Savor the Season: Chicken Fried Steak Meets Sugar Beet Harvest
Farming Full-Time #58
I tell ya what—I'm still dreaming about this chicken fried steak I devoured last weekend at the Hobo Haus. Back in the day, when old men like me were young, and milk didn’t cost forty bucks a gallon, it was the spot.
Simpler times, sure.
But here’s the thing—what the old-timers and the folks still yearning for the days of Tradwives and chain-smoking fail to realize is that chicken fried steak this good actually exists. It’s not some lost relic of our nation’s greasy past—it’s real, and it’s glorious.
After all, this is America.
Land of the free. Home of the gravy.
Isn’t this a great country?
I’m telling you, this thing hit me so hard I time-traveled back to April. Flavor punch straight to the gut. Felt like getting drop-kicked by a gravy-soaked Chuck Norris into a pit of mashed potatoes.
If you ever find yourself in California Jr’s northern backcountry and have a hankerin' for home cooking, swing by The Hobo (yep, it’s just The Hobo now) in Newfolden—a stone’s throw off old Highway 59.
It’s still the same Highway 59 it always was, but slap 'old' in front of any highway number, and suddenly, it’s as if you’re cruising the roads of yesteryear, where gas was a ten cents a barrel, and your only worry was dodging runaway chickens and moonshine-fueled police chases.
Really amps up the street cred among foodies.
Since Route 66 is still cashing royalty checks on America’s thirst for nostalgia, I figured I’d throw old Route 59 a bone, maybe score it some attention. Poor little fella’s showing its age—potholes, cracks, the works—and it’s feeling a bit self-conscious. As a card-carrying narcissist, I get it.
The chicken-fried dream was the night’s special, the main event, so there’s a chance it won’t be on the menu when you arrive. But if you’re fortunate, you might score some of this creamy creation, black out in a calorie-fueled fever dream, and wake up with no clue where the hell you are—acid reflux be damned.
I believe I’ve just given you the coordinates for the belly of the American Dream.
You’re welcome.
The Hobo. Newfolden, Minnesota. You betcha.
Brace for Impact: Beet Trucks Incoming
Now that we’ve got the important stuff out of the way, it’s time to focus on everybody’s favorite topic: beet season safety.
Starting next week, the valley’s highways—and believe it or not, byways—will get the ultimate beat down from overloaded, uninspected farm trucks driven by folks on enough amphetamines to keep a giraffe wired to its eyeballs for a month.
That’s right, kids. It’s sugar beet season, the wonderful time of year when your odds of rear-ending a fifty-ton semi with questionable taillights (hey, Mr. DOT officer, how can you prove they weren’t working before the driver's teeth and brains scrambled them all up?) go up by 95,834%.
Consider this a friendly reminder: stay safe out there and watch for Billy Big Rigger in the rusty Mack. You know the one—with only two functioning clearance lights and a dozen violations that would send any regular trucker straight to the jailhouse. But during beet season? Farmers get a pass on inspections. Why, you ask? Honestly, I can’t remember, and I’m pretty sure no one else does either.
Meanwhile, the poor schmuck grinding eleven hours a day in his rig has to deal with some DOT clown who’d pull out the rubber glove faster than a magician pulls rabbits just to nail him on an out-of-place mudflap.
What a system. Has it always been this way?
Someone’s gonna have to remind me about the legalities of farm truck inspections back in the day. Maybe I missed it during one of my blackouts, but we used to hire a guy to inspect the farm trucks every year before harvest. They’d patch up the air leaks, adjust the brakes, and slap a little sticker on the windshield—kind of like the state park stickers you see on cars for all you lake people.
That sticker was genius, actually. It meant your overloaded beet hauler wasn’t just a death trap—it had functioning brakes and lights, so small car drivers, motorcyclists, and hippie microbuses could make it home without having their carcasses permanently fused to a truck's undercarriage.
At least it gave you some peace of mind—something the meth-heads can only offer through the first 77 hours of being awake. Anything beyond that, the message gets scrambled. Impossible to decipher, even if you’re well-versed in tweak-speak.
Now, whoever decided farmers should get away with skipping inspections had to be smoking a special kind of crack—the kind only politicians smoke in airport bathrooms while soliciting oral sex.
Don’t these people know who they’re dealing with?
I’ve worked on 26 different farms in my lifetime—and let me tell you, a good percentage of them have been (and likely still are) CFs.
What’s a CF, you ask? It’s what my favorite Wall Street writer, Jared Dillian, calls a cheap fuck. The type of guy who’d haggle over a used spoon at a yard sale and then calculate his 'savings' over dinner like he just made off with the crown jewels.
Before you accuse me of having the financial morals of some central banker or government, hold the phone (for you young kids, that’s something we used to say back when we actually talked on the phone instead of using them to ogle videos all day)—there’s nothing wrong with being frugal.
I'm not saying you need to finish beet season and blow it all in Vegas (though if you do, let me know—I’ll haul a couple of loads just to tag along). But, for Slippery Pete’s sake, don’t take it to the extreme. You know the guy I’m talking about—the one who’s always bragging about scoring Vans in the Wal-Mart bargain bin and thinks anyone who doesn’t shop clearance is an idiot.
Nobody likes a CF, especially the guy calculating everyone's tip at the restaurant.
And these are the guys who get to skip inspections? What brainiac politician thought that was a good idea?
You've got meth-soaked drivers crawling out of gutters and into ninety-thousand-pound rigs like extras from Mad Max: Beyond the Beet Field, and you think it’s okay to skip the brake check because “they’ve already ruined their own lives, what more could go wrong?”
Yeah, Minnesota, real bright. You’ll give hog farmers hell for something as harmless as accidentally letting a fart rumble a church pew, but the guy who duct-taped his brake lines and filled his tires with pure adrenaline?
Nah, he’s good.? Sure, let him skip the inspection. Makes perfect sense.
Won’t be long before these yo-yos start telling us to fertilize our crops with Jimmy Carter’s tears, nonfat yogurt, and bacon grease. And who do you think they'll punish once they’ve got that all figured out?
You guessed it—hog farmers. Heaven forbid they get a free pass. They’ll probably be fined just for showing up.
In all seriousness, stay safe out there, gang.
The days are getting darker, deer are running around like kamikaze kangaroos, and somewhere out by a water trailer in a sugar beet field, a trucker who’s been up for five days just took another hit.
Maybe staying in tonight isn’t such a bad idea after all. At least the only thing charging down the hallway will be your kid’s tricycle instead of a tweaked-out trucker in a fifty-ton death cage.
It’s a jungle out there.
Godspeed.