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Do Amish and Mennonite girls get to pick their husbands?

 I grew up in a plain hybrid Amish/Mennonite community in Michigan that was part of a larger church in Pennsylvania called Charity Christian Fellowship. People did not date in these plain religious communities. Instead, they did something called courtship or courting.   My first personal interaction with this process was when my favorite big brother decided to marry when I was seven years old. The first thing he did was go to our Father and ask what he thought about the young lady from the church he’d been praying about getting to know better.  Our father gave his blessing and went to go visit the young lady’s father to inquire if he was open to marrying his daughter to my brother. Her father gave his blessing and said he’d ask her if she was open to entering a courtship with my brother with the goal of marriage within 6 months.  She said YES when her father asked and their courtship officially began.  My brother and now dear sister-in-law were made fo...
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What is the food like in an Amish Community?

 I grew up in an Amish/Mennonite/Anabaptist isolated religious community called Charity in Northern Michigan. The best part of my childhood however was the abundance of healthy food. It took a lot of hard work, but the taste is unbeatable when homemade and fresh. Us kids (I’m the true middle child of 11) had to work hard growing up spending hours a day in the summer caring for the garden and animals. Yet, to this day no tomato sauce is truly good when compared to my Mom’s growing up.   

Everything was homemade. If we wanted a sweet treat for breakfast like cinnamon kuchen (recipe in next post!), a sweet treat made of raised bread dough poked down before baking and in the final 10 minutes filled with a sweet sauce made of cream, brown sugar, or maple syrup, butter, and cinnamon, we’d have to scoop out whole wheat grain berries from the 25-pound sack and grind in the grain meal by hand till we had enough flour. 

Grain mill we had growing up 

When we used Maple syrup it was from the trees on my parent's 18'' acre farm where we tapped and boiled down sap every year.

The eggs for the yeast roll recipe required eggs which we would gathered daily in the morning from our flock. The cream would come from our milk cows (Chloe and Elsie) collected with my older brother in the mornings between 6 am and 7 am.  

My siblings and I would make all our butter by shaking it in canning jars till it started to form. This was a fun and creative activity for us despite being a chore and we found fun ways to incorporate it into our play. Moments such as these are the bright memories of my childhood. 

Everything tasted so good from breakfast with fresh milk and eggs with at most two-day-old homemade toast, to a dinner made of garden-grown and stored potatoes, home-canned green beans, self-raised and processed (pig) pork chops, with homemade applesauce. We never ate processed foods and appreciated the hard work it took to grow and store the nutrients needed for survival. 

One of the things my siblings (again one of 11!) and I all agree on is the food difference between us and most peers who grew up in mainstream America. Most people we know talk back about how they thought it was so cool when they were adults and could eat whatever they wanted, WE (my siblings and I) all wish we could go back and enjoy the good fresh foods we had as children!

What are your questions about food preparation, recipes, or life growing up Amish or in the plain communities? 


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