Welcome to Proviant Foods
My story as a crafter of foods is multifaceted and is deeply informed by my life-long involvement with growing fruits and vegetables on both small and large scales. Added to this were youthful travels to remote places across the globe that allowed me to participate in extraordinary cultural living and eating experiences. The final leg of my food journey was the raising of a family on our Vermont farm where fresh delicious food was a part of our everyday family meals.
The Beginning
Home grown food has been a central part of my life from childhood. My father, a practicing surgeon by day, gardened every chance he got. He filled our tiny suburban lot with fruits and veggies, including miniature strawberries, currants, and bush cherries. He rented gardening space wherever he could find it and our family made regular trips to help with the cultivating, weeding, and harvesting.
At age 9 my parents purchased an old dairy farm, a 3 ½ hours drive away in central Wisconsin. In the old barnyard a garden was planted with all kinds of vegetables, many of which were unknown to most Midwesterners at the time. My siblings and I were commandeered to assist with planting, weeding, and harvesting, giving us the experience of cultivating food from an early age. While the garden produced an abundance of produce, my dear mother had no knowledge of how to cook the unusual vegetables such as zucchini, eggplant, and okra. She boiled or steamed pretty much everything and, as one might imagine, eggplant and zucchini steamed with no seasoning was not favorably received at the table!
Travel & Food
It was not until some years later, when my father took us on trips to urban and rural settings in and around Europe, that I experienced vegetables prepared in their traditional ways and came to appreciate their potential as delicious foods! These travel experiences and the foods enjoyed during them introduced me to a new world of what was possible in a dining experience.
We ate in a multitude of settings including meals on farms prepared by farm families from foods grown and processed exclusively on their land, as well as in urban settings where meals were sometimes lavish and carried on for hours. I had my first Fettuccine Alfredo in Rome, and I was never the same after that….the sauce was amazing!
Sharing Food
During my travels, I observed how meals were approached in a variety of households. I shared in the gathering of ingredients at the local market, watched a family pig being roasted, saw plums from a farm’s trees turn into plum brandy, observed meal preparation by women in multi-generational households, and then finally, experienced the often elaborate serving of the various meals. These experiences were the seeds of my fascination with food! They taught me what fresh delicious food was and how it was possible to create rich experiences around a table.
My knowledge from these travel experiences and the subsequent process of experimentation with foods from a variety of traditions, has brought to our family’s table innumerable meals from may lands. Our two sons have grown up to appreciate the pleasures of our home traditions at table, and with their encouragement, I am embarking on this journey of creating Proviant Foods, bringing to a broader audience some of the foods our family has come to appreciate. Please join me in the journey of bringing farm fresh foods to more people!
