Provision

I have never had to go without food.

The supermarket has always been available to me, and with it, every kind of food imaginable, every season of the year.

I remember my mom talking about this with me as a little girl. Did she speak of it with wonder in her voice? She was born during the Depression, and grew up experiencing the rationing of the war years. Her grandfather made wine; her mother would give him the family’s sugar rations in exchange for his shoe rations, since she had four girls constantly outgrowing their footwear, and he needed sugar for the fermentation process. Mom knew what it was to do without; I was growing up in a different world, a world so far from rationing that planes were flying in from Chile with grapes for our supermarkets when grapes were out of season in this hemisphere. That’s the example I remember her giving me: grapes from Chile, because winter here was summer there.

I have taken this ease of access for granted. Because of this, I was caught off guard by one of the practices all of us in what we were now calling the Parish Farming School of Eucharistic Discipleship committed to in our time together in the old convent: using only produce we grew ourselves.

Don’t misunderstand me. We bought everything else—bread and cereal, milk, eggs and cheese, baking supplies and spices. We just avoided (as much as possible) the produce section at the Kroger up the road.

I didn’t take this seriously at first. For one thing, I didn’t think I was all that good a cook. I had a limited number of recipes in my repertoire; surely it would be all right for me to make one I was confident about, say, my artichoke spinach lasagna, even if we didn’t have any artichokes in the garden, yes?

No. The whole point was to rely on what we had, and thereby seek a more direct experience of the provision of God.

It was not long before our original crew of faux nuns were joined by others interested in participating in our little school. A young couple who had recently moved to the area from Iowa, friends of friends, moved in, and more people soon followed, until there were seven people in the house. We drew up chore charts to tackle cleaning and meal charts to decide who’d be in charge of dinner on the nights we all ate together.

I could hardly imagine how it would all work. We had lots of mouths to feed—not to mention that the gardens also supplied the ingredients for Moriah Pie pizza. Could we—could I—fix satisfying dishes while leaving enough for our restaurant patrons?

Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a food diary during those days to show that it all did work out. Looking back, I mostly remember the times it almost didn’t. There was the night I wanted to make saag paneer, but countless trips out to pick every available spinach leaf yielded a pitifully small batch of greens as they cooked down. Or the night—much later in the year—I wanted to make French onion soup, and spent the whole cooking process wondering how many onions I could take from our winter stores without feeling I was stealing from our future selves.

But things just kept working out, even in the midst of all my worrying. I only ended up living in the Convent for about a year, but kept on working at Moriah Pie for several years after, so I experienced this phenomenon multiple times: we would open the restaurant in February and use Mason jars of canned tomato sauce from the previous year’s harvest. We would be frugal with this, rationing it week by week, sometimes mixing it with other sauces like chutney to make it last. Inevitably, though, we’d run out—and the next week, we’d be harvesting the first tomatoes of the season.

Every year was like this. We never had more than we needed. We always had enough.