Category: People

Grandma’s in the House – A Reflection

I’ve had a lot of funny stories about my husbands Grandma.  He helped remind me of things to write.  Some things I couldn’t write about, but have told a very few privately.  Oh my…

Today’s post is in honor of her and what she has done in her life.  She is still living and is 96-1/2 years old.  Gma grew up in the 1920’s and 30’s.  She saw the Great Depression.  She was brought up in the mode of children should be seen and not heard.  To speak only when spoken to.  On her family’s farm, she farmed the land with horses.

Her father had a small coal mine that he hand dug and delivered to customers.  When he heard of a struggling family, he would take coal to them for free.  He also had a strawberry farm.

Gma married young and started her family.  Her husband worked at a metal scrap yard.  They leased their first dairy farm and proceeded to raise cattle and sell milk.  Early on, she tended bar and later worked in a nursing home.

Gma found a man, lying in a ditch, that had been beaten up and thrown out of a car.  She took him back to the farm and nursed him to health.  Then offered him a job and he lived and worked on the farm until he was 87 years old and passed away.

She also adopted her brother’s son and he lived on the farm also.  By this time, she had about 100 chickens, milk cattle, pigs and a huge garden.  There were about 10 or more family members living there, in the farmhouse together, at one time.  Lots of hands made the work lighter.  My husband remembers having big meals three times a day.  He said that if you leaned back while eating and your back hit the chair, she asked if you were done eating and if you said, “yes”, she’d say, “if you’re done eating, get out in the field and work.”

If Gma ever heard of anyone in need, she would always take food to them.  She would oversee all of the farm work, pitch in where needed, make sure everyone was fed, sold eggs and milk, canned food from the garden, helped raise grandchildren and always made sure that everyone in the family was taken care of and their needs were met.  She’s one of the toughest women I know, but I sure would have been leery of messing with anyone in her family.

Brownies and School Lunches

Along with the learning to cook story, from that first cookbook, “The New Betty Crocker Cookbook”, I tried some baking also.  I was a stay at home mom for the first years of my children’s lives, so the one income had to cover everything.  So, I wanted to try the brownie recipe and real chocolate was pricey.  I had seen on my cocoa can that you could substitute with some oil for melted chocolate.  I tried it and really liked it and I have done it that way ever since.  I also doubled the recipe to fit a regular sized cake pan because when my children were in school, I would make a big pan, cut into 15 pieces and freeze in sandwich bags, so I could just pop them into the lunch bags in the morning and they were defrosted by lunch.

I tried to make some of the snacks they carried for their lunches.  That way, I could use unbleached flour, a little whole wheat flour, cut the sugar a little or substitute honey, and make them without preservatives, colors and additives.

I am now baking for my grandchildren’s lunches.  I make cookies, cupcakes, breads and muffins also, along with Ree Drummonds Strawberry Granola Bars.  The children LOVE these!  I substitute any fruit that I have in the freezer.  Sometimes, I use up a lot of close-to-empty jam jars and just polka dot the flavors all over.  Then cut them as usual and the bars have different flavors in each bar.  I call them mystery bars.

Here is my adjusted version of the brownies I mentioned above:

c=cup, t=teaspoon

1 c. cocoa powder

1/4 c. oil (I use olive)

2/3 c. shortening

2 c. sugar

4 eggs

1 t. vanilla

1-1/2 c. flour

1 t. baking powder

1 t. salt

(You can add 1 c. of chocolate or white chocolate chips and/or 1 c. of toasted walnuts at the very end of mixing, to change it up a bit.)

Melt shortening in microwave for 20 seconds, stir and do another 20 if needed.  Add cocoa powder, oil, and sugar.  Stir well.  Add eggs and vanilla, stirring well.  Then mix in flour, baking powder and salt till just incorporated and you don’t see any more flour.  Spray grease your 13 x 9 cake pan.  Bake at 350 degrees for 20 – 25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.  Let set till cool before cutting.

