Tuesday, March 30, 2021

The Good Stuff


Last night I told my husband that my foot felt better after spending a good portion of the day off of it, reading books to August and so forth. "If I would just stay off it for a week, mostly, I really think it would help."

He agreed. Said I should. 
So what did I do today? 
Decided that since it wasn't burning up hot I'd go work in the garden pulling bolted greens and processing some of them. 
Because of course! 
But it is that time where things have got to be pulled out to make room for the tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, squash, and so forth. And what a shame and a sin to waste all the goodness still there in the leaves of my beautiful greens which have given us so much pleasure this winter. So. I did what I did. I pulled the rest of the mustard greens and picked the leaves off of them. 

This is how big a mustard leaf can get. 

That's one of the batches up there on the right after I'd blanched them. I have four quart bags of those in the freezer now. I didn't pull all the kale but did pull a half row and that's what's soaking there on the left. It, too, has now been blanched and made about half a gallon's worth to bag and put in the freezer. I've still got a goodly amount of collards that I pulled and stripped leaves off but I just didn't have the energy today to finish those up. 
It's quite a process to get the greens ready for freezing. Pick them, get rid of the leaves you don't want because of bug damage or yellowing or whatever. Wash them, wash them, wash them. Drain them. Cut the stems out of the biggest ones and then roughly chop them into bite-sized-ish pieces. Throw them in a big pot of boiling water for a few minutes, drain, put in an ice bath, drain again, and then bag them. 
The Thermonster is a beast of a food processing stove. It can bring a huge pot of water to boil in about a third of the time it took my old stove. 

The whole time I was doing this I felt like a pioneer woman who wasn't really a pioneer woman at all in that pioneer women did not have freezers, freezer bags, ice makers or Thermonsters, while at the same time wondering if what I was doing was going to be worth the damn work. 
Maybe. 
Maybe not. 
I have to laugh sometimes when I read the comments on the pictures of old Florida houses that are posted in a FB group I follow. Everyone seems to envision a time when life was so simple and people sat around on the big front porches and sipped iced tea and gossiped and watched the kids play in the yard. There may have been some of that but trust me when I say that SOMEONE in that household (and it may have been mostly the hired help but certainly not all if any) was chopping the wood and keeping the cookstove going to brew the tea on and where in the hell did they get ice? Were they lucky enough to have a pump in the kitchen where they could get water or did someone have to haul it? Who was getting the supper ready? The giant mid-day dinners to feed all the people needed to work the fields and keep the houses running? Who was doing the washing up after all of that cooking and serving? Who was growing the gardens to make those meals out of? Who was taking care of the farm animals? The cows and the chickens, the horses and the hogs? 
Who cleaned the outhouse? Who dug the new one? 

Simpler times my ass. 

So I was thinking of that today and I was also thinking about the things I use most in my daily life when it comes to getting chores done and no, it's not my beloved food processor or KitchenAid or fancy kitchen gadgets of any sort. It's the big tin pan I use to put weeds in when I pull them, the giant plastic bowl I use to wash greens in or hold chopped greens in. It's the garden cart and the old canning kettle with rusted-out holes in the bottom that I also use in the garden for weeds and whatever needs toting. It's my garden trowel!
Now don't get me wrong. I don't think I could last a week without my cast iron, my knives, my coffee maker. And I love my food processor and my KitchenAid, my beautiful new stove, my refrigerator that makes ice and good Lord don't get me started on how much I love my washing machines both of clothing and dishes. But by golly, it's those old seemingly-worthless things that I grab almost daily that serve my needs so well. Hell, my favorite biscuit pan is one I found in the yard. It's aluminum (the devil's metal) but very, very heavy aluminum and I know it came from Sears And Roebuck because that's what it says on the bottom of it. 


And I swear- the tool I absolutely cannot do without in chicken-tending is an old hoe-head that I use for scraping chicken shit with. The second I found that thing I knew exactly what I needed it for. It's like some random piece of my DNA jumped up and danced, hands raised above heads shouting, "Oh yeah! Oh yeah!"

Well, that's all I have today. Tonight's menu will include a small red snapper that's been in the freezer along with a few shrimp, cheese grits of the sort that take an hour to cook because they are REAL grits, and probably a salad. I forgot to mention that I picked all the lettuce except for the butter crunch which is still growing nicely. 
Last night's egg rolls made with our own head of cabbage were supremely delicious. The difference in vegetables that were picked a few hours before they were cooked and the vegetables you can buy at the store is vast. 

Life is fine for me, at least, in Lloyd today. My foot may not feel better but my soul surely does. 

Love...Ms. Moon



20 comments:

  1. Lovely day. And yes on the amount of labor getting plants from garden to freezer.but it's so worth it. Easy for me to say, decades since I had a big vegetable garden!

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    1. I'm definitely getting to the age where just the garden in and of itself is about enough.

