Our Hometown: The News Couldn’t Be Weirder or Sweeter/ Harvest

It isn’t what it may look like. It’s blueberries. Blueberries!

The little 600 person rural village I grew up in continues to be a Brigadoonish reminder for any of us who grew up in or near small towns. Not only are the garbage truck, the one police car and the John Deeres in every Labor Day parade… Hunters hunt for food this time of year, just as they always have; right now is dove hunting season.

This time of year too, there are at least two other contests of strength and endurance that the children and the grandparents are wicked strong contestants in: the mess of the blueberry pie eating contests

–which are almost as gory as the rotten tomato bombing fights that are held in the dead corn shauk fields at the end of harvest. No malice. Just fun. People walk around after proudly wearing their bloody orange or blue stained t-shirts dripping with left-over slop and glop.

Too, were you to drive through the ‘backtown’ right now, you’d see hundreds of red blobs in many folks’ windows. These are tomatoes brought in to ripen on windowsills to keep them from first frost, which despite the 500 pound per square inch heat right now, could give everything gray hair any night now that it’s September.

And too this week, in the newspaper column devoted to food-keeping, are bewildering (to some) recipes for ‘bringing in’ the harvest to be canned using brown bags and white bars of things like pectin and paraffin.

Thus, if you are lucky to have a grandest of grandmothers who still knows ‘the old ways,’ knows how to stir the huge pots of “biling” steaming ’stuff’ on the hot hot stove in the midst of this wet summer heat…

then you’ll have row after row of sterilized and sparkling glass jars of green beans, halved tomatoes, pitted purple plums, canned applesauce, red bell pepper slices, corn chopped off the cob, peach quarters… all these ‘laid up’ and glowing in the cool cellars to feed your ’save me from scurvy’ appetites over winter.

And last of all, in preparation for winter, the local cooking club has put out the call for special ways to cook oatmeal. Persons who win, will get a certificate to the local milk station for a coveted pint of whipping cream. (Some might think, for the oatmeal, but back there, people are known to feed pure cream to their kitty relatives. Yes, really. And no, I don’t know what the Kitty Heart Association says about that.)

Last year one of the oatmeal winning recipes went like this, as told to me by a friend who still lives ‘back to home’…

Special Gourmet Oatmeal

Cook up a big bowl of oatmeal.
Sprinkle liberally with parmesan cheese, you know, that kind in the shiny green container?
Then add ‘enough’ fresh cracked black pepper to make you sneeze once or twice.

That’s it.
Now you know. Just in case you need to sneeze. Or eat some go-to-sleep-immediately-after-eating-5000gms-of-carbs-at-one-sitting, or maybe just remember, like me, somewhere in this world in such constant fiery gyre, that there are places that still are… well, mostly still.