How I learned to cook

I've tried to remember the times Mother tried to get me to bake something as a kid, and I can only think of one time.  A friend had given her a recipe for a chocolate cake, and for whatever reason, she wanted me to make it.  I was in the fifth grade.  Why she wanted me to try something like that for my first baking challenge, I do not know.  It was in the mid-fifties:  there was no electric mixer in the kitchen, and I think I was supposed to stir the batter with a spoon for 300 times.  I did finally get it in the oven, and when it was done, it looked and smelled good.

Now back in that time, most women had pottery crocks to hold their salt, instead of leaving the salt in the box it came in; at least that's how it was in Harrison County, Missouri.  Unfortunately, I didn't realize that, and I put salt in  thinking it was sugar.  My bad.  The chickens wouldn't even eat it.  Maybe that's why my mom never asked me to cook again.  

When we moved to the Harlem area of Kansas City, Mother did have me fix Chef Boyardee spaghetti sometimes though, so when she got home from work she didn't have to make our meal.  Really, you could hardly call that "cooking". 

My brother-in-law offered to take me to my job in North Kansas City, and I think my mom took me home in the evening.  However, soon after I got that job, my parents moved to Blue Springs.  My folks wanted me to learn to drive, but I refused; I had taken driver's school at North Kansas City High School, and the teacher did nothing but make fun of me in front of the other kids after he saw I knew nothing about driving.  The thing is, I was scared to death.  I still have no desire to drive.

When my parents moved, I got an apartment on 11th street in Kansas City and used the KC busses to go to work and other places.  Anyway, once I was on my own if I wanted some good food, I was going to have to fix it.  All I really cooked at first was Campbell's Soup, pancakes, and toasted cheese sandwiches.  I certainly couldn't eat out, because my job started me at minimum wage.  Later on I moved to another apartment right down the road from my job in North Kansas City, and I began learning to cook.  My sister is one of the best cooks ever, and I knew she cooked out of a Better Home and Gardens cookbook, so I went somewhere and bought one.

The first things I tried out were sweets.  I made cookies of all kinds, and then worked on making pie crust.  That cookbook taught me everything I wanted to know about cooking and baking, although when I married Clifford in 1966, I knew very little about how to cook meats except for ground beef, sausage, and bacon.  Remember, I wasn't making much money, and the largest raise I ever got was five cents.

Why am I telling you all this?  Well, I absolutely ruined that book letting things splash on it after several years of marriage, and the pages were falling out; I threw it away.  I bought another newer Better Home and Garden book, but they had mostly different recipes, and not many were my favorites.  I had bought several of their newer used books on Ebay through my life, but very few of my kind of recipes exist in them.  Last week I found one like my first one, though.  It was in pretty good shape, and when it arrived, I spent a lot of time just looking and remembering all the things that book had given to me.  Believe me, it won't be sitting anywhere near where I am cooking; it's mainly just a look back in time.  

Here are some of the recipes from this book I've been making for sixty years:

    

One thing though:  When I made a peach pie last week, I decided to use the pie crust recipe in an old Betty Crocker cookbook just for a change, and I liked that pie crust better than the one I've made for sixty years.  

You can always learn something new.

Oh, and I just remembered what people call that salt thing:  Salt cellar!  Also Here's a more detailed breakdown:

• Salt Cellar:

  This is the most common and formal term for the container. 
• Salt Box:

  This term is also frequently used, particularly for open-topped containers. 
• Salt Pig:

  This term often refers to a specific type of salt cellar, typically a wider, open-topped container, often ceramic, shaped like a pig. 
• Other terms:

  Depending on the specific design or context, you might also hear terms like "open salt" or simply "salt". 

The things I CAN do

It's easy, isn't it, to notice things gone wrong in your life?  If you begin to think too much about happenings you don't like, it gets overwhelming.  For instance, my tomatoes this year are even worse than they have ever been, and if you have followed me on all this drivel, you know how I love tomatoes.  Oh yes, and the cantaloupe:  I had a photo of myself holding the first one, the one that almost made it but didn't, because it was partly rotted from the mud after a rain.  The rest have been much worse than that, and I have had to buy cantaloupe if I want some.

But lately I've decided to think about the things in my garden that do go well, and I realize most of the foods I grow get along just fine.  Green beans, corn, spinach in it's early season, peas, sweet potatoes, turnips, eggplant, zucchini, radishes, even carrots sometimes.

My husband is having frequent dizzy spells again, and he's so tired of fighting it; that makes it easy for me to give in to depression because he doesn't deserve it.  He'll have a week or so of being able to do a few things, then the next morning he can hardly walk without falling.  The only thing the medical community has given him is some exercises, which do nothing for him.  So all he can do is sit on the couch.  

