I don’t know if my grandparents ate bacon and eggs every morning, but they did every day that I remember being there for breakfast. Grandma used the bacon grease for cooking other foods at lunch (dinner) and supper. Likewise, I can’t remember a dinner or supper there without beans and greens and at least one other vegetable on the table. That must have been what kept them healthy.
I watched Grandma cook yellow summer squash once. Squash? Eeewww! After she started frying potatoes in some of the leftover bacon grease, she cooked the squash with just a little water in a saucepan. When it was soft, she poured in quite a lot of bacon grease (What, no butter? Mom always put butter or catsup on anything we didn’t like.) and then added a lot of sugar too. She stirred it all up and scraped it into a serving bowl. Yuck.
The turnip greens she made that day looked a lot like my school’s wormy-looking canned spinach. I was absolutely afraid of the greens, and knew that if Mom noticed that I didn’t take any vegetables as they were passed around, she would put some of each of them on my plate, so I knew at least I would have to eat some of the squash. I took a just a dab when it was passed around the table, and then a few beans, potatoes, and… managed to go unnoticed when I skipped the greens. Whew!
I expected the squash to be only slightly easier to eat than the cooked greens. Dad had taught me that if I ate first, while I was hungriest, the food that I liked least, it wouldn’t taste so bad. So I started with the squash.
The first bite went over my lips without much difficulty. Hmm, no gagging. So far so good. It was sweet and salty, and didn’t taste like vegetables at all! My brain cried for more and my mouth obliged. (Sugar and fat and salt can still do that to me.) I ate everything on my plate so I could have seconds. My eyes searched the table looking for the squash bowl, spotted it, and then realized it was empty! Uhh! Grandma never made summer squash again when I was there.
I reasoned that if you put bacon grease and sugar on just about anything, it would taste good, but I never applied that idea to cooked greens.
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Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Greens, and Beans, and Squash, Oh My! Part 2
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2 comments:
Ok, I have to admit I loved spinich as a kid. (I still do) And when it was fresh from the garden, yum! That and Grandma's tomato juice, I could drink a all by myself. (that did not make Grandma too happy)
But Grandma loved greens! If you took food on your plate, you ate all of it. More than once I was so excited we were having spinich for supper! Only to find out it was turnip greens. YUCK! I never thought of adding sugar and bacon grease.
Ah your post reminded me of my childhood and how I had difficult time eating the pumpkin and eggplant that was cooked at my grandmas place
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