Can Do

Hold onto yer britches, I'm a-comin'! I'm just wiping down the counter. I put by twenty pounds of broccoli, or maybe thirty, I'd have to put my cheaters on to tell for sure. It was nothing! Just a little can-do Sunday activity. Pick, cut, clean, blanch, cool, dry, freeze. The broccoli? Just the four plants, and no, I didn't start them from last year's seed this time. I've never done that, actually, because they come all ready to go in a plastic four-pack at the garden store down the way. Real good crop so far. Real good, and still coming on. Come on in, set a spell. I'll see can I fetch us some sarsaparillas.

It is a little close in here, isn't it? Picked the hottest day of the summer so far to be b'iling water but you can't argue with a harvest. Leave 'em another day and they'd be fixing to bloom. Just look at all that bounty! Why, pop me in calico and slap my fanny. It's that round squishy bit right there below the bow of my flour-sack apron, and I don't mind if you do.

It's no big deal. It's just a matter of self-reliance, and Lord knows we could use a lot more of that these days, if you don't mind me saying so. People these days aren't willing to put in the work. Expect other people to take care of them. They're going to be lost some day without the thrift and know-how that I personally demonstrated by putting by all that broccoli.

There's nothing to it. You just make do, you fend for yourself. How did I know what to do, you ask? I come from good Norwegian stock, farmers they were. It's in my blood.

Also, I looked it up on the youtubes to be sure.

I mean, no reason not to be modern. You don't want to rely on such a thing, but it's nice. Still have to use your common sense. Oh, and another little tip of the bonnet to our chest freezer and stovetop and all that hydropower. Well there's some hydropower for sure, the mighty Columbia River, and sorry to all the salmon, but if they were sturdy self-sufficient sorts they wouldn'ta been hatched when we was trying to make electricity out of the very substance they need to live. They'll adapt. Maybe 99% of them will die but one of them will love hot shallow water and slicey turbines and that baby's gonna thrive. Anyway. A little nod to the hydropower, plus the buttload of coal plants up north that also apparently figure into our power. Okay, mostly it's coal plants. But water too. And speaking of water, thanks also to all that water that come right out of the tap because of the good people that dammed up our natural reservoirs at Bull Run--it's a mighty slick system. It's so slick we flush poop with it.

Oh, I'd like to give a little shout-out to that Salad Spinner too. Of course, I could have put my broccoli in a bit of cheesecloth and whipped it around my head, but the Salad Spinner is so much easier, and maybe it'll take a few thousand years to degrade, but I only had to buy it once.

Sure, I could've gone to the grocery store, three of which are in walking distance, and bought plastic bags of frozen broccoli, but I take care of myself. I don't depend on other people. The store is for buying animals someone else has jammed into a pen and slaughtered and scraped the fur and feathers off of and wrapped in plastic. Not frozen broccoli, because I can do that myself. Because I am a can-do person.

I'm self-sufficient.

It Came From Out Of The Ground!

We grow the same vegetables every year. Sugar snap peas. Asparagus. Peppers and basil. And of course tomatoes. They even ripen now, and not just at two minutes before frost, because of the global warming. You have to grow your own tomatoes. Eating tomatoes from the store, even in the summer, is like going on a hot date with someone's avatar.

But for much of my life I didn't care much about vegetables. I assumed they were just on the plate to chaperone the meat. Salads were pointless. Something to soldier through.

When my Dad retired, he started making space for vegetables in the flower gardens. I have photos of him looking mighty pleased with his harvest, and he wasn't a smiley sort. I understood in theory, but put it down to one more odd thing only old people get excited about, like compression socks and lemon drops. My sister's been like this all along but she sort of started out old.

But something happened to me in the last few years. I like vegetables now. And salads. What the hell. Last year we stuck in some lettuce plants and it blew my mind how I could trot out the kitchen door and snap up a bunch of greens just like that. This year I thought maybe we could do some advanced college-level vegetables. Broccoli. Cauliflower. Brussels sprouts.

I didn't have a lot of hope for them, though. Seems to me we tried some Brassicas the first year we got this house, and they turned into an aphid maternity ward. I'm not even sure we ate any. And, after all, they were only vegetables. If Brussels sprouts made meatballs I might have been more concerned.

My plants jumped up quickly and I maybe checked them once or twice but basically I was waiting for them to fuzz over with aphids, at which point I would conclude they were about ready. So imagine my surprise when I peered into the top of one of my plants and found a broccoli bigger than my head! And another! And another! I didn't know what to do. Here I had a shit-ton of gorgeous broccoli all ready at once and no idea, other than sharing with neighbors, what to do with it. Until it occurred to me that you could put more than gin in a freezer. Enter Google and a plan began to emerge.

Well I couldn't be more pleased with myself. I now have six bags of blanched broccoli in the freezer and more fresh in the fridge. Why, I'm just like Grandma! Things have been Put By! In fact I'm exactly like Grandma, assuming she didn't also have to slop the hogs and milk the cows and feed the menfolks and strangle a chicken and hie off to the windbreak in the snow to go potty. All right. Comparing myself to Grandma is like getting into college as a Legacy. It's cheap ancestral credit.

