Cukes and Tomatoes and Pickles, Oh My!

Holy smokes! Literally!! Where I live it’s been over 100 degrees F for the past WEEK! Of COURSE some of the cukes had to decide this was the perfect time to ripen. Sigh. So Monday, in 102-104* I was canning bread & butter pickles. Only got 13 pints (did I mention it’s a small garden?), but that’s 13 more than I had before! I did it in stages and early in the morning so I didn’t overtax the one and only window ac unit we have for the entire house. Poor thing has been running pretty much nonstop. I think last night was the first night in a while it was actually turned off. Also the first night in 3 that we were able to sleep in our own bed instead of on an air mattress on the floor in the living room in front of ye olde ac unit. But I digress.

This was my second time of canning pickles, and it turned out just as good as the first time a couple of years ago. But since we were on our last jars, I had to plant more to can for the next year or so. The cukes are ripening in intervals, thank goodness, because if I’d’ve had to can them all on Monday, I’d’ve died from heat exhaustion. I think the ac unit would have as well.

From this....

...and this...

To this! Yummy!

All this canning and the talk of canning takes me back a few years. Wish it took my memory of canning back as well! I’ve been wanting to can tomatoes, but I just cannot recall how to do it. I remember Grandma put up the best tomato juice for years, until she started adding celery salt & seed to it. Then she’d get mad when I refused to drink it. “I don’t understand. Tomato juice is your favorite! You’ve always drank it. Now drink it!” But I’d complain that it tasted funny, and I didn’t like it. To this day I hate celery salt, and I don’t care WHAT you use it in! I can see no good reason for it to be used on food, or even for its very existence.

I remember going out to the tomato patch with Grandpa to check the ripeness. When we made these little trips, Grandpa always had a salt shaker in his back pocket. We’d walk through the patch, picking a tomato here and there and “testing the taste”. I don’t know how there was ever enough tomatoes to can, whatwith all the testing trips we made!

Then came the picking. Grandpa showed me how to start at the far end of the patch first to make fewer and shorter trips as the picking progressed. We had bushel basket after bushel basket of tomatoes! I was in heaven! Then came the canning.

Right about here is where I, the perfect tomboy, usually found something ELSE to do besides work in an extremely hot kitchen in the middle of an Ohio summer! I didn’t mind the work of picking the fruit; I carried a salt shaker in my OWN back pocket to enjoy the benefits. But canning? I couldn’t clear out of the farmhouse fast enough! Mom and Grandma sweated (none of that “glowing” for working farmwives!) in the canning steambath for a couple of days until all the tomatoes were processed. They made a game for us kids of listening for the top to pop and counting them to make sure all the jars had sealed.

Once popped and cooled, the jars were carried down to the dugout basement and set on deep shelves carved into the cool darkness of the ground, where they could stay for years…or until we came to visit and I drank them! Man! There is absolutely nothing on this earth better than home canned tomato juice straight from the cool cellar! And the canned tomatoes? Spectacular to bite into and to use in stews and such!

But now that I’m an adult? I wish I’d stayed in the kitchen. I wish I’d learned these things. But since I can’t go back, I must go forward. I’ve read up on canning tomatoes. I’ve even purchased the Ball Blue Book for home canning. Clear photos and illustrations of such quality that even I should be able to do it. Do I risk it, or plunk down $20 for a canning class with the college extension? I’ve been unemployed since April of 2008, so I really have to watch my pennies. Since I have this canning book, and I’ve been in on various stages of the canning (when I COULDN’T escape *lol*), I’m hoping some of the process has sunk in. That, and the fact that I asked my neighbor to let me help when SHE does her tomato canning (she also uses celery salt *ick!*) this year, will be exactly what I need, and I can save my money for more important things….like jars!

Peas in A Pod

Here it is, the middle of July, and I had just sat down at my deck table to shell peas. As I shelled, I’d pop the occasional pea into my mouth instead of the bowl. Memories of sitting with my grandmother in the front porch swing to shell peas came pouring back as I worked the pods.

Sometimes I can see the sun setting as we shell, the sky in deep pinks and purples with a hint of orange. Other times the sun is still shining strong, yet the breeze through the porch keeps the flies and other pests away. As we shelled, we talked. About anything. Church, school, family, farm, whatever came to mind. Maybe I’d tell her how I’d seen old Maude, the pregnant Hereford, escape her paddock again by jumping the 5 foot tall fence. She had a habit of doing that for each and every one of her pregnancies.

Or maybe we talked about the ponies. Grandpa had got me a Shetland pony who was all black except for a white spot on her forehead the size of a 50 cent piece. She was given the unimaginative name of Star. I’ll write about her later, never fear.

Whatever we talked about, what we were really doing was bonding. I was always fascinated at how Grandma could shell the peas so fast with her injured right hand. For a short time she had worked at a plastics factory to get extra money, and in reaching into an oven to retrieve the just-baked brush, comb & mirror set, the oven door malfunctioned, closing on her wrist. It caused severe damage; her fingers would never straighten again, set permanently into a claw.

