Our corn is in!  We are so excited.  We are terrible at growing corn.  It usually doesn’t even germinate or the crows get it before it has a chance. 

This year, no one was more surprised than Mike and me when the corn came up.  We planted Kandy Korn, a sweet hybrid that has been around along time.  If you’ve been reading my blog, you may remember when it looked like this…

Believe it or not, today it looks like this!

 I just noticed that one of the ears looks a little rotten.  Sorry. 

The financial news says that corn will be expensive this year and will result in higher food prices.  I’m sure I’ll be buying lots of things that have corn in them and will suffer with everyone else, but I won’t have to buy corn.  I’m freezing it!

I have some gadgets to help me in the process…my favorite is this…

This FoodSaver Vacuum Sealer came from Sam’s Club.   I love it!

Look at the corn I’ve froze!  So what if it’s not carefully stacked…

So far, I’ve put up about 60 ears of corn.  I’m now removing it from the cob and freezing it for soups.  

While I had the mess out, I also picked a few green peppers. They grow so easily in our garden. I have a book on organic cooking and it says that bell peppers are among the vegetables with the highest amount of residual pesticide.  Not my peppers!

 

We do nothing to our peppers and they grow all season. We will be picking peppers until the first hard frost. Hmmm…I just noticed that I didn’t wash the peppers before I took the picture above. Sorry.  My father’s voice is in my head saying…”a little dirt never hurt anyone. “

So after I washed them…I chopped them up. Here they are…

I will use these in meatloaf and soup recipes.  I’ll use some that are in larger pieces in fahitas.  They freeze well for these uses.    Look at the wooden chopping block that the peppers are lying on.   Mike made that for me out of leftover materials from a church pew he shortened so we could get it in the house.   A Bristol church replaced their pews and for a very little bit of money, we bought the old ones.    People sat on that bench, found Jesus on that bench, sang hymns on that bench…and now it resides in my kitchen.  I call it my Madonna chopping block since it has reinvented itself.  I hope it lives on a long time. 

Back to peppers…they look a little strange after vacuum sealing….

My mother told me that during the Great Depression, the people in Mendota were not hungry.  Relatives would visit her parent’s home, Will and Eva Sproles, just to eat the good food.   She said she didn’t have nice underwear or pretty clothes and her family did not have coffee or sugar.  However, because they had land supporting a few livestock for milk and meat, a large garden, and put forth the required hard work…they continued to eat well. 

I’ve never forgotten Mom’s words.    She would tell us that while she worked so hard at making sure her own family had plenty to eat.  She worked all of the time.   It makes me feel good to sit at the table on a cold winter day and realize that we grew and preserved some portion of the food ourselves.  And I think of Mom.