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  2. I had three uncles who were farmers. I only visited and looked on, or sat on the porch and stripped peas or beans or currents. The aunts worked until they went to bed, then worked again. One fed hands three meals a day. The other two just the noon time meal.

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  3. So envious that you can go to the garden and pick stuff already. I. Can't. Wait.

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  4. Again, I had to look up a foodstuff that you were eating. It seems that egg rolls are pretty much what I know as " spring rolls" ( chinese ), but egg rolls have egg in the wrapping.....more like a thin omlette? Yesterday we had the hottest March day since 1968, can you believe! It got to 24c here in the south...that's 75 F to you folks! One more day of the warm weather and then it gets back to more normal temperatures for the time of year. 13C max tomorrow. Hope that you can stay off that foot and get it better.

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    1. No- more like the spring roll except fatter and a slightly different wrapper. Mostly they are fried but I bake mine. They can have different fillings but mine generally have some broccoli slaw and chopped cabbage, green onions and tofu. They're crispy on the outside.
      I imagine that 75 IS extremely warm for you! It's in the eighties here today but for the next three days, won't get out of the sixties which is extremely cool for us!

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  5. I've often thought of all the everyday items that I depend on so much, and that often have so much backstory. And yeah...in "simpler times" we didn't have people struggling to keep extra weight off, because they worked hard and grew their own food and washed clothes by hand on a washboard and built their own houses! Can you imagine?! I'd be starving and homeless.

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    1. You are so right, Steve. If someone did manage to become overweight, it may have been due to a medical condition which they didn't/couldn't diagnose or treat then.
      And I'd be starving and homeless too.

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  6. So much for resting your foot.

    I think when we grow our own food and make meals from scratch we understand how difficult it is and how much time it takes. Much less prone to waste.

    I have tomato plants under a grow light in my kitchen and ten oak trees. Still need another six or seven weeks before we can plant outside. Sigh. You mock me with your winter garden:)

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    1. Definitely much less prone to waste when supper doesn't come from a box.
      Ah well, I may be mocking you now but it won't be long before I'm stuck in the house because it's so damn hot here.

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  7. The "good old days" were not so good for a lot of people!
    I don't have a garden that I tend to - I have a big green lawn that my son mows and a bit of landscaping plants close around the house. I have tried a few times to grow tomatoes or beans or peppers but without much success because we never knew what we were doing! I can blame our mid-western weather but I am really just lazy... I appreciate hearing about your home-grown treats!

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    1. You could try to grow a few big containers of tomatoes. Might be fun and would be pretty simple.

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  8. How right you are about things being tough in the "good old days". They were physically tough of course, but I do wonder if they had different stresses to us - no email deadlines, no work being taken over by robots and so on, but then no access to such improved medicine. That being said, there was definitely a closer sense of community then (in my opinion, having grown up in a large poor family in the inner city). Everyone pitched in and shared. If we could get that back I think life would be so much better!

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    1. Well, yes, they did have different stresses and I am sure that communities and families absolutely had to come together to help each other but I imagine that the stresses they had- like fear of not making it through the winter with food, too many mouths to feed, being dependent entirely on the weather for the growing of necessities - were pretty bad. And honestly- I think that there were probably as many assholes then as there are now.

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  9. I know what you mean about all those people wishing to go back to 'simpler' times. they wouldn't last a week before they would be crying. and the answer to 'who' is the women, as usual. I haven't had a food garden for a couple of years. I think I'm really going to try and start another small one but over here at the house, a few small raised beds to start because I do miss the fresh out of the garden food.

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    1. You're damn right about the women. I doubt that men's lives were a piece of cake either but the women worked just as hard if not harder.
      You might enjoy at least a tiny bit of dirt to grow things in, Ellen. A few tomatoes, maybe?

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  10. I guess nobody else resonated with your appreciation of the right tool however simple or secondhand or improvised, but I sure did. I have a whole bunch of things around here I have to guard carefully because otherwise they would get thrown out as junk, but they're perfect for what I want them for. Thanks for noticing and expressing it so well

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  11. Your greens are so inviting. My favourite food stuff!!!

    I tried life without a washing machine mainly because the women living in my village in this tiny African country we called paradise for a while had none and they and their families were always wearing spotless clothes. I watched them pounding and wringing and rinsing - in the river estuary and/or using an outdoor sink - and tried. There was a lot of laughter and pity.

    When I found a secretive semi legal way to import a washing machine, I could not sleep for the weeks it took to bribe and con the various customs people and someone to check the fickle electrics and the plumbing. When it was finally installed, I washed everything, literally everything. My neighbours watched and tsk tsk tsked for a day or two and went back to their washer women groups singing and gossiping and pounding.
    My wonderful machine lasted exactly 18 months, it died of a shortcut and meltdown when a cockroach decided to deposit a huge load of eggs in the casing of the control panel.

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Tell me, sweeties. Tell me what you think.