Sunday Dinner - Sept. 21, 2020

 

Yesterday morning, our 6-year-old granddaughter, The Nugget (worth her weight in gold), wanted to go visit Nanny.  I stalled her for as long as I could, hoping to give Nanny time to drink her coffee and get out of her pajamas.  Finally, about 11 o'clock, I relented.  When the middle granddaughter, Lou-Lou (a nickname that somehow evolved from "Cindy Lou Who"), heard the commotion, she wanted to go, too.  By the time we all got our shoes on, the oldest granddaughter, teenager Maddie-pants, put down her cell phone and joined the troop, and we set off down the driveway.

Nanny had her windows open, heard us coming, and met us on the back porch with hugs for everybody.

I went to the garden.

Squash needed picking.  Purple hull peas needed picking.  Okra needed cutting.  Nanny brought me some picking sacks and a knife to cut the okra.

The Nugget wanted to pick the tomatoes.  Though I would have preferred to let them ripen another day, I let her pick them.  The other girls joined us.  I handed them a picking sack and put them to work in the pea patch.  Despite my warning about itchy okra, the older girls snapped off a few pods and immediately started itching.  

With our picking sacks heavy, we walked back home.  Maddie-pants went back to the phone, but the younger two girls were all-in for shelling the peas.  Afterward, I told them that their purple thumbs made them real country girls.  The Nugget smiled a toothless grin.  (The child is missing so many teeth I don't see how she eats!)

Come suppertime, I served them up a garden supper:  fried okra, purple hull peas cooked with bacon, a squash casserole, sliced tomatoes, and meatloaf.  None of them had ever tasted purple hull peas.  Only Lou-Lou had previously tried fried okra.  They reluctantly tried a bite of everything and deemed it all somewhat edible.  I think that their having gathered the vegetables made them a little more tasty.

This morning, they all started their new
schools.  Maddie and Lou-Lou were excited; The Nugget, not so much.  They all went out the door with their backpacks, masks, and hand-sanitizers.  Nugget was a little weepy.  I almost was, too.  

To tell the truth, I'm a little bit terrified.  Schools are basically petri dishes.  

Now, everyone has gone about their days, except for me and the two dogs, Ollie and Dixon, both little balls of white fur.  Ollie is a sweet dog.  Dixon weighs about 2 ounces, and he is a sh*t-head.  Every time Maddie leaves the house, he howls - a mournful, high-pitched scream that sounds like a siren.  Maddie says he's her "emotional support pet," but I think it's the other way around.

The Husband has been threatening to squirt Dixon with a water pistol every time he starts that awful howling.  But yelling, "DIXON, SHUT UP!" seems to work fairly well - for a minute.

 

I was already at the the bathroom sink, washing my hands, when the toilet I'd just flushed made a gulping noise and seemingly reversed its engines.  I stood, watching in horror, as brown water rapidly approached the rim of the toilet bowl.

I was the only person awake.

Or the only person who admitted to being awake.

Thankfully, the water level stopped rising a couple of inches from the edge of the bowl.  I got the plunger out of the bathroom closet and pumped it up and down a couple of times.  Belching noises emanated from the bowl, and some of the water went down.  Figuring the problem was solved, I flushed again.  This time, the bowl came perilously close to overflowing - so close that the plunger, itself, would have displaced enough water to send it over the rim.

This was bad.  

What to do?

Long story short, I had to bail out the toilet with a styrofoam cup.  The only container suitable as a receptacle for what I was bailing out of the bowl was my garden picking bucket.  (It is now soaking in bleach.)   And then what does one do with a bucket full of nasty toilet water?  I made three trips to the woods to dump the foul stuff.  Finally, with the toilet bowl almost empty, I retrieved the serious plunger - the one that works like a bicycle pump - from another bathroom and managed to unclog the toilet.

About two minutes after I'd cleaned the toilet, sanitized the plungers and myself, and retreated to my chair on the porch, The Husband came out to the porch with his coffee.  I could tell that he was dying to comment or question what had happened, but he knew that if he said anything, I'd know he was awake throughout the whole process.

I'd known he was awake, anyway.

 What a day yesterday was!

I was like a cat in a cage for most of it.

My younger son and his family were scheduled to move home from east Tennessee some time this weekend.  Their plan is to live with us until they can find a place of their own.  Their actual date of departure depended on when the moving company finished packing up their house.  When we heard from them Wednesday afternoon, they were expecting to be here today (Friday).  

For the past couple of weeks, we've been making room for the five of them.  We have two spare bedrooms.  Both closets were packed full of junk, some of it left over from 20 years ago, and some from our older son, who just recently moved into his own place.  We threw away and stashed and donated loads of stuff until we had two empty closets and two empty dressers.  

