Bovina does Kosciusko

Say it with me now- kos-see-es-co. I’m not even sure I can get away with the title. My grandparents’ horse farm is actually located in Hesterville, a community 10 miles northwest of Kosciusko composed of only a church, a cemetery, and an old schoolhouse.

Either way, it’s definitely a change of pace from our urban setting here in New Orleans. Home-brewed refers to sweet tea, which takes the place of Stone Ruination at the dinner table. Buildings and dirty sidewalks are replaced with undeveloped land dotted with hay fields and sprawling pastures. Wi-Fi is some alien movie, and the only Internet connection is the mythical dial-up. It’s a place where Slow Food isn’t some hip movement; it’s a way of life. Instead of running across the street to the Tuesday Farmer’s Market, you walk out your back door and pick you own squash and corn.

Like every other visit to their house, actually any of my grandparents’ houses, the trip always seems to be centered around a meal. We show up, talk football and weather (I’m pretty sure that’s all old men know), and then gluttonously leap into a buffet that could outshine any overpriced “organic” meal from Whole Foods. Buffet? Hey, when your family exceeds two tables, family style serving becomes obsolete. On the menu this weekend- baked beans and green beans from the garden less than 400 feet away from the table, and grilled pork tenderloin from a neighbor’s pig given to my grandparents in a trade involving hauling off fallen trees- old-school bartering at its best. A true “farm fresh” meal without the farmer’s market.

In a restaurant setting, the chef would be declared a genius and the menu would be proclaimed as “ever-changing”, “local”, or “fresh”. If the pork loin was stuffed with pine nuts and the bacon in the baked beans was labeled “pork belly” on the menu, it would fly out of a New Orleans kitchen to the tune of $25.00 - $30.00 a plate. This same food, using fresher ingredients, can be cooked just as well, or even better, in a humble kitchen by an old lady from Mississippi who doesn’t how to use an immersion circulator and thinks sweetbreads are made at Krispy Kreme.

Although lengthy and monotonous, making the drive to see these kinfolks is certainly worthwhile, not to mention I usually come back home with enough squash, corn, tomatoes, fresh sausage, fig preserves, and gallon zip lock bags of hand-picked blueberries to sell to a local tattoo shop and subsequently force Jim Tressell to retire.