.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Thursday, April 27, 2006

garden 13



Thirteen things we grew in the garden when I was a kid:

  1. tomatoes -- I never realized until I was a teenager that you could actually BUY canned tomatoes
  2. green beans -- my mom's favorite story of my first time at summer camp: I wrote home, complaining about the food--I said they served "artificial green beans".
  3. strawberries -- ever hull a bushel of strawberries? I can still remember the feeling under my fingernails
  4. peas -- vivid memories of shelling peas. it takes a heck of a lot of pea pods to get enough peas for dinner. particularly when they taste so delicious raw.
  5. pumpkins -- another thing that boggled my mind when I saw them for sale in a grocery store.
  6. zucchini -- oddly, the only way we ever ate this when I was a child was dunked in milk & flour & then fried.
  7. corn -- not to be confused with the feed corn that grew across the road.
  8. watermelon -- which, for some reason, we generally sprinkled with salt before eating. strange.
  9. muskmelon (cantaloupe) -- no, I don't know the reason for the different name. I didn't like it--thought it was slimy. maybe it was--maybe they tended to let it get overripe. I don't know.
  10. carrots -- I had nothing to do with these--one of the few veggies we weren't tasked to pick &/or otherwise prepare.
  11. beets -- something else I was shocked to discover that you could actually buy was pickled beets. if allowed, I'd have eaten an entire quart jar of pickled beets at a time.
  12. green peppers -- loved these raw, but the seeds freaked me out a little.
  13. radishes -- these I ate by dunking into sugar. raw tomato slices also got smothered in sugar. I don't do that anymore, except on the rare occasions that I want to revisit my youth--those flavor combos will turn me into an 8-year-old in an instant.
This doesn't include the apple orchard, the pear trees or peach trees, or the grape vines. There was rhubarb and asparagus, but those grew by my grandpa's garage, not in the garden. We never grew potatoes or any kind of lettuce--I have no idea why. And there were always 4 rows of gladiolas on the west edge of the garden. No other flowers, and nowhere else.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!
1. (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)


Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!




Categories:

Labels:


Comments:
Salting watermelon is not so unusual. I've tried it, and I wasn't impressed. Sugaring radishes and tomatoes . . . now that's different.

We grew corn,tomatoes, and radishes. In Southern Cal we could have grown anything we liked. We also had a lemon tree and a guava tree. Boy, that guava tree smelled! We had a duck that loved to eat the fallen fruit.

I was also once traumatized by a cantaloupe, but that's another story.
 
Your list reminds me of being a kid and gardening with my grandpop. He grew everything listed, plus eggplants, yellow squash, and some kind of bean that required poles and wires so that it could creep upward like ivy. And potatoes, Silver Queen corn, and cabbage. We ate zucchini and squash prepared in a variety of ways, including your fried recipe, plus zucchini grated fine and turned into zucchini cakes.

Late summer and early fall, my grandmother would be making jelly, canning, freezing, and pickling like crazy. After she finished, grandpop would make a monumental mess while making sauerkraut, which she would can in Mason jars and only he would eat.
 
Sorry. Meant to finish that comment with:

Thank you for the walk down memory lane.

-jmc
 
Traumatized by a cantaloupe? My imagination's working overtime on that one.

JMC, it was a walk down memory lane for me, too. Somehow, when I'm remembering, all that gardening doesn't seem so hard.

How do you make sauerkraut, anyway?
 
Gardening is so much easier in memory, isn't it? I hated weeding that garden as a kid, but I don't remember that now, I remember spending time with grandpop and eating fresh peas out of the pod.

I think sauerkraut is basically just pickled cabbage. I remember lots of shredded cabbage, some carrots, salt and sugar dissolved in vinegar. There were probably other spices mixed in, but mostly I remember the overwhelming sweet & sour smell, and the fact that grandpop used every bowl in the kitchen in his preparations, when probably one or two would've been enough.

If you are interested in the recipe, email me at jmcarr2001 at yahoo dot com. I'll check with my grandmother to see if my grandfather ever wrote his recipe down.
 
How was I always traumatized by food? By my imperious father insisting I eat it and FINISH IT. But cantaloupe made my throat itch (like bananas, like carrots, like raw nuts -- an allergy, perhaps).

Nowadays, I love the stuff.
 
Living in Germany, I find myself fascinated by sauerkraut. You don't actually find much in the stores, and, at least here in the Pfalz, it's rare to find it in restaurants. My impression is that it's generally made from scratch, and that buying it in a can is akin to having Hostess cupcakes at a kid's birthday party: considered rather lazy & sad. Unfortunately, my German mother-in-law is of the opinion that food comes in cans and boxes, so she's no help.

Doug, oh, yes, I can relate. I vividly remember one evening when we had 'chop suey' with chow mein noodles on top. I was full, but I wasn't allowed to leave the table until my plate was empty. Chow mein noodles, when soggy, look remarkably like worms. I must have sat there for an hour.
 
Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?