WHIP UP A MEAL FROM NEXT TO NOTHING!

 

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

Christopher Kimball of the MILK STREET TELEVISION cooking show, recently asked his friend Alex Aïnouz, a Parisienne, to tell the audience about the recipes a typical French home cook prepares for his/her family during any given week. Aïnouz replied, “We cook what is available; we don’t cook recipes.” Come to think of it, our ancestral mavens of the cook stove, and hearth, and fire-pit have been cooking that way since fire was discovered. Well-stocked pantries and freezers are contrivances of the modern world.

The conversation between Kimball and his French friend took me back to memories of my dear mother. While Mom was a darn good baker of pies, cobblers, biscuits and bread, she wasn’t as skillful a cook, otherwise. She fried her meats to near leather and creamed just about everything: creamed peas, creamed corn, even creamed canned tomatoes, a method of preparing vegetables that never pleased my taste buds. “Al dente” was not only a term Mom never heard, but the concept would have been completely foreign to her, for she boiled her vegetables until they were as soft as mush. In another way, though, she was masterful in the kitchen. I can’t tell you how many times I witnessed her pulling together a meal on a dime from a seemingly empty fridge and pantry, because, as was common back in those friendlier old days, someone unexpected stopped by at right about meal time.

Mom began life as a farm girl during the early decades of the twentieth century. Her experience in the kitchen was typical of budding cooks in most farm kitchens back then. There was the benefit of her mother’s enormous garden, which was replete with vegetables and various kinds of berries, its harvest canned and stored in the cellar at season’s end; there were chickens in their dozens in the yard, on the porch, in the barnyard, and gathered among the apple and peach trees in the orchard. Every morning, the hen house was a veritable egg-banquet in the offing, and out in the smokehouse, sides of brined pork and beef suspended from poles, the products of the farm’s stock of pigs and cows. Never ever was there a sparse larder. All that was required to pull together a meal when company came around was to gather up some eggs, wring a chicken’s neck, break open a canned jar of corn, cook up a “mess” of green beans afloat au jus in hunks of ham or thick slices of bacon, and throw some wood in the oven of the cook stove and bake a loaf or two of bread, a blackberry cobbler, and a peach pie.

 My mother was nineteen when she and my father married, and as soon as they could pull it off, they high-tailed it to the big city and never again entertained the prospect of farm-life. Thereafter, for the most part, the local grocery store was the equivalent of my grandmother’s garden and smokehouse. Nevertheless, no matter how long it had been since Mom’s last trek to the grocery store, she could whip up a meal from thin air. Macaroni and cheese with sliced ham sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup were her staples; or gravy and biscuits and fried potatoes; or bean soup and cornbread, or my enduring favorite: fried bologna sandwiches and sliced tomatoes on the side. Of course, people in my corner of the world call them “Fried Bologney Sandwiches.” Mom followed the traditional recipe of fried bologna, American cheese and mayo slapped between slices of white bread, but I like to tinker with traditional recipes. Be advised that my version of a fried boloney sandwich is hearty and filling. I can only eat half of one. It’s a good sandwich to split with a friend, or to save the second half for tomorrow.©

 

 

LINDA’S FRIED “BOLOGNEY” SANDWICH

INGREDIENTS

• 2 slices of your favorite bread
• 2 slices of bologna
• A few tablespoons of a butter and olive oil blend such as Olivio or Countryside Creamery Butter with Olive Oil and Sea Salt  
• 1 slice of sharp cheddar cheese
• A dollop of ketchup
• 2 eggs

DIRECTIONS

                                                            

1.        Put 1 tablespoon of the butter/olive oil blend in a frying pan (preferably an iron skillet) and heat to medium high.

2.       Cut short slits in the bologna around their entire perimeter. This prevents the bologna from cupping while frying.

3.       Place the bologna in the skillet.

4.      Brown both sides of the bologna. When done, scoop them onto a plate with a spatula.

5.       Quickly crack the eggs into a bowl and whip them as if you were preparing them for scrambling.

6.      Lower the flame under the skillet to low. Add another tablespoon of the butter/olive oil blend to the skillet.

7.       Dip both sides of the bread into the whipped eggs and place them in the skillet. Cook both sides to a French Toast golden brown.

8.      While the second side of the bread slices is browning, place the two slices of fried bologna on top of one slice of the bread.

