Early blessing
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
Remember when we were in Venezuela and only knew about three words in Spanish and we were attempting to order breakfast?" I remembered! We'd been spoiled, traveling with interpreters and now we were on our own, deep in the country, far from tourist hotspots where waiters spoke English. We perused the menu and pulled out our Spanish to English Dictionary. The translation of the words literally were "fried, green, parakeets." We were scared to order THAT! Later, we discovered that it was a nickname for scrambled eggs with green pepper diced into it — a Spanish omelet of sorts. We have it all the time, now.
Sunday for supper, I attempted to make salsa the way the ladies do in Mexico. They carefully dice cilantro, peppers, onion, tomato, and cucumbers to make the yummiest concoction. I still have all the ingredients in my garden so I brought them in and commenced — the only problem was that I was too impatient to do all that slicing and dicing by hand so I threw it in the blender and ended up with mostly juice! It tasted good but it lacked something in the presentation.
Blessings on the cultures that add spice to our lives and grow our wintertime veggies.
This morning I was eating a fresh mango, sprinkled with lemon and salt. It was so delicious that if I closed my eyes, I would have been back in the tropics. Deep in the Panamanian jungles, deprived of familiar food and sweltering in the heat — in those circumstances nothing tastes better than a fresh mango, although I would have loved some mashed potatoes and gravy! In India — the other end of the earth with similar heat — we drank mango lassi (their version of a yogurt slush). Isn't it amazing that I can be eating tropical fruit in Kansas?
Blessings on the people whose hands have touched the mangoes to bring them to my table in Ramona — that's truckers, customs officials, shippers, brokers, and field workers.
"And I hope they washed their hands," says my mother, eyeing this exotic, foreign fruit with skepticism.
In Mom's heyday, oranges were the exotic delicacy. They came once a year — at Christmas — in their stockings and they relished every little piece of citrus right down to the rind. Even prunes were a precious commodity in the country and not dished out during the Great Depression to nine kids at random.
Always planning ahead, my Grandpa Schubert planted fruit trees on his farm northwest of Ramona. Aunt Anna remembers bing cherries, apples, and apricots. "We'd climb up in the trees and had ourselves a feast," Mom recalls. "We didn't realize how lucky we were to have this bounty." Anna chimes in, "We canned a lot of it, but sometimes the cherries went to waste, there were so many."
We try and imagine wasted bing cherries. My sister found some in Salina and would bring them home by the bag full. "Bings are like gold," Jess says, "I couldn't get enough of them this summer and I was like an orphan hoarding three or four bags at a time in the refrigerator."
Our mother is still of the old school where prunes are a delicacy and you only buy tomatoes when they are in season (and she means locally). That's one difference in the generations — we buy tomatoes year round, even if they taste like cardboard and are shipped from El Salvador. It's the color we are after, long after the flavor is gone. Just think of all the things that appear like magic in even our grocery store — you'll find grapes in the spring, corn in the winter, broccoli every season of the year.
We bless the farmers in Monterey who cultivate the cauliflower fields while Kansas wheat farmers are resting from their labor. And give thanks for the whole shipping industry that makes this year-round-bounty possible.
It's another day in the country and if I were limited to only what grows in my garden today, I'd be eating hot peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers galore, waiting impatiently for the day I could dig my two sweet potato plants. That's it!
