Enid, smiling but eyes shut. Gee, I wonder why...

Enid looking shy

Nancy

 

We spent some time each year gathering fruits, nuts, and vegetables. We went to Bullard's Farm market for pick your own tomatoes. Usually, we'd get anywhere from two to four bushels. I had some kind of funky allergy to the vines and my skin would turn green where I scratched it but there is nothing so tasty as a vine ripened tomato. Mom canned a lot of them. I loved them fresh but I hated them cooked. I ate tons of them.

Sue says we also went to some place called Winnie's but I don't remember that name.

In the fall we would go to Hicks Apple Orchards to pick our own apples. There was a strawberry place that I think was called Liebig's where you could pick your own but there was more than one of those places. We went on lots of drives in the countryside to pick up what we called walnuts but were really hickory nuts. In the spring, no matter where we lived we hunted fresh young dandelion greens to cook and eat. These I hated but the rest loved them.

Sometimes we'd go to the Welles farm and buy nuts from the girls who picked them and stored them in oatmeal barrels. Even though they were our half cousins they would still cheat us some years and sell us the nuts leftover from the year before and they were rancid and had to be thrown in the burn barrel.

Even then I loved fruits and most vegetables more than I liked meat.

Mom was a good cook even though Dad didn't always think so. He thought he could cook better because he'd worked in the family restaurant. I don't think it was anything more than a hash house but I didn't know that then.

Mom said she met him in his family's restaurant but it says in the census paper his dad was a teamster and yet mom said his dad was a farmer so its confusing.

Mom would cook baked chicken legs and thighs with biscuits and mashed potatoes and gravy. It was hot and salty and I loved it.

She also made stuff like baked macaroni with cheese when we had cheese.

Sometimes the government would hand out surplus foods. We would get a five pound block of yellow cheese usually. Sometimes it was good and sometimes they made it different and it wasn't so good. When you are hungry enough, its all good, well, except for that cows tongue Dad ate that Christmas.

Along with the cheese we would get a box of powdered non fat milk. This was yucky but could be used in cooking. At different times canned meat was given out. Sometimes it was good and other times it resembled dog food. Mom would try to trade those cans with someone else that liked it.

Once we even got a can of powdered eggs. There is no getting around this. Powder eggs are awful. They smell and taste disgusting.

Dad made icky stuff like macaroni with beef bones. I think they were shin bones. He called it plate beef and you thought from the sound it would be good but it wasn't. He used the bones for flavor and if there was any meat at all it would go to him or the youngest because he worked and us kids could live on the macaroni with icky cooked tomatoes with the bitter seeds. I hated it and would just pick out the macaroni.

He made other stuff I didn't like. He made rice pudding. It was a huge pan of cooked rice with a egg/milk and sugar base with vanilla. It might not have been too bad except for the cooked raisins. I detest cooked raisins. I don't even like uncooked raisins.

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