I do not put icing on these when they are for the freezer, because icing doesn’t do well with the plastic bags after they thaw.  But I frequently do for home.  I just use a simple recipe of 1# confectionary sugar mixed with 1/2 c. shortening or butter and 1 t. of vanilla and just enough milk to bring it all together.  You can add some food coloring if you like.

Learning to Cook

When I was about 13 years old, my mother thought it was time for me to learn how to cook.  She would ask me if I wanted to help her cook dinner.  I remember thinking, “why do I have to help cook?” and I would hurry outside as fast as I could.  Whenever she would ask, I’d say “nope, I’m going outside”.  I had two brothers with lots of stuff to do, any type of ball to play, bikes to ride, ropes to jump, or mud puddles to try and throw each other in.  And a really great train went by our house every day and the caboose guy would wave at us.

She got clever and said, “I’ll teach you how to make pie crusts and I’ll make the filling”.  Pie, yes I’ll make the crusts anytime to get a pie out of it.

Along came my first husband.  We got married a week before my 19th birthday.  His mother was a gourmet cook and even packed him a thermos of mashed potatoes to take in his lunch for work.  After cooking for a week, I was given a Betty Crocker Cookbook for my 19th birthday gift.  It looked like greek to me.

I got all “gung ho” and was going to make all the bread for my family.  My first and final loaf (for many years) came out of the oven looking exactly like a brown brick.  The upside of that was if I would make enough bread, I could build us a house.  Plus, I got really good at blowing out oven fires.

I tried a soup recipe and saw where it said to brown the meat.  I thought it was brown and I would save some time by skipping that step.  It came out tasting like what I think stone soup would have      tasted like.  How could so many things be in that pot and it tastes a     little like lightly flavored water?

I was going to cook us some pork chops.  Since you put a roast in some water to cook it, I put the chops under water to cook them.  They came out tasting like cardboard.  The cookbook wasn’t helping much.  And in the first month of being married, he lost 10 pounds.

I ended up asking my mom to come show me some tips and I started learning to cook after I got married.  She said she knew I’d eventually want to know how.

And that is how my love of cookbooks started.  I have too many to count at this point in my life, and I have become quite a good cook.  My grandchildren always challenge me for their birthday dinners with stuff I’ve never tried before.

My advice on cooking would be, take it slow and simple at first.  If you’ve never made a recipe before, do exactly what it says.  You can adjust it the next time, if you want to.  And have fun, it’s so satisfying knowing you’re feeding your family good home-cooked food.  Plus, the joy of sitting around the table and listening to the stories of the day from each other.  This grows a family good!

The Canoe Trip

How do I start?  I loved canoeing as a teenager in high school and even afterwards.  Then life got busy, working lots of hours and I didn’t do it for a couple decades.

My husband said he used to go all the time with his parents when he was young and really enjoyed it.

I know my brother, Rusty, liked to canoe, so I asked him and his now ex-wife to go with us.  When we were paying for the trip, the guy asked us if we wanted to go the three mile or the ten mile trip.  Me, being all gung-ho, said let’s do the ten miles.

So, me and Tom get in our canoe and head down the river.  I’m in front, paddling.  We start heading for the bank, so I switch my paddle to the other side of the boat.  Then we zing to the other side of the river towards that bank.  My brother’s canoe is calmly going right down the middle of the river.  He ends up pulling away by a far piece, probably to avoid all the yelling going on in our canoe.

My canoe bounced from bank to bank and back again.  At one point, I grabbed ahold of a large tree, that was jutting out over the river, before being slammed into it.  I think that veer was intentional…

I kept asking Tom what he was doing and he said paddling.  I said, “I thought you said you loved canoeing and did it a lot as a kid.”  He said, “Yes, but I was always in the middle, and my mom and dad did all the paddling.”  That explains a lot.

I don’t know why we couldn’t sync together and go down the middle of the river, but those ten miles seemed like one hundred, and was probably at least 30 miles, the zigzag way.  I kept telling him to paddle on the opposite side that I was on, to go straight, but it never happened.

