Week 32 (August 2-August 8) Let’s share some stories about food preparation.
Choose a family member to write about and share some details. Did your grandmother can or dry food? Did your mother have some favorite recipes? Was your grandfather a hunter? Did Dad like to barbecue? Let’s record some stories or recipes.
Answers
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My family canned a lot of fruits and vegetables. My Dad would bring home produce that needed to be canned. I remember one time he brought home crates of peaches - lots of peaches. If the quantity wasn't bad enough, maybe he should have thought about what time he got home. These peaches needed to be done and it was late at night.
We canned peaches until the wee hours of the morning. I don't know how to tell the story well, but I remember the floor got pretty slick from blanching and peeling all of those peaches. My Mom slipped and landed in a bucket of peach peelings. For some reason teenage me found this hilarious. You know how anything can be too funny when it is two in the morning. I remember that my mother didn't seem to think it was as funny as I did.
My Dad thought that it was important that we knew how to garden, how to can and freeze food, and how to make meals with what we had available. He taught us that we should store food for "rainy days" that might happen in the future.
I grew up knowing that we always stored enough food for our family to eat. I also learned how to milk a goat, make my own cheese, and to cook from scratch. My parents thought that food preparation skills were important. I learned the importance of these skills and taught my own children how to be prepared and how to cook from scratch.
My Dad seldom cooked, but I do remember him helping with the canning.
My Mother was from England and we teased her at times for putting a British slant on her cooking. I remember her trying to make Corn tortillas and she wasn't very successful. Her tortillas were more like a corn pancake. We enjoyed eating them, but they were nothing like a corn tortilla. We nicknamed them Limey Tacos.
I remember my Great Grandfather, Miles Murphey making me breakfast. He spread peanut butter on a piece of bread and then drizzled honey or syrup on the top. I can't remember if he really drew a heart with the honey, or if I just remember that he loved me.
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That reminds me of Marjorie Hinckley's story about all the tomatoes they grew during the depression, and how sick she was of tomatoes, but they helped pay for a new roof, etc.:)
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My father's cousin (Mary Stewart) sent me many a story about preparing dinner for the haying crews in Colorado in the early 1900's. She said she had to catch the chicken, kill it, and cook it. Won't go into details here. Neighbors worked on helping one another. One family would cook, while the men did the haying for each other. My grandfather (Leo Lambert) would catch fish and share it with his neighbors. They lived on a homestead Routt Co., Colorado and times were hard. So these aren't favorite recipes - but a vision into the times.
I do have an old register my great grandmother (Teresa - Tess DesPlaines/Stewart) had of what she paid for and got for many essentials.
The recipe that is always the talk of family is the one for beer. She called this "Marie Lambert's beer" (my other great grandmother). Have to admit I haven't tried it! The family would use this recipe and send the kids out on the train with their suitcases full and they always came home empty.
Hope everyone enjoyed this.
Carol
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Love your story. Goodness, have you ever tried Ice cream and syrup on waffles? It was a favorite. That sweet tooth in me.
Guess the other is corn bread, honey and milk. Must be another sweet tooth thing.
Have to admit I haven't done much canning other than making jams. I try to do that yearly as my husband definitely likes Jam. I remember once as a child making making pineapple/apricot jam from an Apricot tree in the backyard. Don't have the recipe just the memory. Now I make my jams from my freeze dried storage most of the time.
The other recipes I remember is making homemade tamales! This was a day long affair - pork, chicken and beef. My greatgrandmother Artimesa (Garcia) Bartlett taught us this. She put 1/2 black olive in each of them. Keep trying to find a vendor who does that!
Thanks for the bringing to light these special memories.
Carol
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Have you thought about the things that are different from our childhoods as compared to our children or grandchildren's experiences?
- pay phones - keep a quarter in your pocket
- no cell phone - walk home when your car breaks down
- VCR or TV antenna with one or two channels
- color tv? (a kid from school told me that he had color TV and Mr. Spock was green. We believed him until we realized that if we tuned the colors to make Mr. Spock green, everyone else turned green!
What other simple things have changed?
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I inherited my great or maybe 2x great grandmothers wooden rolling pin. It is made of a single piece of wood and the handles are carved out of it. It hangs on my kitchen wall. I' sure they made tourtiere pie crust with it.
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