Something I learned from my mother

 Since yesterday was a cool and rainy day, I made chili.  I make it from scratch using the recipe from an older Better Homes and Garden recipe.  I consider it a very healthy meal, with more vegetables in it than meat.  

I was reminded of another time I set out to make this same chili about two years ago.  Ground beef was pretty costly at the time, because the Covid mess had made food prices go way up.  I was making chili.  I browned the meat with the onions, bell pepper, and garlic.  Then I added the tomatoes (frozen, from my garden) and tomato sauce.  I added the six tablespoons of what I thought was chili powder and was just about to add the kidney beans when I noticed a mistake:  I had grabbed the wrong spice!  I had put six tablespoons of cayenne pepper in it, and no chili powder!  I normally use about half a teaspoon of cayenne; the recipe doesn’t call for it, but we like a little spice in our chili.

Trust me, nobody would want to eat chili with six tablespoons of heat added.  Meanwhile, I could have cried thinking about throwing away a pound and a half of meat.  It didn’t take me long to figure out a way to save it.

I let what I had in the pan cool, got some freezer bags out, put 1/2 cup of this fiery mess in each bag and put them in the freezer.  Ever since then, I make my chili by the usual recipe, I add a frozen 1/2 cup of heat.  It gives us the exact amount of cayenne pepper we like, while little by little we are saving that one-and-a-half pound of meat.  I think yesterday may have been the last of it.

I know it seems silly to others to go to such extremes.  At that time, that amount of 80% lean ground beef probably hadn’t cost more than six or seven dollars.  But if my mother, who was married in 1932 during the Great Depression, ever taught me anything, it was this:  DON’T WASTE FOOD!

Mothers Day

I am putting my daughter's Mothers Day greeting from Facebook in my blog so I'll have it in the future.  It was better than any card she could have sent.  She probably stole the picture from my blog, or from Facebook.  

Rachel Fierro is with Donna M. Wood.  

Happy Mother's Day to this pajama-gardening, chicken-carrying, song writing, cow-loving Kitchen Magician. I love you!

Happy Mother's Day to this pajama-gardening, chicken-carrying, song writing,  cow-loving Kitchen Magician. I love you!

            

For some reason, the next comments refuse to be the same size as the first ones.  Oh well, most people know how to make the words larger if they can't read them.  There were other comments, but I really liked all of these.  Any time Cliff gets a chance to comment on my beauty and greatness (ha!) he lets people know how amazing I am.

Strawberry time

Cliff and I have had strawberries on our cereal for three days straight.  We also had strawberry shortcake once already, and the berries are just getting started.  Here's what I picked this morning:

This is before I washed them, so they have dirt on them, thanks to all the rain we are (thankfully) receiving.

I have a small patch on the southwest corner of the garden; these planted themselves by crawling over the old strawberry bed.

And another on the southeast corner; I moved and planted those myself, carrying new plants from the old site.  There would have been more if it had rained last year.  Look at that bright red berry on the end.

If you have never tasted home-raised strawberries, you're missing out.  When strawberries are raised commercially, they choose a version of strawberries that are very firm, so they can travel well; they are never as naturally sweet as home garden berries.  For a couple weeks or so, we are eating a breakfast fit for royalty, putting two cups of berries over one cup of cereal.  I add a little cream to our two-percent milk, also... and yes, some sugar, but not much.

Riverbend Ed, if you are reading this, I will tell you that my parents planted "everbearing" strawberries one time in their long lives.  My father said they had very few strawberries compared to the June bearing varieties.  Since my mom needed plenty to freeze and plenty for jams, my father tilled out the everbearing after that one year.  I'll be anxious to see how you fare with yours.  I wouldn't mind trying them myself if they work for you.  

I shouldn't have planted this many tomatoes

Those closest plants are Yukon Gold.  I did a bad job of planning my garden this year, and I also had some failures, what with hail, wind, and pouring rains trying to defeat my plants.  There is a row of later red onions beyond those peas yonder.  I transplant cabbages in any little space I see.  

I set out a few cantaloupe plants a month ago, but because of wind and hail, they are just now starting to prosper.  It's the same with the four sweet potato plants, the peppers, and the eggplant.

Every year is different, but I always get lots of pleasure from my garden.

Things you probably would rather not know

This morning I was remembering my summertime visits to my Grandma Stevens’ little farm.  I’d stay for a week every time.  I played in the woods across the road from her house for hours.  Sometimes Uncle Leo’s kids would come up and play, or I’d walk to their house.  They lived just up the road from Grandma a mile or so away.  

On one of my visits I was there having the time of my life as usual; it was approaching bedtime when Grandma said to me, “We’re going to wash our feet out on the porch.”  She got the enamel-wear bowl she used for hand-washing, put warm water in it, and set it below the two steps that went down into the porch.  Then she took off her shoes, sat down on the top of the steps, put her feet in the bowl, and washed them.  I was rather puzzled about it; why was she showing me how to wash my feet?  I had never done that before when I stayed at her house, but after this happened, I always washed my feet before bed at her house. 

I stole this picture from Ebay.  This is the closest thing we had to a bathroom sink.  It sat beside a bucket of water we had to carry in from the pump.

I should be embarrassed about what I’m about to tell you now, but I’m not:  I never wore shoes unless I had to, from the time I was a toddler.  I still love walking barefoot.  And for some reason my mother never made me wash my feet before I went to bed.  This was back when my parents and I, as well as most of our relatives, didn’t have running water and bathrooms in their homes.  You washed using a soapy wash cloth all week long and had a bath in a round galvanized wash tub on Saturday so you’d be clean to go to church the next day.  

