On the Porch or Over the Fence

Today, December 19, Saturday, I was texting with a neighbor who has moved away. She mentioned how she used to like to sit on the porch with her mother and watch people go by. In the summer, I do that as well, although because I have a woodland style yard, not a lawn, I can't really see anyone and they can't see me. Nonetheless, it reminded me of days when I sat on my Grandmother's porch in Philadelphia. She lived on a moderately busy street, 10th Streer, and there was a trolley line, so when she and I sat on the porch we had the fun of passers=by as well as the rollicking bell ringing trolley car to watch. My mother used to talk over the fence back in the days when there were housewives who took a break from hanging out the laundry, or cooking up big pots of family style food, to chat over the chain link fence, a baby on one hip, another in a stroller, and maybe a couple in the yard. The fence days were on Roland Ave, Maple Shade, NJ and we lived in a new development, in a circular cul de sac, so the housewives, who were the ones home all day in those 1950's days, were in a sense, cut off from the rest of the world. Very few had a driver's license or a car. My mother had both! She also was one of the few who had a 'charge card.' Thinking of those more languid childhood days made me think of those big pots of food that were always cooking because women were economy minded, it being just after the war and the depression, and there being large families to feed. My mother's big pot meals were: sauer kraut with pork in the pot, served with mashed potatoes, beef stew, lentil soup with carrots, potatoes and hot dogs diced into it, many varieties of bean dishes including bean soup, to name a few. There are quickie versions for so many soups. My last blog entry mentioned the qickie version for beet soup that used canned beets instead of fresh beets. I have a quickie lentil soup, and a quicki corn chowder recipe too. I call them my disaster dishes because they are soups made from canned goods, so in a time of disaster, say a winter without electricity or when you can't get to a store for fresh produce, you can make a few soups with canned goods: 2 cans of creamed corn, a can of regular corn, one to two cans drained of sliced white potatoes. Just combine them in a pot with a bit of vegetarian bouillion to a desired thickness or thinness, and you can thicken or cream it up with plain, unflavoried Siggi's yoghurt. The lentil soup is likewise super easy, 2 cans of lentils (I found them in the ethni food aisle, bottom shelf) a can of drained sliced carrots, and a an of drained sliced potatoes. Easy and fast. There is a good recipe for entirely canned chili ingredients too: a can of red beans, a can of black beans, a can of white beans, a can of corn, a jar of salsa, a spoon of chili powder. Voila! Presto! I serve this over rushed up lime flavored tortilla chips with grated cheese on top. It is also good with brown rice. So these are all things you can keep in your cupboard and when it snows and you don't want to pull out of the driveway, you can make a quick and easy meal with canned goods. Needless to say, all of these soups probably taste much better with fresh potatoes and fresh carrots than canned, and given a choice, I go for the real fresh vegetables over the canned, although I am definitely through forever with the pressure cooker to cook beans. Dr. Oz says the canned ones are just as nutritious! I think I will go into the kitchen right now and make some potato and corn chowder, but I will use the bisque recipe and fresh potatoes and frozen corn. All of these are infinitely better tasting and more healthful that canned soups, though, so get out your soup pot and try one! Then, next time you are chatting over the fence with a neighbor, pass on a simple recipe!

Tools of the trade

This morning, after I gave up trying to take the dog for a walk because it was too dangerous (owing to the snow folowed by freezing rain wh'd had overnight) I decided to make my weekly soup. Someone had kindly cleared the snow off the sidewalks all the way down the street but the freezing rain had made them like a skating rink and even with TRAX on my boots, my Husky/Lab dog was so excited she was pulling and a red light went off in my head - broken leg, broken hip - DANGER! Turns out it was a great day for cooking, however. Every since I was sick over the summer, I have made it a part of my new lifestyle to not only walk the dog 3 miles a day, but make a big pot of soup and eat soup for my big midday meal every day. Last week it was minnestrone. This week it was to be BEET soup also known as borscht to those with experience with Polish, Russian or Jewish foods. My former mother-in-law was Polish and made many hoemade and elicious Polish dishes such as golumpki (stuffed peppers or cabbage) and Latke (potoato pancakes) and both beet soup, and cherry soup. I took out some bowls I haven't used for 30 years that I bought in West Virginia at a place called The Honeymooner's Souvenir Shop. It was 3/5 of the way to my parents house and when my daughter was little I would stop there and buy her Cherokee made moccasins, and coal bears, and cedar boxes. One year, I bought a set of nesting bowls that reminded me of my Grandmother Mabel's bowls. Grandmom Mabel's bowls were thick pottery, and a pale creamy beige almost the color of skin. There was a 1 inch border around the top with a stipe, sometimes maroon, sometimes a pale turquoise blue. I loved those bowls and I can remember her dicing potatoes into the bowl for potato salad, whcih my mother also made but with different bowls. Grandmom's bowls were from the 1930's. My bowls are what was known as 'stoneware, als a creamy off white with a royal blue stripe. Since I was making beet soup today, I got out my sharpest knives (not very sharp actually since I don't cook much). Beets are tough. They are like little bleeding wooden golf balls. I was reminded of my other Grandmoder Lavinia Lyons' paring knife. That was a super sharp, razor sharp little knife. The blade had been worn down over the many years into a crescent shape from paring round things like beets and potatoes. Grandmom Lyons always warned me not to touch the paring knife because it was so sharp. She kept a dark gray sharpening stone in th drawer to sharpen that paring knife, just what you need to cut something like beets or turnips! Cooking can do that, bring back memories of your grandmothers and mothers. I always remember making potato salad with my mother. We girls would be set to dicing the celery and the onions while the potatoes boiled and the bacon sizzled. She sliced the potatoes thinly into the big mixing bowl, that in another bowl, she mixed the mayonaise, vinegar, celery seed, onions and celery, which she then poured into the potatoes and lightly mixed along with the sliced hardboiled eggs. When it was all lightly tossed and mixed, she added the bacon, broken into crispy small pieces (what was left after we children all stole strips of it from the draining towel to eat. Here is the recipe for the beet soup I made today: sautee a diced onion and one chopped clove of garlic in olive oil in a large pot, dice a potatoe and add it. You can either used two cans of sliced beets here or two cups of fresh beets. I used 3 fresh beet (about 1 cup) and on can of beets. Cook for 15 or 20 minutes, adding vegetable broth as needed, it will be two cups total. Simmer another 14 or 20, up to 30 minutes. Use an immersion blender to puree. When I serve it, I add a heaping tablespoon of unflavored plain yoghurt. Some prefer sour cream (the original folk recipe). Today I made a dozen corn muffins which I liven up with cranberries and walnuts, and had a nice meal of soup and cranberry/nut muffins for a cold snowy day! ENJOY and when you do, take the opportunity to visit with the memories of the cooks you fed your childhood, the grandmothers and mothers, and sometimes fathers (my father was the Sunday pancake chef complete with a double electric fryer that he opened at the head of our huge family dining table. On one side he cooked bacon and sausage, on the other pancakes, and eggs.) It was a special Sunday ritual of my childhood. I would like to find some of those beautiful old bowls in an antique shop like the Red Mill, perhaps or the place I used to visit in Burlington, Antique JUnction? Meawhile, I will enjoy visiting with my West Virginia neting bowls from the Honeymooner's Souvenir Shop which has sadly been repaced by the Honeymooner's Gun Shop, not a very optimistic souvenir for a newlwed couple!

