in Indiana and in the Red River Gorge in KY there are places, I won't say exactly where, with lots of circular and oblong depressions in rock outcroppings that the archeologists say were used for that. I guess you might have had your own pestle, but the process was maybe a communal affair just using an appropriate rock shelf. The one in the Red River Gorge is under a large rock overhang and dry all the time, the one in Indiana is out in the open beside a stream.  

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

I'm also in USDA zone 6 b, not that it really means all that much. The only reason I might mess with anything other just direct seeding my garden is if I want to produce plants to sell and for them, I use a very low tech, unheated cold frame. Low tech in that if it is warm and sunny, I might have to open it to vent and if it's going to drop into the low 20s or teens, I toss an old blanket over it.

Greenhouses are great for lots of things, and I would like to have a nice one, but to grow a garden in my climate they are completely unnecessary. The cold frames are really unnecessary for a garden too, but very useful for producing things to sell.

There are paper charts with numbers and pretty pictures, and there are cell phones measuring a perfectly synchronized illusion. Long before and long after there is a small blue planet circling a little white star. I just want to wish everyone up north a Happy New Year.