But in summer when school was out, I can’t for the life of me remember ever washing my feet before going to bed.  I ran around going through puddles and gardens and fields, but I do not recall ever washing my feet regularly.  Here’s the strange thing:  I don’t remember my mother ever telling me to wash my feet at bedtime, either!  I never got that message until I was at Grandma’s house that time, and I don’t think I took that lesson home with me, either!  My mom wasn’t a dirty lazy person.  She washed the clothes in a wringer washer, and back then women wanted their white clothes WHITE!  She used bleach and bluing and hung sheets on the line with pride, because other people might see them.   But she never said anything to me about how dirty my sheets were (not that I would have noticed they were dirty anyhow).  We moved to the city when I was eleven, and it wasn’t long until we had a house with running water and a bathtub.

The bottoms of my feet have always looked dirty in summertime, though.  It isn’t that I don’t bathe, but if you’re walking outside barefoot all the time, it would take bleach to clean the bottoms of your feet; soap and water won’t do it.  I used to garden barefoot, milk the cows barefoot, step in cow manure barefoot (accidentally, but still); I’d go to the nearest hose or puddle or pond, wash it off, and go on my way.  I actually had a friend one time whisper to me that her mother wanted me to start washing my feet before I went to bed at her house. I was twenty years old at the time!

True confessions.  But you all knew I was a little weird, right?

Oh, these lovely mornings

I can’t wait for full daylight before I go to the garden.  I always know there will be some sort of surprise out there:  a different color of iris blooming, or lazy seeds that I had given up on ever germinating that come up all at once.  Gabe the dog and Blue, the cat are always chasing one another in the garden and making me laugh.  Throughout the dull, dreary winter, I revisit these things in my mind:  I don’t know that I have missed a spring sunrise for many years.  I’m always up around 4 A.M. just because I’m made that way, and many times I’ll step outside just to see where the moon and stars are on that day, long before the sun comes up.  I feel at peace with the earth when I’m outside. 

Cliff laughs at the fact I’m outside when he wakes up around 7 o’clock, knowing I’m out in the garden.  I always set up the coffeepot for him before I go out, so he only has to turn it on to have his coffee.

Last week I chose to believe that our weather is going to get back to normal after three dry years.  So to prove that to myself, I put all the soaker hoses away in the garage.  The last two years I wouldn’t have had much of anything in my garden without those soaker hoses.  Right after I put them away Thursday morning, we received yet more rain, as if to reassure me.  Peas are blooming and the green beans are starting to grow.  Cliff has been eating his white radishes right along and we’ve had spinach a couple of times, as well as lettuce.  Now the lettuce is bitter, though.  I googled “bitter lettuce” to see what makes it that way; well, apparently there are plenty of causes:  Dry weather, too much water, hot weather, not enough nutrients.  Well, I’m not going to worry about it, because there are other things I’ve been waiting to plant to plant in that space anyhow.

I do expect to be picking some strawberries next week sometime.  I’ve found a couple of ripe ones.  There’s only one packet of frozen strawberries from last year left in the freezer.  

I have too many tomato plants set out.  I do it every year, hoping that one variety or another will keep us eating tomatoes until October.  I even put out two more Jet Star plants yesterday, because they seem to be less blighty than some of the others.  Before I had ever heard of or seen tomato blight, which showed up in the late eighties in my world, I only ever had two varieties:  Big Boy and Rutgers.  Alas, those don’t last long enough for me to get a ripe tomato off them, these days.  

This was taken just as the sun was coming up after two inches of rain.  

You know what I’m doing this time of year

 I never thought I’d be proud to have a big healthy weed in my garden, but this one makes me happy.  It’s a milkweed plant I chose to put in my garden last year to draw the monarch butterflies.  It’s the only plant they eat and lay their eggs on.  It spreads rapidly, so that means I’ll have more weeds to take down.  That’s OK, because I’m out there with a hoe killing weeds every day anyway.  

Next, I have Blueberry plants.  I put them all out last summer, but below is the oldest one, which has the start of some berries.

 This pepper plant has been in the gardon for three weeks.  It has tried its best to grow, but we have had a lot of high winds that have tried to kill it several times.  It’s ragged, but it’s tough.

There are 4 berry plants near the fence.  That’s because they need a trellis for support, and I’m hoping I can use the fence for that.  The first three are boysenberries; they are a hybrid plant, having blackberry, raspberry, loganberry, and dewberry in their parentage.  You can see the cat is messing around with the third one.  These three plants came to me looking like sticks with roots.  I assumed they’d put leaves on those “sticks” like a tree would, and had almost given up on them ever coming to life.  In the last week, they let me know they were just fine, but the sticks still look like sticks; the new life came out of the ground from the roots at the base of the “sticks”.  I have no idea if the stick parts will come to life.  Beyond the cat is a red raspberry plant.  

I often do use little sticks to make my rows, but the cat makes it difficult to keep them upright.

Oh yes, look at my asparagus plants!  In two years they’ll be big enough to eat.  Only one root failed to make a plant.

On another note, week before last I took my guitar to the two churches and sang one of the songs I wrote, Patchwork Quilt.  It tells how Christians are all different, but can still work together for good.  Last Sunday my friend Paula found one of those envelopes meant for people to put their donations in; it had been torn open and written on.  The pew is one where several children always sit, and obviously it was a child’s writing.  Paula handed it to me and said, “Look at this.  Children actually do listen in church.”

I had to laugh about the way the child tried to spell quilt.