I’m not really sure where April went, but apparently it is gone. Likewise, where did spring go. It was quite chilly the first of the week. Must be the Easter cold snap and it waited to snap a little late. Actually in 1973 Easter was on April 22. I know that for a fact, because my grandfather died on Easter Sunday that year and Monday when I glanced at our family timeline calendar on the kitchen wall it read Herbie Hudson, 1973, 51 years.
That is how people are listed on the calendar if they have gone on to meet their maker. If it is a wedding anniversary it reads so-in-so and so-in-so, number of years. Birthdays just list the person’s name and age.
That’s the way my grandmother did it. That’s the way my mother did it. These days, as keeper of the calendar, that is the way I do it too.
The calendar, I suppose, is a long standing — or hanging — tradition that we’ve kept going, and it still hangs in the same spot in the kitchen that it hung the day I was born, as far as I know anyway. Obviously we get a new calendar every year and update the numbers, but it does hang on the wall in our house where my grandmother hung it when our house was her house years ago.
There are a lot of names on that calendar, some folks, even, that I know not who they are. A couple of years ago I started eliminating some of the strangers after Mom died and there was no longer a person to turn to and ask “who the heck is that?!”
Some of them were probably kin, but since I was not sure how they were kin, or who they might be kin to on one side or the other, I guess you could say I divorced them.
Sorry folks.
The pages of that calendar seem to be flipping by pretty quickly in 2024. Day after day, week after week, month after month keep on flying by.
It needs to slow down just a little bit and I need a pretty weekend to get a few more tomato and pepper plants into the ground rather than still sitting in the pots they came in on the ground where they seem to be growing fine. A couple of those hot days last week did have them wilted down to the point that my heart kind of sank one day when I got home.
Sunday afternoon it had warmed up enough to put on some shorts and get outside and clean out the garden — I’m way behind — and get the soil turned over. I got the garden cleaned out, but didn’t make it to turning over the soil before I ran out of time.
I did put up a big ole pot of mixed greens — the last of the crop — for future meals. Being in that tight on time situation I opted to mix all the greens together before blanching them and rather than have a few bags of cabbage, a few bags of collards, a few bags of mustard greens, and a few bags of Brussel sprout leaves, we’ll be having just “greens” — a bunch of bags of “greens” — with our pork chops and sweet potatoes for several weeks to come.
I didn’t know until recently that the leaves on Brussel sprout plants are just as good as the sprouts themselves, but a Google search said they are and my munching on some in person backed Google up. Should never have doubted Google.
I’ll tell you what is not very good and save you the time and effort. That would be the stems from blooming collards. I’ve been popping a few off here and there and tasting of them and they tasted pretty good raw. They were kind of crunchy and a little sweet and pretty much tasted like collards. Imagine that.
Sunday evening, I decided to boil some up in a pot and see what they would taste like cooked. They looked like green Praying Mantis boiling in the pot liquor which was not a very appetizing site. At one point I thought I saw a worm boiling along with them but it was just a curled up stem so I ate it right out of the pot.
We were not planning on having them for supper Sunday night anyway, so I figured they could age in the frig a couple of days and finish cooking on eating day.
“I don’t know if I can eat that,” wife Danny said upon looking in my pot. “Yeah, I know,” I replied, “I’m going to have to work on that.”
At this writing on Monday, we’ve not ventured into the pot yet, but I can tell you the tender raw stems are no longer tender when they are cooked stems and they still look like Praying Mantis when they are done.
We’re going to eat them, though. I’m probably going to have to “weed” through there for the lack of a better word and pull out the tough stuff and return the tender to the stove.
The taste is there, but you know what they say about eating with your eyes first!
We’ll probably have all the answers by the end of the week, but I do hope the pork chops are really good just in case.