Visit to the Museum of American History in Deptford, NJ on Dec. 12. 2020

December `12, 2020 The most fun thing I have done this month is to visit THE MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, in Deptford, NJ. with my sister, yesterday. On the brochure offered by the founder, Jeffrey Norcross, archaeologist his mission statement is: “Our museum is not a building filled with artifacts; it is a building filled with history told with artifacts.” Although my purpose in visiting on this trip was to look at the model train displays, from the 1940’s and 1950’s, my favorite items in his collection have always been and always will be the little metal figures molded from melted down artillery shells and bullet casings. What I learned this time, was that in a lower shelf in a nearby case, was the photograph of the grandmother who collected them in Germany after the second World War. It is a marvel to me that something so fanciful as skating and sledding figures would have been made from the debris of unimaginable destruction and violence. Thinking about his grandmother, I realized that he must have been the little boy in the family that was interested in history and so she passed her collection on to him, as did the other relatives, who gave him their fishing reels and favorite lures, and the old farm equipment from their farms in the Maple Shade and Pennsauken areas. So many of the items resonated with me in odd ways. He has a collection of hand carpentry tools and I also had two planers which I have carried with me over many decades for heaven only knows what reason. One of the planers had a wooden handle/holder obviously roughly hand carved from a block of wood another, a Stanley 45 planer, was actually the subject of a series of drawings that I did back in the 1970’s. These tools spoke to me of the hands that had held them, the things they had made, a time before electric tools when a carpenter needed strong hands and muscles to shape the wood for furniture or for buildings. Near the reels and lures, their is a group photo of four men and their catch. Maybe these were Jeffrey’s uncles or grandfather. The addition of the family photographs makes all the things so much more eloquent, to me. I have some things like that, my great-grandmother’s treadle sewing machine in its wooden case, which she used in her trade as a dressmaker when she was still a young girl of 16, according to the federal census I found doing family history. I have her heavy solid metal iron too. One year I made a booklet for each sibling of the family heirlooms so that when I die, they won’t simply end up in Goodwill, but someone will rescue them and hold onto them the way Jeffrey N. held onto his family’s possessions. I don’t know who that descendent will be because contemporary people don’t seem to have much sentiment for old family things. I don’t blame them. Why should young people have to go forward burdened by the left over possessions of the relatives who came before them. You have to care about those people and those things, the way I did about my grandmother’s things, her quilts, her photographs, her diary and her mother’s sewing machine and iron. Anyhow, I really enjoyed that day and wish more people could visit and enjoy that museum and take their children with them so that some of the magic might rub off on them! The Museum of American History 138 Andaloro Way (used to be Andaloro Farm) Deptford, NJ 08093 856-812-1121 www.southjerseymuseum.org (also on facebook) hours Thurs. thru Sun. 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

18th Annual Antique Toy Train Show at the Museum of American History, West Deptford

The 18th Annual Antique Toy Train Show Nov. 27th, 2020 thru Jan. 31st, 2021 Featuring O and O-27 gauge toy trains, from the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s. Lionel, Marx and American Flyer engines, with adjoining cars, will race on two diverse platforms. Vintage Plasticville buildings from the 1950’s will further augment the display. Vegetation and auxiliary structures will give the platforms a traditional holiday appearance. Museum of American History 138 Andaloro Way, West Deptford, Nj