Grandma Was So Much Tougher

daphne on January 11, 2010

For some, the holidays are a time of peace.  A time to reflect on special stuff, family stuff.   A time to recall the little things that made Grandma so sweet.

This year the holidays gave me a wallop by way of a sudden and tremendous recognition that my Grandma, all four feet ten inches of her, was an ass-kicking strong man in disguise.  She was strong, not as in, wow, she overcame so much when she moved to this country with nothing more than the snow in which she’d walk both ways up hill to her destinations.

No, I’m talking strong as in, this is an actual un-retouched picture of my Grandmother, taken long ago in the old days–

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(Anyone know what happens when you call up the spirit of Jack Lalanne twice in four months? I’m guessing it means I can skip the gym today, right?)

Anyway, Grandma was strong.  I base this retrospective assessment on a recent attempt to recreate a recipe from our ancestry for my daughter’s class assignment.

Recipe?  Said I.  Oh no, we can do better — we’ve got the actual cookie press from my little old cookie-making Grandmother.

Note: The 2000 in the name refers to number of humans on the earth at the time this was manufactured.

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My grandma made cookies with this gem, which is basically a caulking gun for the kitchen.  The dough goes in one end and, with the ease that one would birth a thirteen-pound baby, out pops the cookies.

push

PUSH!

Breathe.

PUSH!

Breathe.

My children, not yet being of cookie-bearing age, left the toiling to me, though they did step in to add a teaspoon or twelve of sugar to the globs that I managed to produce.

final

In the end all I got for my efforts, for those hours of shoulder-twisting wrist-jarring pain, was a lousy batch of sugar cookies.  That’s like going through 3 days of back labor to birth a dart frog.  Cute, yes.  Sweet, sure.  Just not exactly what I had in mind going in.

Things were tough in the old days.

Maybe sugar cookies were all that they knew.

Maybe Grandma didn’t have easy access to chocolate.

But I do.

Chocolate is the best.

And it never makes me work this hard.

My, What Big Spinach You’ve Got Granny

daphne on July 9, 2009

There is a chance, I suppose, that since I’ve deserted it our sweet little garden has runneth over, but I’m not holding my breath.  I’m visiting my mother, and she has shown me how a real garden behaves.  It’s not that my cute little berry patch back in Colorado isn’t special; it is.  But next to this macho New York garden with its prime beach-front location and vines reaching for the stars, mine seems a bit underwhelming.

Look closely.  Can you find my girls? That’s them being consumed by greenery as they munch their way through grandma’s garden.  My what big spinach you’ve got granny…now how about you get it to spit out the children?

It’s not just the size of her prolific garden, or the fact that it’s situated on a piece of real estate that makes broccoli everywhere envious.  Something about those leafy greens put a spell on our children.  It was all we could do to tear the six cousins out of the garden and convince them to jump in the bay.  The beach? Maybe later; hey, who wants more salad?

The snap peas are sweet and crisp, a favorite along with the cucumbers.  But surprisingly, these kids can’t keep their picking fingers off the fennel (they call it licorice, and save it for “salad dessert.”)  They also chomp with glee through the spinach and chard.  Ok, so for those keeping score, it’s North Carolina for earth-friendly, grass-fed protein, and New York for getting kids and their vegetables together in harmony.

Cousin Emily adored the mint leaves.  And I think Evan owes his Spider Man powers to the hundreds of blades of lemon grass he chewed.

My mother remains modest about her remarkable gardening success.  She suggests only that we place lo-jacks on the children to allow us to pull them to safety when it’s time to give them their ice cream.

You do remember ice cream, don’t you kids?