Lights, Camera, Cooking!

Hollywood was on shaky ground last week as Smokey House Center became the star of the show for a day as the production crew of Danger Men Cooking arrived to cook and film for our Thursday Lunch. Head chef Gary Schmidt laid out the menu for an All American Cookout: hamburgers, bar-b-que chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, pasta salad and mint sun-tea. Who could resist a meal like that?

Before all the filming and action of the big day there was a good deal of preparation to do and the Field Studies crew, who would be the stars of the show the following day, spent Wednesday with work pants on learning about and harvesting the foods they would need. Carrots, kohlrabi, cabbage, potatoes, green beans, wax beans, broccoli, zuchini, summer squash, onions and herbs were all selected, collected and washed clean. To wrap up a good day of harvesting the crew spread out over Smokey House Center’s property searching for spearmint. Stream sides are the perfect place to find mint for tea and the best part is letting your eyes stay busy looking at goldenrod gals and watching orb spiders catch their lunch while your nose does all of the searching.

Thursday morning everyone scrubbed the harvest dirt out from under their fingernails and got down to cooking. There were 40 burgers to be made, chickens to be cut, veggies to be chopped and plenty of mixing and spicing as well. A table full of Field Studies Youth, their focus as sharp as the knife blades as they chopped away, others surrounding a big bowl of ground beef to be mixed chatting as old friends, still others dodging smoke rising from the freshly lit charcoal. The cooking was everywhere, and so was Chef Gary as he gave instructions and assistance, teaching students how to use knives, form a good burger, spice a salad, cook a potato.

The food was ready just in time for lunch and the compliments were not made out of kindness alone. The food was excellent and almost every scrap of it had come from our farm.

The Thursday lunch day always ends in the best way possible, everyone sits back, takes a deep breath – and eats!

With Thursday now behind us the film crew, almost invisible in the background all day, has their work to do editing and you can all look forward to seeing the action for yourselves on when Danger Men Cooking airs this fall on GNAT-TV. Check back again for video clips if you miss the episode on TV.