9.      Add the cheese to the top of the bologna.

10.    Drop a dollop of ketchup on the top of the cheese.

11.     Place the second browned slice of bread on top to form a sandwich. Flip the sandwich with a spatula and cook until the bread is slightly charred and the cheese is melted. The charred consistency adds a satisfying crunch to the sandwich.©

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Multi-award-winning author Linda Lee Greene’s GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, which is a novel that blends historical fiction and an intimate study of her ancestors, receives rave reviews:

5 stars Wonderfully Written!

“This was a thoroughly enjoyable book. I loved the Americana. [It] reached out and touched my heart, mind and soul. [It] provided tremendous insight into what many American families endured during the first half of the 20th century. It captures you and draws you in. This is most certainly a five-star novel.”

GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS is available in eBook and/or paperback. Just click the following link/URL and it will take you straight to the page on Amazon on which you can purchase it.

Purchase link: http://goo.gl/imUwKO

#ChristopherKimball, #MilkStreetTelevision, #CookingShows, #Recipes, #FarmLife, #FriedBolognaSandwich, #GuardiansAndOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene

 

 

 

A MEMORIAL DAY STORY

 

 From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

 

Long, long ago—when I was just a little kid, my family visited the graves of our dead relatives not only on Decoration Day, as Memorial Day was known then, but also on every holiday and at the change of seasons. Among Civil War and other war veterans, upper-crust titans, and lower-caste farmers of our region of Southern Ohio, most of my deceased maternal kin lay in our designated plot of the old cemetery. When spring changed to summer, we thinned the old-fashioned lilies of the valley and irises on their graves and then supplemented them with geraniums and petunias. We embellished each grave with perky little American flags, stars and stripes that waved patriotically from their wooden pegs. As the weather turned brisk again, we planted pumpkin-colored chrysanthemums at each headstone, the ebullient faces of the flowers reflecting the last rays of the sun. Next came festive Christmas wreaths, and finally, grave blankets of fresh hay before the January freezes blew in on the frigid north winds. There was never any second thought about those tasks of caring for the graves of our departed loved-ones. It was as natural and as necessary to us as breathing.

Back when my mother and her siblings were young, and to accommodate the whole large brood, Roger and Smoky, the team of workhorses, straining against their leather harnesses, pulled my grandparent’s heavy flatbed wagon on visits to the graveyard. Taking a rare break from the demanding chores of their farm, Mommaw and Poppaw were at the helm of the wagon. Dean, the baby of the family, sat between his parents on the high seat of the buckboard, a vantage point that looked out over the ample rumps of the horses. Piled in the bed of the buckboard, the seven other children sat on bound bundles of hay perched vicariously on the gaping floorboards of the conveyance. In perfect harmony and at the top of their lungs, and accompanied by Uncle Bob and Uncle Bussy on their mandolins, the group sang the old song, “On Top of Old Smoky,” while the groaning wagon appeared in danger of imploding from the weight of its human cargo and the rough terrain that suffered its challenged wheels and chassis. As the first grandchildren born to the family, my brother and I also rode in that wagon on some of those excursions, singing that old song in unison with our aunts and uncles at the top of our voices. As the newest youngsters in the family, it was we who then got to ride between Mommaw and Poppaw on the high seat that gave view of the broad backs of Roger and Smoky. I was a grown woman with a husband as well as children of my own when suddenly one day it dawned on me that the song was about the Smoky Mountains rather than a horse named Smoky. My Uncle Dean and I, during every gloriously long and adventure-filled summer of my young life on the farm, rode bare back together on top of our own Smoky many times, often singing the song. It was natural that the song took on the meaning of riding Smoky, the horse. 

  

I still can see in my mind’s eye the wobbly wheels of the buckboard and the iron-shod hooves of the horses kicking up clouds of dust on the deeply-rutted mud-caked lane that opened onto that hillside cemetery, the accumulated clamor of buckboard, horses, and human beings setting in motion the flight of collected birds in an old oak tree at the edge of the plot, the overlapped and snapping black wings of the birds, for those brief moments, nearly blotting out the sun. One of my prized possessions is the ancient earthenware jug that housed the grease Poppaw used to lubricate the screeching wheels of the buckboard, the interior of the jug’s fissured walls coated to this day with black and slick remnants of the grease. During those journeys, every once in a while, Poppaw yelled, “Whoa, Roger…Whoa Smoky,” and the buckboard came to a grating halt. While the horses snorted from their huge nostrils and pawed the ground with their heavy hooves, their hot bodies steaming and making auras of their perspiration all around them, down from the high seat on his long legs Poppaw jumped, pulling that jug from beneath the seat, a stick jutting from its open top. The working end of the stick wrapped in a grease-blackened cloth, he smeared the axles of the wheels with it.          