The Googles said to soak the broccoli in salt water for a while to discipline any resident insects. But I didn't have any insects. Oh wait! Oh there they are. Hmm. Tucked way up in there, huh? Lookit that. They look right cozy. Hmm. Well, it's not like I didn't go ahead and bake a bunch of blackberry maggot pies that one year. The Googles say it's just extra protein and nobody will be the worse for it, and everybody did eat the pie, except myself, because I felt an allergy to larvae coming on, which is, I tell you, a thing.

Grandpa and Grandma

Blanching is a silly word for something that turns purple asparagus green or green broccoli greener, but we're stuck with it, and I did it. And I did pose with my broccoli haul, and I will be damned if I didn't feel mighty pleased with myself. Just like Dad.

Of course, I am old.


But not THIS old. Hey! Monday was Dad's birthday. Happy 111th, Daddy!

The (Missing Eighteen Minutes Of) Tape

First we got the huckleberries. Then we had to get a freezer to go with them. And then we had to get freezer tape.

Maybe many people would not need to get freezer tape, but it breaks my heart to buy new Ziploc bags. It breaks my heart to buy plastic at all, and we can't seem to avoid it. We clean all our Ziploc bags and reuse them until they burst into tears--they tear at the corners--and when we got our cute new little freezer, all I could think of was Mommy and her freezer, and she used freezer paper and freezer tape. So I knew it could be done. Naturally I already had freezer paper because it's useful in hand-applique and stenciling, but I didn't have freezer tape. Next time we went to Freddie's, I had freezer tape on my list.

Fred Meyer's has most everything you might ever need. Dave went off for groceries and I hove off to the aisle with the tin foil and freezer paper and looked for the tape. I looked up and down and I didn't find it. I talked to a nice fellow shopper and we commiserated. She couldn't find what she was looking for, either. It occurred to me that Freddie's might not carry freezer tape. Do they even make it anymore?

Eventually I bushwhacked over to the Scotch Tape aisle, where a Fred Meyer employee looked straight at me and said "are you looking for freezer tape?"

Dang! I don't think of myself as being that transparent, but perhaps I reveal more than I think I do. Maybe I should be more circumspect. On the other hand, "needing freezer tape" isn't much in the way of an emotion.

Turns out the other lady I'd spoken to had tipped off the employee about my freezer tape bereftness, and the employee had gone off to check out the tape aisle herself, anticipating my arrival. We looked hard. We didn't find any. She whipped out her phone and called another employee. "Dan's in charge of this whole section, but he used to work appliances," she mouthed to me, "and he says he knows for a fact that they have freezer tape over by the freezers. In one of those impulse-buy displays that sticks out from the shelves. They'll be hanging on it from those little clips."

That's a good idea, marketing-wise. I mean, if you're going to go to the trouble to find freezer tape in Fred Meyer's, and you finally find it, where better than right next to the freezers? "Here's my freezer tape," you'd say, "and look! I could get a freezer to go with it, right here!" It might not happen often, but for the tiny price of putting freezer tape in just the right spot, you could make a major sale.

Sadly, Dan, although reputed to be amazing, was mistaken. My new friend was already on the phone again and motioning me toward Hardware. Soon we were in front of yet another tape display: electrician's tape, blue masking tape, regular masking tape, frog tape, etc. "Monica does all the tape ordering," she confided. "I mean, for the whole region. She literally knows everything. There's a duct-tape deputy but she handles the rest," she said. "And she swears we have it, and it might be here." Her phone rang again. It was Marilyn, from Inventory, who, omigod, was awesome. "Marilyn says she's pretty sure she saw it over by the preserving section. Just by the mason jars and paraffin," she said. That made sense. "And that's aisle 28." Off we went again, hesitating briefly at the Garden Center, where we both shared a thought balloon ("Floral tape? Nah").

We scanned the shelves of canning supplies. No freezer tape. "You know, where you should have it, if I could make a suggestion, is next to the freezer paper, over in foils and wraps. That's the first place I looked."

"Good idea," my new friend said. "I'll talk to Jeremy about that. He does shelving and displays."

"Meanwhile, do you have a place for freezing containers? You know, Tupperware and Ziploc bags?"

"Sure. It's over there by the freezer paper and foils and wraps."

I went back to Freezer Paper. I stepped to the side and noticed, for the first time, a small display that jutted out from the shelves. Freezer tape was hanging from little clips all the way down. Bingo. "GOT IT,"  I bellowed to an aisle of startled plastic-wrap shoppers. I had my freezer tape and a nice quarter-mile hike under my belt and all the information I would need to run the Fred Meyer Human Resources Department.

It just goes to show. Sometimes the thing you're looking for is right in front of you. It doesn't work for car keys or reading glasses. Works great for inner peace, and freezer tape.