 |
| Reynolds Summer Salad Recipe Below |
Garden fresh broccoli, like any garden fresh veggie or fruit tastes better than the mojo from the grocery. I wonder what they do to that produce these days. I heartell of ripening rooms in warehouses and stores. I hear of picking while green and forcing the ripening. This may be why sniffing the belly button of a cantelope no longer yields the musty scent of ripeness. It may be why apples may have rotted guts without a single prick from a very hungry catepillar. I recall examining bags of apples and peaches for the number of items with worm holes, exchanging one item for another in the bag, at my mother's behest. She taught me how to weigh the heads of iceberg, to check for ripe peaches, to assess tomatoes for color.
Going to the grocery with my mother included learning to read labels for preservatives, transfats, fiber, and protein. It was only a part of our eating structure in my formative years. We also canned up bushels of Michigan peaches my grandparents hauled home in season. We cooked up spiced applesauce: slow stewed apples run through a Vitorio Strainer with a bit of brown sugar and one Red Hot candy at the bottom of the quart jar. We grew and canned green beans, bread and butter pickles, carrots, and so many tomato products that our neighbors thought us oddities. Our corner lot reeked of stewing amish paste tomatoes for days. Later, my mother hung the juiced product in disinfected pillow cases to drain off water and make sauce, then with more, she let it sit until it was paste. Our kitchen was a sauna with the whistle of a pressure cooker. We ran outside to collect more scabs on our knees and avoid carrying tomato skins and seeds to the compost pile, or to avoid shucking more corn for the freezer.
On vacation this past week, mother said she and Dad only gardened a year or two. I remember a long stretch of it. I recall being bribed to weed and pick peas. I recall sunflowers that grew so fat their heads could nuzzle mine. I recall a year with the Sweet One-Hundred Cherries seemed to be Sweet One-Thousands. I recall a carrot that weighed a pound and purloining off our monsterous zucchinis on unlucky folks at church. THat was before we knew to treasure the 'baby' veggies for fine dining. That was when my mother still served canned spinach, asparagus and lima beans. Yuck.
I am sure they gardened much longer, though the efforts grew more modest each year. Gardening is a constant negotiation with the moods of a region. In Indiana this year, we have had over sixteen days of temperatures topping 90 degrees. There is no rain. My garden is going to cost me, just for the water bill. I was more modest with my seed-buying. I followed Dianne's lead and planted 'rescues' and refurbs: wilting heirloom varieties and dying Coral Bells.
When I woke up the next morning and set the sprinkler on the beds, I discovered my tomatoes are plump and ripening fast. I picked a whole peck or more last night, along with a head of broccoli, three fat cucumbers, more squash, though the leaves look to be dying. I found a few more beans and two melons. The sweet potatoes out back are surviving and the first year asparagus starts I'm babying are alive still.
Goodie for me. Goodie for gardening. Goodie for my daughter who wants Summer Salad for her birthday meal and my son, who made it tonight from our krims and mortgage lifters, and those cukes.
Reynolds Summer Salad Recipe
4 cups cubed and peeled cucumbers
4 cups warm, fresh tomatoes, diced
Dressing:
1/2 c greek yogurt
2-3 T Olive Oil Mayo
pinch of cayenne
1/2 t fresh cracked pepper
1/4 t fresh cracked sea salt
2 shakes or pinches of garlic powder
Mix dressing, pour over diced veggies. Serve promptly.