So, my advice would be, before canoeing with anyone, get a background check to see how they came about learning to paddle.  And then ask their family and friends.

I never lost my voice canoeing before.  First time for everything, I guess.

 

Andrea and the Snake

After a second divorce, I found a 150 year old brick home, on 7 acres, and bought it for a very reasonable price. It was the home of my dreams. All it needed was the white picket fence in front. It was so cool! It had a fireplace in the basement that was part of the original log cabin, with a swing arm for cooking in it.

The yard had only been mowed around the house, and the lawn between the house and the pond was allowed to grow up. There were big stalks from where big weeds had grown. I didn’t think much about it, till summer came and I started mowing it.

Being a single mom, I got a push mower and started mowing on Sunday, then and hour or so around work schedules and children’s schedules, every day all week to get the whole thing mowed, down to the pond. Then start back at the top again on Sunday.

The first day, while mowing, there was a 3 foot cream and brown snake between me and my mower. I jumped and started yelling, “Snake, snake”, only to be there standing by myself wondering who was going to kill the snake. So, I had to get braver and started wearing my work boots and carrying a hoe along the handle of the mower.

That summer, there were nine different colors of snakes that I encountered between the mower and me. Most were under the two foot range, if bigger, too big for under the mower. I “put out of their misery”, over 30 snakes that summer. I guess they had moved in where the grass had been high. It wasn’t like that any summer after that. I kept it mowed, thank goodness.

My daughter, Andrea, was just about a teenager. I was on afternoon shift at the factory where I worked, and had asked her to take the compost to the garden while I finished getting ready for work. She came in about two minutes later and was white as a sheet. She said, “Mom, I just stepped on a snake in my bare feet”. So, I’m thinking, a six inch snake. “Let’s go see”, I said taking the hoe with me. Also in my bare feet. We got to the back steps where she said she stepped off of and onto the coiled snake. I thought it was so small that we couldn’t see it in the grass.

Then something caught my eye to my right and there was a four foot snake “running” for the woods. I ran with my hoe and swung. It was hard to hit a big moving “S” shape. I got it about a foot behind the head and it came at me with mouth wide open. Andrea, of course, was supporting me from way behind. Out of big fear, I started swinging the hoe and chopping a lot. It finally quit trying to get me and went to snake heaven. If there is one. Which I doubt.

I was probably white as a sheet by the time the battle was done. My theory is if I let it go, it will come back bigger the next time.  That was one day I was glad to go to work.  If something would have touched my leg in the car, I probably would have wrecked it.

My Sister

I came into the world in the usual way, a mother and a father.  When my mother found out that he liked to date other women while he was married, she promptly divorced him.  I was 18 months old and my brother was just born.

My biological father, not wanting to pay child support, let my stepfather adopt us two.  My stepfather has been the most wonderful Dad for us! A story for another time…

So my biological father married someone else and started another family, then moved a few hours away and I never saw him again.  My brother, however, wanted to meet him and did, and knew him for many years before he died.

My brother kept telling me that there was 2 step brothers, and a step-sister.  He would tell me how nice she was and how we had the same laugh.  “She’s really nice and I know you’d like her”, he would always tell me, trying to make me want to meet her.

I was always kind of afraid that if I did, I would have to meet the biological father and I couldn’t seem to want to face it.  So, after he passed, my brother got me thinking about her again and I said I would like to meet her.

I took my brother, and mother (she already liked her) with me and we met at a restaurant half way between us.  My favorite color is purple, and when she came in she had purple glasses on and a purple case for her phone (her favorite color).  I have one too.  We both have a big love of music.  She plays the guitar and keyboard.  I just like to sing.  I don’t have a good voice, just the heart for it. 🙂  We talked a little, we cried a little, and when we left each other, we exchanged phone numbers.

Within a few weeks, I called her and said I just missed her and wanted to talk some more.  For being in my 50’s, I thought I was pretty brave to venture to a place I was afraid to go before.  And I am so glad that I did.  We text and talk and see each other very often and I wonder how I ever lived without her.  I always wanted a sister.