These late days of high summer have been all about the outdoors here at our family compound. When we have not been camping and working on the Airstream, we have been working on our first garden, growing some veggies. We consider it an experiment this year, to figure out what will grow in our limited space, what we can manage, what we did wrong, what we did right, what we will do differently next year. There are no rules, other than the ones provided by the natural biology, meteorology, and soil of our location.
Our inspiration has been Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I recommend it as a guide to a first attempt to try to grow, buy, and live more locally. I need to find some asparagus crowns before frost. We are able to get lots of wonderful produce here in our farmer's markets. Something about growing your own, though, feels pretty good. I love working with veggies that did not cost a fortune and came coated with wax.
We spent our anniversary week at Patoka Lake. As I know very well from my hard-core backcountry camping experience, hiking segments of the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains, that these outings to the state parks and forests of Indiana are not, technically speaking, camping, but it's a great way to spend some time together and have some incredible experiences, like seeing the bald eagles and ospreys, and several types of herons and egrets on that huge lake.
We haul a little home with us out into the well-groomed utility-provided campgrounds of Indiana. We cook our meals outside on a fire and a gas stove, but that is really just because we like to do that. We could cook our meals inside, on a tidy little 40 year old Magic Chef range, which could include baking brownies in an oven, if only I could figure out what's keeping the oven from igniting, and I'm not going to take the time to figure it out as long as we can make s'mores and banana boats on the fire (thanks, Amy C. !), instead.We also partied a lot in July and August with a whole lot of birthdays -- Mammaw, Pappaw, Cathy, Teenage Cousin, and moi. Hmm... must have been something about these cold midwest winters bringing on these summer birthdays. What's my story of origins? I guess it gets cold in Alabama, too.
Hey -- look who started third grade on 8/4/08!We've been pleasantly surprised to find that the Chiclette loves to go camping -- as long as there are DVDs, cousins, buddies from church, bicycles. How do you talk to an 8 year old about slowing down, unplugging, and connecting with nature? We're figuring it out. Daddy long-legs, moths, and other insects are still sources of much screaming, but we're trying to introduce curiosity, which helps.
Most recently, we have been canning pickled veggies -- again, experimental, with a Proustian touch of reminiscence about how my grandmother and my parents did this in the summers of my childhood. The scent of dill evokes those kinds of erlebnis experiences upon which Dilthey elaborated, full of emotional associations, all good, tender, full of discovery and the freedom of many years of childhood summers and weekends spent in the country.If I were a superstitious person, I would not continue this nostalgic exercise. These memories are mostly childhood memories because my grandmother succumbed to Alzheimer's Disease and died when I was in college. Then, when I was becoming a free-standing adult in a sort of marriage that was absolutely wonderful, and we finally lived in a house where I could garden and flex my homemaking muscles, my Mom was found to have AD, also, and died in 2001.
What am I doing now, carrying on these kitchen garden traditions? I mean, is Chiclette paying attention? I don't know ... maybe. I don't think she likes pickles. Now, maybe if I made ketchup, I would earn a few neurons in her mind, in which some future steaming pot of homemade ketchup will evoke memories of our kitchen.
I might have come close to surfacing a few neurons of my own I made my first attempt yesterday to duplicate taco sauce that I miss from the Mexican Kitchen in Hattiesburg. Maybe someone can let me know if this is the Mexican Kitchen I remember from living there in the 80s and 90s. I used to buy their taco sauce by the quart. Someone told me it was a commercial food service product, but I have searched for it high and low and cannot find it.Finally -- I found something close here on the Southside, at Roscoe's Tacos. OK -- it's not Southside Indy -- it's Greenwood. Let's get this out: we live on the Southside, not in Greenwood. We live in Indianapolis, on the South side. We live sort of in Homecroft but not quite, but also not in Southport. Roscoe's Tacos is definitely in Greenwood, and anyone who thinks Roscoe's is the best Mexican in the world ought to live in Greenwood. Just like the Mexican Kitchen, Roscoe's is not the greatest Mexican restaurant in the world. But, it is good, as far as it goes, and you can't beat the value. One of the four secret recipe sauces I tried on my tacos came pretty close to what I remember from the Mexican Kitchen. I tried to duplicate the recipe at home. I think I am closing in on it. More about that in a later post...
So, anyway, back to Dilthey and erlebnis and all, I choose not to live with superstition nor nostalgia. Rather, I carry on for the sake of the here and now beauty of our garden, the fecundity of it all, and the anticipation of putting out a relish tray at Thanksgiving that will include our okra, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, chilis, as well as the local produce we have collected all summer.
The next few posts will document directly or refer to some of our pickling efforts. I'm sure some stories will emerge along the way. Thanks to Troy and John for coming over to our pickling party where we all practiced with the Ball Blue Book. I hope this party will become a summer tradition in late summer/early fall.
By the way, I am looking for the best one-stop resource for all sorts of preserving, including freezing. Amazon has a plethora of choices listed. Does anybody have an opinion about Putting Food By?We just got a chest freezer for the easiest preserving. We put it in the garage, just like everybody else I know.
