From the land to the table.
Sara Hageman Schenck has built a life around God, family, feeding people, stewarding farmland, keeping family stories, and enjoying the life in front of her.
It started at fourteen.
When Sara was fourteen, her dad asked her to cook dinner for ten business clients. She did, and she loved every minute.
That dinner was an early glimpse of the woman she would become: someone who plans well, makes a home wherever she is, and knows how to feed the people in front of her, whether that is ten business clients or a hundred people at the Labor Day dove hunt.
What the generations taught her
Sara grew up in Remington, Indiana, shaped by family, faith, farm life, and women who knew how to make plenty from what they had.
Her mother’s example established the order: God and faith first, then family, then the farm. At Grandma Ethel’s table, there was always room for five more. At the family sugar camp, five generations of Schencks have made maple syrup, with as many as fifty people coming through for breakfast on Sugar Camp Sundays.
The family history also holds hard seasons. There are stories of loss met by community, land bought and built up after the Depression, and faith that held when life did not go according to plan.
Making room at the table
For Sara, it comes down to real food: fresh food, the food she was raised on. She is grateful to have grown up on a farm with food that tasted like it should.
After years of stomach pain, she learned that gluten was the main culprit, and relearned how to cook so that same real food could stay on the table. That experience shaped the Healthy adaptations in Remington Roots. They are not about turning heritage food into diet food. They are there so more people can eat the food that feels like home.
Stewarding the land
Sara is the owner and managing broker of Hageman Realty and the fourth generation of her family to lead the firm. She holds the Accredited Land Consultant designation and works with families buying, selling, and managing farmland.
Her work at the brokerage is another expression of the same responsibility that runs through her home and cookbook: care for what has been entrusted to you, think beyond the present moment, and help the next generation inherit something stronger.
The Labor Day dove hunt.
Every Labor Day, Sara and Shad plant food plots and sunflowers and set out seventeen hay bales, two shooters to a bale, and open the farm to family and invited guests for two or three days of dove hunting. She cooks for fifty to a hundred people. Dove bites are the signature, and they do not last long on the platter.
Hunting is a family affair. Her husband and son do most of the shooting, and her daughter is learning fast. The rest of the year keeps its own calendar: turkey and morels in spring, deer in the fall, duck in the winter.
There is a lot of wild game in the recipes because it is their way of life. They eat what they harvest, whether that is from the hunt or the garden.
Why she wrote it down
Sara gathered recipes from elderly aunts before they passed. She knew that if someone did not write down the recipes, stories, and practical knowledge, parts of the family record would disappear.
Remington Roots is her answer. It is a cookbook made to be cooked from, written in, made your own, and passed down.
Love God, enjoy your life, and share both with the people in front of you. That is the whole idea, in her own words.