This morning I have been emailing a friend of mine who lives in the Dallas, TX area. We used to work together some years ago and still keep in touch. I was talking about my wife being gone to the beach with her daughter and the daughter's mother-in-law this Mother's Day weekend and told her I was thinking of making a couple of meals I really love but don't get when my wife is around. Various reasons. One is they are unhealthy and they will probably make me quite sick but I do love them so much.
They are meals from my childhood. The Ironic thing is back when they were common and available I did not like them at all. It got me to thinking about the relationship I had with food in my childhood years compared to the way it is today.
I grew up in a pretty rural setting where everyone had a garden and preserved their own vegetables. There were some pretty good time and some times that were a pure pain in the butt. I know we always had a garden but I don't recall a lot about them so much as I do about my grandparent's garden.
My grandfather planted faithfully by the Farmer's Almanac. I can recall quite clearly him telling me that potatoes should be planted "in the sign of the bowels". That fell in February and if the ground was still too wet to be worked he would fret and fret the potatoes would not do well. So he would get Virgil Boyd (One of the three Boyd brothers who married three of my Aunt Burnice's dauthters) to bring over his mule and plow and turn the garden in the bottom by the creek. I supposed he also did the one across from the chicken house but I don't remember that one. But, it got done some way.
After he'd turn the bottom he'd attach a "drag" to the single tree (look it up) and smooth off the turned ground. When I was younger I'd sit on the drag and add my weight to it. If we'd have had a harrow I think the ground would have been harrowed before dragging. Then when the ground was flattened he'd attach the 'laying off' plow and make long furrows for planting the seeds.
You've seen the little spots on potatoes? They are called 'eyes'. We'd sit and cut up a sack of seed potatoes into small chunks but we had to make sure at least one eye was in each chunk as that is where the vines grow out of. Then we'd walk the furrows doing the planting. One person (generally me) would carry a bucket of cut up potatoes and drop about three of them about a foot apart in the furrow. Behind me someone came with a bucket of fertilizer dropping some between the potatoes where the fertilizer did not touch. Last came someone with a hoe to cover up the potatoes and fertilizer.
This part of gardening I never minded. I always enjoyed the planting.
This was pretty much the same procedure for everything. We would plant corn, beans, potatoes. Other things were planted with "sets". They would get seeds and fill a long bread pan with dirt and plant the seeds and let them grow indoors until time to plant. Then we'd take and put them in the ground. Tomatoes and cucumbers were done this way mostly.
Then there were things we grew in raised beds from seeds or, in the case of onions, small onions called 'onion sets'. Lettuce and onions were planted very early in the Spring. About the same time as potatoes and they were planted in raised beds.
This is about where my real interest in gardening ended. The rest of it was just hard work and that was one thing I was never into. The biggest pain in the butt was when the harvest came in and it was time to preserve the vegetables. I remember my grandmother and mother working all day in the kitchen with an old coal cook stove canning tomatoes, making pickles and sauer kraut. Kraut was the one I particularly hated.
They would take a large dishpan and cut up the cabbage heads into chunks until the pan was almost full then I would have to take the 'chopper' and chop it down to where it was kraut sized pieces of cabbage.
The chopper was an instrument with a horizontal wooden (or plastic) handle with two long tines with blades on the ends and fixed in place. In between these two tines there was a third blade on a spring that stuck out just a little farther than the two fixed bladed. I'd have to take this and chop and chop and chop... I did not enjoy that at all. And, I did not even enjoy eating the kraut. The one reward was I got to eat the cabbage 'cores'. I did like those.
Well, that is enough for the day. I'll continue my food meandering on another day.
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