I'm In A Pickle!

As a teenager leaving home for the first time, there are certain pieces of familiarity such as loved recipes one brings with them. This is one of many of my mother's recipes that I carried with me and made every year for the last thirty five years. Little did I know as I sat at the table writing out her recipes back in 1976, that my mother would be dead six months later. Her recipes are treasured and have been made repeatedly over the years. They have been passed on to my two girls who, though they never met their grandmother, know her through her recipes.

Mom's Bread and Butter Pickles

~in my 19 year old handwriting~

Before you start, sterilize your jars in a hot water bath.

Bring pickling mixture to a boil and boil for 10 minutes. Add cucumbers and onions and bring to a boil.

Carefully pour into hot jars leaving 1/4 inch head space. Wipe edges of jars and place on cap and lid and hand tighten.

Place filled jars in a canner and hot bath process for ten minutes. A lot of people do not do the hot bath process when making pickles. My mom never did this step when she made pickles, nor did I until a few years ago, but it is recommended.

One jar got short changed on the pickles...not to worry...even the extra pickle juice is saved and  used around here. It adds a tangy zest to coleslaw or cucumbers & cream and is the secret ingredient that makes my spaghetti sauce so good...there, the cat's out of the bag!

Happy pickling,
Marisa

TALE OF A WASHER WOMAN

Elle Bee at In The Kitchen With Kids
has a wonderful post on being grateful,
so please check it out.

You can spin a web of gratitude as well, the requirement are:

It can be one small thing, the only thing, that's keeping you afloat today.

It can be a story of a promise kept or a dream realized.

It can be one thing (or many things) that you love.

Maybe you're just grateful to be breathing today.

It can be someone, some place, or some feeling that brings you security.

Maybe you are in a pit of despair,

but you noticed the warmth of the sun on your arm

through a kitchen window

and it brought you a tiny measure of hope.

It can be something you're glad didn't happen!

It can be trivial. It can be deep.

It can be a gift, a miracle, or just your favorite food.

The only rule is that it has to have gratitude at it's core.

Here is my Gratitude, Woven & Spun:

I have so much to be grateful for
but lately
there is one thing
that has been a constant reminder
of just how lucky
I am

...an old washboard.

For years, I remember watching my mother doing laundry for a family of ten using a wringer washing machine similar to the one pictured here.

She would fill the washer with water from the tap, then add detergent and clothes, always starting with the whites, then darker clothes and finishing with the dirtiest load last. The same water was used for all the loads. As water was not easy to come by, it was not to be wasted. While it was a luxury for us to finally have running water after years of using a hand pump, or carrying it by the bucket full from the well, as often happened in the summer when the water level was too low to be drawn by pump, we didn't take it for granted.
As each load was washed my mom would feed it one piece at a time through the wringer at the top of the washing machine where the clothing would then drop into a large galvanized wash tub filled with clean water for rising. After rinsing, she would then run them back through the wringer before hanging outside to dry.

This tub also served as the family bathtub when set up in the middle of the kitchen floor, where we took turns bathing, all eight of us using the same water.

While things were hard for my mother, she must have felt fortunate for having the modern convenience of a washing machine compared to the hardships her mother and grandmother had to endure.



This is my great grandmother, Annie May (Crowell) Mason who was born in 1883 and died in 1919. She married when she was 16 and my great grandfather was 21 and they had ten children.
She looks like an older woman in this picture but she was just 36 when she died of TB. Apparently, when she contracted TB, she moved into a tent beside the house so that the kids wouldn't be infected as the family had no money for medical aid . She would do all the cooking for the family outside, as well as all the laundry. The kids would leave it on the front step where she would collect it, do the washing in the tent and leave it outside the door of the house for the older children to collect and take it in.

Some months ago, I had hubby bring down from the attic an old scrub board that had been stored there for years, and I have been using it ever since, mostly to give hubby's work T-shirts an extra scrub before tossing them into the washer. It is pictured here along with a bucket of homemade laundry detergent.

Every time I use it,
I think about the hardships my mom
and those before her
suffered
and I feel more appreciative for all that I have.
Using it keeps me grounded,
so that whenever" shit happens",
as it tends to do ,
I don't ever loose sight
of just how lucky
I am.