Monday, February 20, 2012

1 Potato, 2 Potato, 3 Potato, Squash

I can easily remember back to my childhood days of summertime when I'd spend the summer seasons slaving over the household garden.  It truly was a labor of love.  If you didn't love it you'd complain all through dinner about your aching back and the blisters from the farm tools used to keep said household garden weed and pest free.

In-between swim lessons which took up our morning hours at Macomb Park in upstate NY we had chores to do.  Weeding the garden was just one of them.  Oh before school even let out for the year we'd have to already have the garden tilled and planted.  It wasn't until my high school years that my mom decided to rent a rotor tiller.  Before that she had us with our hoes, rakes, and spades to turn the soil by hand.  I think if she could have she would have harnessed us to the old plow rig that my Aunt Bea had left behind in the garage.

Having a garden was important.  We didn't have a lot of funds to throw around on grocery store produce and eating out.  If we wanted to eat a particular vegetable come Winter we had to grow it ourselves.  This also meant canning.  I can still remember how Mom had just painted the kitchen ceiling white when the very next day while canning the pressure cooker decided to explode.  There were tomatoes and glass everywhere.  To say she was pissed was to put it mildly.

But I think the thing that really sticks in my mind to this day is my aversion for summer squash.  One Summer we had a bumper crop of it and couldn't give enough of it away to friends and family.  We had fried squash, boiled squash, steamed squash and I think if mom could have found a recipe for squash jelly we would have had that too.

I invite all of you to take a moment from your grocery shopping produce selection in the store to think about where your vegetables have come from.  Are they locally grown?  Or did your produce selection come from a foreign land?  If so have you stopped to realize just how much energy and fossil fuels were wasted in getting that particular item to your store?  How about the pesticides that are on the item in question?  I don't know about you but I do try to avoid buying the produce in the grocery store.  I can't wait for the real stuff to start showing up again in the farmers' market.  I say real because the stuff in the stores is mostly franken-foods (genetically modified).

I think that perhaps one of our best uses of spare time could be spent growing our own vegetables like our grandparents did in WW II.  Bring back the Victory Gardens!

As a member of From Left To Write I received a free copy of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  All opinions expressed in this blog are my own.

29 comments:

  1. I looooove this blog post!!!!! We try very hard to buy only local and organic. Thanks for posting this.

    Oh, eating meat, even locally "grown" and not from a factory farm, is incredibly hard on the world.

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    1. Normally I don't eat meat all that often as I have a hard time digesting most of it. I wonder if it is because of the fact that most of it is from livestock that isn't free range.

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  2. I buy as much as I can from our local farmer's market.

    The pressure cooker story made me laugh. One Thanksgiving a huge pressure cooker of potatoes exploded all over my aunt's kitchen. My Grandma and I were covered and it was all over the kitchen. LOL!

    I hope you had a great weekend.

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    1. I had a wonderful weekend and will probably blog about it sometime this coming week. For now I'm exhausted as I just got home. Sighs...wish it didn't have to end.

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  3. The pressure cooker story is one of the reasons that, although I've always wanted to learn, I'm a little afraid of trying to can. I'm going to look into taking a class and have a real live person teach me how to do it (:

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    1. Can't see as I blame you. I don't know how to use one either but someday I hope to.

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  4. My parents had an amazing garden when I was young. We had lots of eggplant, okra and tomatoes. I miss having a garden.

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    1. Wednesday I'll be starting my seedlings for this year's garden. I usually start them on the first day of lent but last year I started them in January thinking we'd have a nice summer here. I was so wrong.

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  5. Ewww. Squash. Enough said. Blech.

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  6. This is why I dumped one of my CSAs. Too much squash! I found a few good ways to eat it, but I need a lot more recipes to make it through a summer!

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    1. If I didn't move around so often, they won't let me move my home canned food to the next duty station, I'd squirrel away more than I do now.

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  7. Pressure cookers terrify me too. Although I have one which I have used occassionally but I am always nervous. I would love to be able to grow my own veggies.

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    1. I'm thinking of freezing and dehydrating more it this year. Though I don't yet have a chest freezer I might get one soon.

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  8. My Grandfather always had a garden, and we got a lot of his bounty. My mom used to get real creative with the overload, stuffing squash and making tomato pie and carrot bread. My grandparents stopped canning and started freezing the extras long before I was born. I do remember my grandmother blanching the tomatoes and removing the skins and freezing them. If you have a storage freezer, freezing is easier than canning, and more nutritious as well. I live in farm land Connecticut, so while I don't garden veggies myself (now that we have the land, I will give it a go, probably not this year), there are plenty of places to get the farm fresh produce. Our local grocery also sells maple syrup, butter, honey, eggs and raw milk products all from this town! The winter is a different story, naturally.

    I love Kingsolver! I'm going to check that book out :)

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    1. I miss Maple Sugaring season in NY. My cousins would have a set up in their garage. I don't miss my mom's mystery foods from her freezer. I cleaned it out in 05 before moving and found a roast from 1994 in there in the bottom. But I do miss my mom's canned summer produce. Not her pickles which were soggy!

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  9. Wonderful post. Try zuchinni bread. Not sure I spelled it right but it's yummy and uses up the overload.

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    1. I love making zucchini bread. I don't like the over abundance of crook necked yellow summer squash.

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  10. This book has really opened my eyes to the changes I need to start making to what comes into my kitchen. I've never really been consistent about buying from the farmers' markets and thinking about where our food comes from. I enjoyed your post :)

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    1. My husband is used to the imported tomatoes that have no flavor. Every year, due to training or deployments, he misses my tomatoes that I grow here. I end up giving a lot of them away. Hopefully this year he'll be around to enjoy them.

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  11. We had a freezer full of zucchini bread and used to leave piles of it on our neighbors front step, the kids in the house were not pleased :) We'd finally give up and let them grow huge - for both stuffed zucchini and the most novel use, carrying them around to break in a new hiking pack :) I love winter squash but never a big fan of the summer varieties, unless they are fried to a crisp, yum.

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    1. I never thought about breaking in a hiking pack with them. Good idea. I've used them for door stops.

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  12. I'm very fortunate that I live in the Heart of Agriculture in California, so we get lots of local fruits and vegetables. You would think we would have tons more Farmer's Markets than we do, or local fresh fruit stands. But I'm sure that 90% of what we grow her is shipped out to other states if not countries.

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    1. In about two months the farmers' market nearby where I live will be in full swing. I can't wait!

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  13. My mom went through a vegetable garden phase for a few years and I remember really loving it. But then we grew out of it and moved and she resorted to tomato plants instead. I think the foundation of having that garden is what made me want to have one right away when we moved into a house. Eating food you grow yourself is such a wonderful reward.

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    1. Today I started my tomato, pepper, and onion seedlings. Hopefully they'll do much better than last year with that rotten weather we had here.

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  14. I get sick of summer squash and zucchini, too, come July. I even make brownies w/zukes just to use it up.

    What great memories of gardening you have - thanks for inspiring me to make sure my kids have plenty of garden chores this year. ;-)

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    1. My mom liked to say that it builds character. More like it builds callouses.

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  15. I want a garden so bad! As soon as my job lays me off, I'm going to live on my parent's 10 acres.

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