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Show High Time 1 Sat It Any Old Tims I ! FLORENCE BITTNER free in Florida : (k f's releases of !&t0 harvest the J0 8 them to ,Z kre 'hey froze. One 5 hat froze my blood W must be of a uni- iW CSSs they will all time." 1 1 '!Wit I now why store 4 t mmatoes and res-T res-T 'f about lb, .eganlen variety PacbSard box they 5:fCwThdsAmeofacon- I tin, h Aunt Martha i' Ko. I was com- Hie price of let- EiVy "a,:ytday-She in i Just imag ne. Sf StPPed com- :C,H ansPortation udthe foods in sea-.have sea-.have ruled eating habits all the centuries of man. Since foods can be frozen, thawed and cooked in microwave, micro-wave, the flavor of garden fresh is available all year, and the incentive for eating in season sea-son is gone. Uncle Jim loves asparagus. From the time the asparagus season opened until it closed, what they had for vegetables was asparagus. MY FATHER was fond of new potatoes and peas in combination com-bination or separate. When garden planting time came on, he managed the planting so the two vegetables would come on together. We could always find Dad when green peas were on by the freshest trail of pea pods. He would stop by the garden on his way out to the flour mill, fill his pockets with peas and munch all afternoon on raw peas. WE BOILED the new potatoes pota-toes in their jackets, picked and shelled the peas and added them to the potatoes in the last five minutes of boiling, then mother made what we called w hite milk gravy to pour over them. That was a meal, with fresh homemade bread or hot biscuits. We ate stewed rhubarb as soon as rhubarb came on. Also rhubarb pie, rhubarb jam and rhubarb in comination with strawberries or whatever other fruit might make it taste a little more edible. Rhubarb purified the blood. CARROTS we could eat for a long time since we could leave them in the ground after frost, but they were eaten either raw or boiled to insensibility. insensi-bility. Carrots were good for eyesight. My parents also ate parsnips with much clucking, telling us how good they were. Boiled, then dipped in egg and flour and fried, strips of parsnips began be-gan to show up on our dinner plates about the middle of November. Dad said they had to get cold before they were good. I didn"t think they got cold enough, or whatever was supposed to make them good. TURNIPS WERE another vegetable I had trouble with. Most of my friends ate them raw with much gusto. Even when it w as the in thing to do to walk to school gnawing on a turnip. I wouldn't gnaw. Gnuts on gnawing. Spinach w as full of iron and good for sluccish blood. When the greens came on in the spring, we had mounds of them day after day. In addition to iron, spinach had plenty of sand. We also ate dandelion greens and pigweed greens. I think we must have had the fastest blood in town. CELERY WAS good for you too. We ate celery bare, dipped dip-ped in salt. We put a little mound of salt on the tablecloth by our plate and dipped the celery cel-ery in the salt. Also little green onions and radishes were dipped dip-ped in a little mound of salt. Where do people put their little mound of salt now? W'hen tomatoes came on, it was high summer and we had about had our fill of fruits and vegetables in season, but nothing no-thing compared with tomatoe season. Mother sliced them and served heaping plates of them every meal and they were all gone at the end of the meal, so someone must have been enjoying them. ONE SEASON I looked forward for-ward to was cantelope. Not that we ever got them to ripen in our garden since our growing grow-ing season was too short, but when Dad went on trips to trade flour, he brought back mounds of cantelope and watermellons and I have never had enough of either. We must have had hardy digestive and metabolism systems. sys-tems. In the w inter we ate fried and canned food and meat. In the summer and fall we ate fresh vegetables and fruit. Lots of milk all year round except ex-cept when the cow "went fresh." None of us developed scurvy, though rickets were common, or so we w ere told by the stern looking ladies w ho visited vi-sited from the extension service ser-vice to teach our mothers things about nutrition. As a re- suit, we got large doses of cod liver oil, and if there was every anthing devised to take the good taste out of a w hole day's food, it was a big dose of cod liver oil. LETTUCE WAS only in season sea-son for a few weeks and was always the leaf variety. It also came with sand. We really didn't eat many salads because the salad things didn't come on together. By the time tomatoes were ripe, the lettuce had all gone to seed, the radishes were strong and the little green onions on-ions had become big onions. To day in the fresh v egetable section of the supermarket, there is an array of fresh vegetables veget-ables and fruits which have little lit-tle relation to growing season. We eat oranges in August and tomatoes in February. We think nothing of having fresh spinach in November and celery cel-ery is an all year vegetable. SEEMS LIKE about the only in season fruits now are strawberries, melons, fresh peaches and cantelope. I think even turnips are year-round now w hich is about 11 Vi months too many. Some things I wouldn't miss, but I'll be delighted to see year-round cantelope. Even if they don't purify the blood. |