I went to work yesterday morning expecting to go to the grocery store after work.  Mid-morning, I bit into a Milk Dud, and part of my front tooth came off.  This tooth has been cracked for years, but the dentists have said, "Just leave it alone."  A couple of months ago, a little bit of the enamel chipped off.  The dentist said I'd need a bridge.  I'd just spent close to $2000 on another bridge.  I could not face more time in the dentist chair.  I asked her to just smooth the rough edges and let me go, for now.

When part of the tooth cracked off yesterday, I looked in the mirror and found that I had a gap as wide as the Mississippi between my two front teeth.  If I'd say words that began with "F" sounds, air would whoosh out.  It drove me crazy.  I called the dentist office, bracing myself for beginning a long-drawn out procedure, but the office wasn't open yesterday.  

I came on home and did some googling, and found out that the problem might be fixed with "bonding," which sounded much better than tooth extractions and bridges.  I called another dentist that I've used in the past.  They said that they'd had a cancellation and could work on me if I could come RIGHT NOW.  So I jumped in the car and drove back to town.  Less than an hour later, the problem was fixed.

Meanwhile, we got a text from the kids.  They were an hour away!  I stopped by a grocery store to get stuff for spaghetti and meatballs, and hurried home.  Soon, the young'uns were pulling in the driveway.  We started unloading their stuff immediately.

My house is wall-to-wall stuff.  We'll eventually get it all straightened out.  Meanwhile, it sure was nice to go to sleep with a bunch of granddaughters snoozing under my roof!

Turnip Greens Planted - September 16, 2020

 

Every day, when I look through the screen door from my perch on the back porch, the potato plants in the tub get sparser and sparser.  (Is "sparser" even a word?)  Yesterday, three plants remained of the dozen I originally planted.  Today, the healthiest of the three is nothing but a stick.  Here's the devil that did it:

Who knew tomato worms would eat potato plants?

I just can't have nice things.

I went to the garden about 3:30 this afternoon to work on the turnip green patch.  Pulled up another wagon load of grass, and there's at least another wagon load still growing.  

For the first time this year, I almost got over-heated.  When it's seriously hot outside, I wait until the garden is in shade, but it didn't seem all that hot today.  I had on my red straw hat (which a hummingbird investigated for a few seconds) and long pants (to keep the mosquitoes from feasting on me like they did yesterday when I was wearing shorts), and I worked, bent over, with my back to the sun.  When I raised up, my world went sideways for a minute, and kept going that way for longer than I expected.  I carefully made my way to the refrigerator in the big shop, where I've stored some bottled water, and went back out to sit in the shade to cool off.  After a few minutes, I was good to go again.

I ended up planting a 2-feet-wide x 10-feet long strip of turnip greens.  If it doesn't rain tonight, I may plant another one just like it tomorrow.  There'll still be room for another strip, but I might plant lettuce in it instead of turnip greens.

Turnip Green Day - September 15, 2020

A couple of years ago, Uncle Jack told me that he always plants his turnip greens in the middle of September.  

Well, today is smack dab in the middle of September, so I went to the garden, intending to pull up the grass in the designated greens patch, till up the soil, and scatter the seeds.

It didn't happen.  The ground is too wet to be tilled.

I pulled up a big wagon load of grass, though.  After that, the top couple inches of dirt would have been loose enough to trap a turnip seed, except that I tramped it down with my boots as I worked my way across the patch.  If it doesn't rain tonight, I might get out there tomorrow with a rake and scuff up the soil enough to catch the seeds.

I could not believe how many worms I discovered.  Not earthworms.  Green worms.  Brown worms.  Gray worms.  Little curled-up c-shaped things.  In my mind, I heard my mother say, "Pinch it in two," as she said to me one day when I pulled a big juicy green worm off a tomato plant in her flower bed.  First of all, I can't stand to touch the things longer than it takes to un-velcro them from the tomato leaves.  They squirm something awful.  Secondly, I know what's inside that worm.  It's bad enough to step on them.  No way I'm going to pinch one in two bare-handed. 

But today, I was wearing my gloves.  I must've pinched/squished 50 of them.  They seemed to be right on top of the ground, not in the soil.  Or maybe I tossed them on top of the soil as I shook the dirt off the grass roots.  

The greens patch is where the cucumbers were, but I've seen those little worms all over the garden.  I sure hope I've made a dent in next year's crop of tomato worms, if that's what they are.  Or maybe they're cabbage worms.  They'll be eating my cabbage, broccoli and brussells sprouts soon, won't they?  

  

Final Tomato Canning (probably) - September 14, 2020

Today's tomato pickin' yielded 4 pints of canned tomatoes.  I expect that will be the last time this year that I'll pick enough to fool with canning.  

