The Casserole in the Ration Binder
At the county dairy meeting I read out my feed ration, and it turned out I had the potluck recipe card in my binder instead.
I have a binder. It is a three-ring binder with tabs, and it holds every feed ration, mineral mix and forage test I have ever run. My wife calls it my Bible. I carry it to every meeting, set it on the table and open it with the confidence of a man holding all the answers.
The county dairy meeting that year was at the community hall just outside Stephenville. Forty producers, a projector, a coffee urn that gurgled like an old tractor and a long table of covered dishes along the back wall. I was on the agenda to share my winter ration. I stood up, adjusted my glasses and opened the binder to the right tab.
What I read out loud was, 'Two cups cream of mushroom soup, one can green beans, one cup crispy fried onions, a pound of ground beef.' There was a pause. A man in the second row cleared his throat. I looked down and saw the recipe card my wife had slipped into the binder the night before. It had a little heart in the corner.
I did what any dairyman would do. I kept going. 'Mix thoroughly,' I said, 'and top with cheese.' The room exploded. A man named Harlan, who has been a dairy producer since before I could drive, wiped his eyes and said it was the first ration he had ever wanted to eat. I took a bow.
Afterward I found the real ration in the back pocket and read it properly, and several people wrote down the casserole too. My wife got three requests for the card. The dairy herd guides I keep beside the binder had good advice about winter feeding, but nothing about how to recover from a pot roast in the middle of a presentation. I got a standing invitation to speak next year on one condition: bring the casserole. It went onto a page at farm.FM, though nobody who was there has let me forget it.
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