Mixing Religion & Food ... Sort Of

Last night I was moving around the television channels, trying to find something to watch other than re-runs of Mythbusters, when I came to rest on a program about Mennonites.  I'm not a very religious person, so I soon moved on, but later in the evening, I started wondering, what the hell is a Mennonite?  This morning, I went to that internet source of all things accurate, Wikipedia, and did a little page surfing.

And I came away basically saying to myself, "What the hell is a Mennonite?" In the article, I did zero in on the word "Anabaptist", which caught my eye only because the character Chaplain Tappman in the book Catch 22 was an Anabaptist, but as near as I could figure out, Mennonites and Amish are about the same thing.  And since Wikipedia does tend to over-simplify a lot of shit, this is what they look like:

I'll keep one of these in my wallet to help me in spotting them.

I was doing a couple of more searches in order to learn just a little bit more, when it became obvious that googling Mennonite brought up more food related things than religion.  Apparently, Mennonites like to eat ... a lot.  And they seem to like, in my humble opinion, bland fatty foods.  But the lack of variety surprised me.  They like food, but the selection is kind of slim.  This seemed to be the favorite dish:

Vereniki doused in Schmont fat with farmers sausage

It took a little bit to find recipes, but Vereniki is basically a boiled doughball. Schmont fat appears to be dough gravy ... and farmers sausage looks like something that was deposited on my lawn this morning by an off-leash dog. But I'm sure it all tastes blandilicious!

The other favorite is a compilation of various foods to create a late-afternoon meal called Faspa.  The most popular interpretation of the word Faspa is the Florida Association of School Personnel Administrators.  Although this sounds like a fun group, I doubted it was the definition I was looking for, and further digging proved me right.  The meal consists of rolls (more dough), butter, jam, cheese and coffee.  More things can be added, but the most popular embellishment to the meal appears to be pig tails, preferably en casserole.  For those of you wondering what this porcine concoction might look like without making it yourself, here's a two picture recipe:

Step One:  Remove tails from pig

Step Two:  Serve piping hot!

From a personal preference point of view, I'd want to put a lot of Schmont fat on that.  I mentioned above that the Mennonite list of favorite foods seems to be pretty slim.  In fact, according to one blog on Mennonite eating that I came upon, Welcome To The Bowman Bunch,   the unfortunate author ate nothing but the following for every meal of her life:

Vereniki

Farmers Sausage

Rolls

Schmont Fat

Cherry Mose (?)

Well, I should talk ... if it weren't for Jan's protests, I would eat nothing but baked chicken, rice and frozen corn.

I'll bet that all of this food talk about baked, fried and boiled dough; plus those yummy pig tails have made you ravenous.  And since this is a food related post, what kind of asshole would I be if I didn't leave you with my favorite Mennonite recipe:

Plumi Moos (Sunday Soup)
4 cups water
3 cups dried fruit
1/2 package cherry Jello
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 tablespoons corn starch

Cook fruit in water until very well done.  Then mix sugar with cornstarch and enough water to make a thin paste.  Let cook a few minutes to take away the starchy taste.  Then take from stove and add cherry Jello.  Serve warm or cold.

When you're done, it should look exactly, precisely like this:

Does It?

If not, just ladle on Schmont fat until it does.  Let me know how you like it ... Atvadus!