 

Many years ago, a psychic, supposedly consulting messages pertaining to me that emanated from an otherworldly realm, where, I am told, such things are known, and scripted within her crystal ball, told me that as a spiritual practice, I should visit cemeteries on a regular basis again. I am yet to wrap my head around the fact that she was privy to the habits of my family of old, and it wasn’t until I wrote GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, a book about my family, that I set out to take her counsel seriously.

 

This Memorial Day I come to call in my car rather than the old buckboard. At the entrance to the road that loops the deeply forested community of Cedar Fork in which the cemetery is located, although over the years several new homesteads have cropped up among the trees, the road improved, and the bridge that spans the creek refurbished to modern standards, still it feels as if I am entering an evolutionary backwater, a safe haven cut off from the rest of the world. Nevertheless, I am shocked at the greater accumulation of headstones in the cemetery as beneath the tires of my car the gravel on the lane pops and crunches. And as was the case during my childhood visits, huddled within the gnarled branches of a wizened oak tree on the boundary of our family plot, gathered birds are perched. Their noisy flight as I exit my car and approach the graves briefly blankets the sun. These days, the graves are almost exclusively under the custodianship of some obscure caretaker, and I imagine, with the assistance of the watchful birds.

 

Late, but better than never, I see fully the meaning behind the psychic’s counsel to visit cemeteries every chance I get. How easy it is for me to lose my way in imagining that life is one way when it really is something else. Few things are more accommodating than a cemetery in which to gain a foothold in reality.©

 

***

 

The above essay is a revised excerpt of Linda Lee Greene’s GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, a book of historical fiction based on a true story. To purchase a copy of the book, please click the following URL:  http://goo.gl/imUwKO

 

Image: Dean and Linda on top of Old Smoky.

 

#Decoration Day, #Memorial Day, #Southern Ohio, #Cemeteries, #Farmlife, #GuardiansandOtherAngels, #HistoricalFiction, LindaLeeGreene

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MY BROTHER!

 

 From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

April 5, 2021

 

“This is where and when my clearest memories begin: you and I posing for Mom’s little Brownie Camera in front of the big snowball bush in the yard of the farm the summer Mommaw and Poppaw took possession of it. You were your usual wriggly, balking self, impatient to get it over with so you could go exploring—digging for fossils; chasing down spiders and snakes; shouting at birds on the wing to come back and take you flying; studying the trees, the wind, the sky; in essence trying to solve the mysteries of the universe. And I—I shushed you, fixed you to my side with my arm on your shoulder, and ordered you to smile. This was the nature of our relationship, and continued to be until the day of your death. Maybe it is no different, even now.

          “Sometimes I wonder if you were in too much of a hurry to know what God knows. Is that why you left us so soon? Are there such wonders there where you are that it was worth the going? Is there anything there more wonderful than the roar of the rivers in Earth’s center, the silver tinge on the leaves of Earth’s birch trees in the moonlight, the gay burst of intrepid little flowers through Earth’s hard crust in spring, the shenanigans of Earth’s hectic squirrels scaling treetops and rooftops? Do you look down on Earth now, filled with longing?”

          “Oh, Lin, as usual, you are such a skeptic!” I hear you retort in my mind’s ear. “I am here and there and everywhere. I dig in stardust now. Like Saint Francis, little critters ride on my shoulders and tuck into my hands. Saint Joseph and I fly across the universe together almost daily. And I am there in the ripples of the water, in the scent of the plants, in the chirping of the creatures.”

“I will plant a tree this spring in your memory, and look for you on its leaves in the moonlight. If you manifest there, then I might understand. In the meantime—Happy Birthday, my brother!”©

 

Photograph: Linda Lee Greene and David Marlin Greene, Summer, 1948

 

#BrownieCamera, #photography, #FarmLife, #SaintFrancis, #SaintJoseph