From todays Damnedfool blog: You can taste a little of the summer My grandmas put it all in jars. https://youtube/watch?v=Wtbn45ae0FE Greg Brown Jr.’s low slow gravelly voice makes you wait a bit before he finally comes out with “jars.” It’s worth waiting for. Today I canned a dozen jars of tomato sauce from the odd heirloom variety I raise, Polish Linguisa. They’re big and meaty and long, kind of like Romas on steroids. And they’re really fun to skin. Sixty seconds in the boiling water, another minute in the cold water, cut off the stem cap, grab it by the tail, and squeeze. Floop, the whole scarlet thing pops out of its jacket. Just as much fun as shooting watermelon seeds. Remember when watermelons had seeds? Greg’s grandma canned a lot of stuff. Me, not so much, but I love having that tomato sauce, applesauce, and plum butter through the year. We have a funny little space we call the Dwarf Closet under the stairs up to the bedroom. It has a little half-high hobbit door, complete with doorknob and hinges, and if I do a very controlled duck-walk, I can go in without barking the top of my backbone. It stays pretty cool all year around, so it’s our version of a root cellar. I have cartons of jars and a bin of garlic and some more bins of dried apple slices. It’s a nice place. When I was a kid in northwest Indiana, we had a storm cellar where the canned jars lived, and I was scared to death of it. It was tucked back in a corner of the basement and reeked of damp and spiders. I was already spooked by the time I got to the bottom of the stairs, because that’s where the well-water pressure tank was, and for years and years I had nightmares where that thing would explode. You had to go past it and take a 180, pull open a heavy door, and turn on a dim hanging bulb. I can’t remember what-all might have been on those shelves, because my mom wasn’t really into that (the fact that the pressure cooker might explode didn’t make canning more friendly), but there were probably green beans, maybe corn and tomatoes. I only liked that stuff fresh out of the dirt. We went down there a few times when a tornado was coming, which didn’t exactly enhance its warm and friendly aspect. So I really appreciated Greg Brown lending me his grandma. Later he sings, “You bet, grandma, as sure as youre born, Ill take some more potatoes and a thunderstorm.” I really, really liked those Great Lakes thunderstorms, all wham and flash and ozone, and I miss them out here in Sebastopol. I actually got a rousing good one at Jo’s home in Italy, and viewing it from within two-foot-thick stone walls was an added attraction. All of which is to say, even though it hit 93 degrees today, fall is on its way and it’s sweet to see summer’s ruby bounty headed for the Dwarf Cellar. We may set the alarm Tuesday night and drive out to the ocean shore to watch the “blood moon” eclipse. Three years ago we did that, enhancing it with Weinberg symphonies and a snifter of Jameson. All hail the chances to see Mama work her wonders, be they red jars or red moons.
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 04:03:52 +0000
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