But being a farm woman, she made do. What could not be cured must be endured, I’d say. Surgeries could not reverse the damage, and the metal contraption she got from the doctors for physical therapy more often than not was used to entertain us kids. What kid would not be entranced by something metal with leather thongs and rubber bands that fit over your hand like a gauntlet? We were warned about using it to actually punch each other. Grandma had a habit of handing a knife to us and having us cut our own instruments of punishment off a tree outside! We kids learned quickly!!

Grandma wasn’t even slowed down by the accident. She continued to knit, garden, can, tend the animals, whatever it took to keep the farm going. So there we sat, my young legs trying to push the swing into a real SWING, and Grandma’s feet planted firmly on the floor, keeping it down to a slight, steady rocking. She’d snap the top off the pea pod, pop it open, and zip a thumb right through the pod, peas falling into the bowl in her lap. She laughed when I tried to imitate her and the peas went everywhere BUT in the bowl.

I’m a little annoyed that she never clued me in on how good fresh raw peas tasted, but then, if I had known that back then, there would have been fewer peas in my bowl. I LOVE peas! Any way, shape or form. So I guess my Grandma knew what she was doing, as usual.

My peas are done now, and it’s time to plant more if I want some for fall. It is probably too late, but I’ll have to try anyway. I promised my backyard neighbor that I’d plant them along the fence line this time, since she loves peas as much as I do! As long as she leaves the peas on MY side to me, she can have whatever grows on HER side.

The Fight Is On!

When my brothers and I were kids, two of us had to wear glasses (we still do!) The youngest (Lee) was SUPPOSED to wear them for reading, but refused. So my other brother (Glenn) and I hated him. Nothing personal, you understand!

The number one rule in our house at that time, besides not running in and out of the air conditioned living room (that meant letting the cold out of the room every time we went thru the curtain!), was this; if we got into a fight with each other, the glasses had to come off first! Period. End of sentence. Woe be to the one who forgot and risked or actually did get their glasses broken!

Number two rule was to take it outside. That made a lot of sense, seeing how we were living in a tiny little house at the time on our grandparent’s farm. I can’t remember how many fights. or “tussles”, we had back then, but I do remember they fell off sharply when at one point grandpa came out with a folding chair and made a production of setting it up and sitting down to enjoy the free show. I’m sure we kids felt rather silly when he did that. I was rather embarrassed!

You know, I’m constantly amazed at how well we turned out, and at the fact that we managed to survive childhood relatively unscathed.

Goodbye, Uncle Walt

My grandparents had an old black and white Zenith back in the 60’s and 70’s. One of the first to have a remote control, which was top of the line back then. The remote, affectionately called “the clicker”, had 3 buttons; one for on and off, one for channel up, and the last for channel down. We got 3 stations on bad days, and 4 on good ones. They were ABC (channel 4), NBC (channel 6), and CBS (channel 10). Oh, and PBS, which was 32 or 34 if you had the UHF antenna pointed in the right direction and the sun was shining.

There were just a few rules that were sacrosanct when it came to the old black & white Zenith: Sunday morning before church we watched the televangelists, and if church got out early Sunday night we could catch most of Disney! Saturday evening was wrestling, and the weekday evening news was ALWAYS CBS with Walter Cronkite. No ifs-ands-or-buts about it. If our chores were done early we could watch Flippo, which was usually great. Or the Banana Splits. But the news was Walter Cronkite, as no one else would suffice.

This carried over to my parents. I believe they tended to watch Walter as well. He made us feel … comfortable, I guess…when his face was on the screen, giving us the good as well as the bad. He didn’t use big words, or act like he had to talk down to the general public. He didn’t “purtify” or make flowery speech. He gave it to us straight, whether it was man landing on the moon, or the assassination of a president. He reacted to the news as well, showing us that he was human, a man of the people, so to say.

I don’t think he ever made a misstep in his job or his life. He was the first reporter to be called an “anchor”, and in that he was aptly named. He anchored entire families to the television to hang on his every word. Nowadays entire families are split up: one is the in living room, actually watching the television, while another is in the bedroom getting their news online. Maybe a child is at the library, skimming over the MSN headlines, or in their own bedroom, watching their own television, away from the rest of the family…wherever they might be.

He popped up once in a while after his retirement, and every time I heard his name or saw his picture, I’d flash back to those times spent on my grandparent’s farm. Grandpa worked for the Electric company for his full time job, then came home to his modest 15 acre farm and took care of a couple of cows, a pony or two, the chickens, and a few other odds and ends critters he had running around in the pasture. Maybe some weeding or tilling the vegetable patch. Then in to wash up and relax in the living room with Walter while the women (grandma and mom) got supper ready. Me being a tomboy, I usually found something better to do, or else I’d sneak into the living room with grandpa and we’d watch the news together.

Walter was so a part of my childhood that it almost feels like I’ve lost a family member. Maybe a kindly uncle, or someone along that line. I, for one, will miss him. And that’s the way it was.