Once the tomatoes were in the canner, I set a timer and told The Husband, "When the timer goes off, turn the burner off," and I put on my mud boots and went back to the garden to pick the purple hull peas.  I've already shelled, blanched, and frozen them.  One fat quart bag.  

There are tiny white flies on the peas.  I wonder if they are responsible for all of the skinny, moldy, matchstick-sized pods that I pulled off and discarded.  I wanted to spray them, but didn't have any insecticide mixed up in the sprayer.  It was getting dark, and I still needed to cut the okra.  I ended up with several big hand-fulls of okra that wasn't too big.  I briefly considered bringing it home to pickle or freeze, but there were peas to shell and put up, so I ended up pawning the okra off on Nanny.  There'll be more.  

Speaking of okra, I finally got around to making okra and tomatoes.  As far as I know, I'd never eaten home-made okra & tomatoes, only the canned stuff, years ago, before I married.  I liked it okay.  It always surprised me that the okra wasn't slimy.  I half-expected my home-made dish to be a little slippery, but it wasn't.  (Maybe the acid in the tomatoes dissolves the slime.)  I basically followed the recipe I saw in a Paula Deen video.  Sautee some onions (I threw in two small pimiento peppers, just because I had them) in bacon grease.  When the onions get translucent, add the chopped tomatoes.  Paula used canned tomatoes; I used fresh ones.  Paula added a spoon-full of schmaltz, or something close to it, to the tomatoes; I used a spoon-full of chicken fat off some chicken stock I'd saved yesterday after roasting a chicken.  I seasoned the tomatoes with salt, pepper, and maybe a tablespoon of sugar.  Once the tomatoes had cooked a little bit, I threw in the okra and cooked it until the okra was tender, but not soft.  It would have been perfect if we'd eaten it then, but the other things I was cooking weren't ready, so I turned off the burner and the residual heat cooked the okra just a little more than I would've liked.  But it was still good.  Paula Deen says she serves it with rice, but I had squash that needed to be used, so I didn't make rice this time

As I watched the stuff cook, I was tempted to thicken it with a little flour or cornstarch slurry, but didn't.  The next time I make it - which probably won't be long (we liked it) - I might sprinkle a tablespoon or two of flour over the onions as they cook, which would make a little bit of a roux to thicken the tomato juice - make the sauce a little more like gravy - and serve it over rice.

Sewing on Sunday - September 13, 2020

One of my besties raises Golden Retrievers.   Her mama dogs are quite fertile, and have had as high as 13 pups per litter.  Once the puppies are mobile, my friend spends about 6 weeks doing nothing but cleaning up poop and bathing puppies.  Since she lives 300 miles from me, I rarely get to see her in person, and I've never seen any of the puppies (she doesn't need a visitor with all that going on).  I keep telling her that she ought to just let those bitches birth those puppies under the shed, but she won't listen to me.  <shrug>

My friend sends her puppies to their new homes with "goodie bags."  I don't know what all goes in them - probably pee pads and chew toys, stuff like that.  Last week in text messages, we somehow got on the subject of the goodie bags, and before the conversation was over, I'd volunteered to embroider her kennel logo on her goodie bags.  She said she'd ship me some blank bags.  They arrived yesterday, but we didn't check the mail until late in the day.  I started on them this morning.  Bag #3 is in the machine now.

My Great-Aunt Lee caught me doing hand embroidery one Sunday afternoon when I was a kid, and said, "For ever' stitch you sew on Sunday, you'll pick out with your nose on Judgment Day."  Maybe that doesn't apply to machine embroidery.  

I wished I'd had them yesterday.  Remember, I had planned to prepare the turnip green patch for planting this weekend, but it was raining when I woke up Saturday morning.  Since I had not made a contingency plan, I roamed around the house all day - from the couch, to the refrigerator, to the porch, to the bedroom, back to the porch . . . .  About 1 p.m., The Husband joined his weekly online ukulele jam.  I sat watching it until I noticed one of the ladies was DRINKING - at 1 p.m.! - and I thought, If she can day-drink, so can I, so I fixed myself a good-sized gin & tonic, grabbed my mandolin, and went out to the porch to practice.  I wasn't much good for anything else, after that.

We walked down to the garden, to get some tomatoes for supper and check the mole trap.  No mole.  Lots of new fire ant hills.  We dusted them until we ran out of powder.  

There were lots more ripe tomatoes than I expected, enough to fool with canning them.  I brought home just a few tomatoes to go with some we already had - going to try making okra & tomatoes for supper - but tomorrow after work, I need to pick and can.  

There were a few squash big enough to pick.  I saw a squash bug on one of them.  Time to spray again before they get rampant.  

The okra needed picking, too, but the okra rows are a SWAMP, and I wasn't wearing my mud boots.

Peas need picking.