Red Room Where the Writers Are

Although we are long past the stage in life where we must get kids ready for a new school year, nevertheless, like most Americans, our lives are impacted by the academic calendar.  Soon we will be trying to avoid being on the roads at the time we know school buses will be picking up and letting off children.  We know we will have fewer visits with the grandchildren now. College towns are bracing for the new influx of business.  Parents and volunteers are helping nervous but excited freshmen carry their possessions into the dorms. Our adult children report registration and shopping trips as well as hurrying to cram in final summer junkets.

I baked a bundt loaf of zucchini bread to welcome Jeannie and Rick’s family Friday night as we are to be their stopping place between Freeport in northern Illinois and Nashville, Tennessee, where Leslie will be studying music business at Belmont University.  Since I understood it was their first day of school in Freeport and imagining how difficult it was going to be for them to pack everything Leslie needs into the family van, I was expecting them in the middle of the night, which is their most common arrival time.  They usually tumble into beds when they get here, but I like to have lunch meat and snacks available in case someone is hungry.  Since their schedule was to be at Belmont at the l0 a.m. assigned time on Saturday to unload into Leslie’s dorm, I knew the visit would be very short.  I stayed up to enjoy whatever brief encounters we might have before they had to be on the road again to Nashville.

I was very well organized with clean beds and bathrooms awaiting them.  I was disorganized to the extent that I had not studied the calendar correctly after my last phone conversation with Jeannie. Come to find out, it is this coming Friday night that they are to arrive after Jeannie and Rick’s first day of teaching and Cecelie and Elijah first day in their new school year.  Although all the colleges here in our end of the state are beginning, Leslie’s classes start until a week from tomorrow.  Ah well.  Their beds will still be clean, and I stuck the zucchini bread in the freezer until then.

Since I often use the oven to make two angel food cakes at once or two pans of zucchini bread, I experimented on the second loaf by using only half the amount of oil called for and substituting Splenda for sugar.  I used an extra cup of skim milk to make up for reduced oil, and I had a lighter less caloric cake for the weekend that  I wasn’t afraid to serve Gerald, who unlike me will be very disciplined in the amount he slices off.

Expecting the Freeport gang, I had door unlocked and the porch lights blazing. Knowing he would be wide awake no matter how early they had to leave for Nashville, Gerald went onto bed at his usual sensible early bedtime.  I would lie down on the living room couch and snooze awhile as I would get up and down doing some laundry in machines in our garage and cooling the green beans I’d been cooking in the slow cooker. 

Our neighbors have such a huge patch of beans that we were invited to join in the picking.  Gerald participated and brought me far more than we could eat in real time.  Although I can’t bring myself to admit that I will never can again, my equipment has been untouched by me both in the years since and for sometime before we moved here seven years ago.  (I once envisioned family gatherings where I taught adult daughters to can in my kitchen.  Geography, busy careers, and sad health problems have made that imaginary scenario an impossibility.  Yet when we moved, I still brought canning equipment along to this house on the lake.)  I have continued to freeze some excess foods from Gerald’s and the neighbor’s gardens.

But with our freezers crowded with the beef we purchased from Gerald’s brother and with other activities filling our schedules, I have not been enthused about freezing this year.  So I have used a made-up method probably not approved by any home economics experts.  I have cooked beans in slow cookers, cooled them, and put them in quart freezer bags.  (If you read this, Sonja, that is how I am doing it this year.  The correct way is to blanch them a few minutes—I’d have to look that time up in the misplaced pamphlet—cool them quickly in ice water and bag them.)  My guess is that the correct way has more nutrients intact and certainly will taste fresher when cooked. 

This brings me to discuss the “correct” way to cook green beans.  Many say to cook them briefly the way they are often served now in restaurants.  Daughter Mary Ellen, who lived in the South for years and learned to cook them there, will say to cook them long long times, season them liberally with bacon or ham, and salt them deliciously. Of course, many southern and Midwestern restaurants still serve them this way. 

I can only once remember being served green beans in someone’s home where the green beans were cooked the healthy brief way.  Although I have always tried to be scant on the salt and bacon grease, I still have usually prepared them in that typical rural way I learned from my mother and mother-in-law. I have sometimes used bullion cubes for seasoning to reduce calories. 

I am not sure how I will be serving these when I pull them out of the freezer this fall.  Being cooked thoroughly before freezing will make them handier to heat quickly.  I have been leaving off cooking salt lately to please Gerald’s doctors.

Although I have stopped canning, I must admit that I know a certain vicarious thrill at all the busy college-educated young men and women in our community (as well as older ones) who are gardening and canning.  I am sure they love having the laden pantry shelves available to their families just as I did, and I am sure it helps their budgets.  I suspect the joy of preparing for winter with home grown produce that they have planted, picked, and processed motivates them perhaps even more.