I don't drive, and every time we go shopping I pray we make it; I am now a Walmart Plus member, so even here, I can get anything we need, although we are 15 miles from the nearest store.  There's no charge for that, as long as I buy more than $35 dollars' worth... plus a small tip for the person bringing it.  To see my husband have to go through this upsets me, but all I can do is just try to be nice to him, because I can't even imagine how he stands it.  I do thank God that I have my husband beside me still.  Even with his trials, he is always trying to take good care of me, as he has done for fifty-eight years.    

I try to do my 10,000 steps each day.  I'll be glad when the days aren't in the nineties so I can actually enjoy the outside again.  We get some laughs watching E.R., because the doctors and nurses do things in that show that no hospital would allow.  For instance, one of the doctors sneaked around to heal a horse outside of the hospital in a horse trailer because his little girl wanted him to.  Yeah, that would happen.

We have always made jokes about everything and everybody, when it's just us here, and that is probably much of the reason we are still together.

Never lose your sense of humor.

Through any trials, I always remember this old poem I've put on my blog before:  

The optimist fell ten stories.
And at each window bar
He shouted to his friend below:
“I'm all right so far!”

Author unknown

I'm surprised I am still alive

 I almost always played outside from the time I was old enough to understand where I could and couldn't go alone; I found very little fun inside the house unless Mother was cooking something good.  Yes, it's fun to eat in a house when my mother was cooking.  If she baked a cake, I licked not only the spoon, but the bowl also.  If she baked a pie, she cooked the little scraps of pie dough she had cut off and gave them to me.  Some folks have told me their mothers put sugar and cinnamon on the dough before cooking theirs, but I liked it just plain.  But I digress.

In spring, summer, and fall, I always had chiggers becauses they live in the grass, and I did too.  I don't remember having much trouble with mosquitoes then, in Iowa or Missouri either.  Oh, but those chiggers found their blood on the most intimate parts of my body!  Their favorite place, bar none, was my belly button.  I had trouble getting to sleep because they made me itch so badly.  I'd stick my finger in trying to scratch it, but that only seemed to make it worse!  

I probably shouldn't tell you this, but at a certain age around two years old, and sometimes lasting a lot longer, children are pigs.  For instance, they pick their noses no matter who is around, sometimes even putting the stuff they harvest on their finger so they can check it out.  If it makes the grade, they might even see if it tastes good.  Again, I digress, because not one chigger ever went up my nose.  However, as a little pigs do, I got curious and sniffed my finger.  What a terrible smell inside my belly button!  Like any good little pig, I made it a regular thing to check my belly button every time the red bugs decided to torture me.   

Now I am living with mosquitoes.  I reached through the okra row trying to see if there were any pods yet (there were none), and was almost carried away by mosquitoes!  Get this: The mosquito is the world’s deadliest animal. Spreading diseases like malaria, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, Zika, chikungunya, and lymphatic filariasis, the mosquito kills more people than any other creature in the world.  How on earth have I lived so long?

Oh yes, and I have picked more ticks this year than usual.  Ticks can spread disease. 

Not all ticks can cause disease and not all bites will make you sick, but as these diseases become more common it's important to learn how to prevent a bite, how to remove a tick and what to do if you think you could have a tick-borne disease.

Lyme disease is the most common disease spread by ticks in New York but there are other serious diseases transmitted by ticks including babesiosis, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted fever, hard tick relapsing fever, and Powassan encephalitis.

 I guess I'm just lucky.

I went to my family reunion

 We went to my small family reunion yesterday.  The high temperature was 73 degrees.  I was a little chilly for awhile.  Who wears a coat in August!  

I know people who have followed me either on my blog or on Facebook for years are tired of this old picture, but here it is.  I never remember who which baby is except for myself, but it has become a yearly thing with us girls.

The Allen baby girls of 1944. I'm the baby in the bonnet.

Most of my dad's people weren't very tall; I think my father was 5'7", same as my mother; if she wore high heels, she was taller than him. Look at me, towering over all the others! I took after my mother. I'm also the oldest. I just noticed the strange way I'm standing, but there's a reason for it. No, I didn't need to go to the bathroom. My left leg is straight because that's the one with the knee replacement. Now I have only one knock knee. Since the replaced knee hurts exactly like the other one, I saw no reason to get another. Why bother?

I have one old picture to show you. I have my mother's body, her curly hair, and her size. I used to have her bra size but as I aged I wasn't very comfy with them (age changes your body) and got rid of over half what I had. But I digress. Cliff has told me for a long time that my high cheekbones are exactly like my dad's; I could never see it.

Yesterday I put a picture of me and my dog, Gabe, on Facebook. It was his eighth birthday. By the way, he got over sixty likes. Today, looking for old pictures, I found one of my dad with me, and I saw it. Not on this picture, because my baby fat covers it up, but it shows on his face. Now look at the picture below it.

I'm really glad Frances had her eyes open this year.