Coming back from the Wilderness

[cwcdesign]

I was so glad to get Mike's email back in March (2 days after we were furloughed) but I was in the middle of an online art class (Adobe Illustrator for Surface Pattern Design) that I had plenty to keep me occupied through the spring.

I have been baking on and off for the past couple of years - I changed jobs at the Resort and it seemed to overwhelm me. My Mom (89) has some dementia and we had to take the car away, so that keeps me busy - I have not been able to physically see her since mid-March when they went into lockdown at her community - so far no COVID-19 there.

But, like many, I have been baking more since I've been home. Son Will is here with me - he arrived back from Boston last August with plans to be here for a couple of months before moving to Portland, OR. The fall plans fell through and then all this happened. I had made him a baking kit of Mrs. Cindy's Chocolate Chip Cookies for Christmas and he made them last week - a budding baker. Nathaniel moved to New Zealand last August. He and his partner rode out the lockdown well - he is still bartending.

It looks like we are being called back to work at our store (which never fully closed down) on June 15th, but that could change if this comes roaring back (highly likely the way our governor has reopened the state without never closing it). But, one day at a time. Several of us got a plot at the community garden and that has been wonderful too - we are already harvesting - grilled squash last night.

I hope you all are well and I will try to be a little better at checking in. I still email a lot with dachshundlady and they are hanging in.

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[S_Wirth]

Carol...it was so nice to hear from you and to hear how your boys are doing! My son is 50 today, talk about making me feel old! Mrs. Cindy left us three years ago, 4/15...hard to believe how time flies.

[Mike Nolan]

Dachshundlady hasn't been here much, I know she registered but I don't think she's ever logged in, maybe she's just lurking? Let her know we miss her dog stories.

[cwcdesign]

Sarah - Happy Birthday to your son!

I always think of Cindy around her birthday - April 22nd, but almost daily. She was so supportive of me when my Michael died and they were able to come visit me here while they were still able to go to the race track. I miss her, but her think she’s still giving me strength - I want share with her how far I’ve come.

Dachshundlady still hangs out on the private Facebook group and spends lots of time with her family. I will give her your message.

[S_Wirth]

Fall of 2018, DL emailed me about a chocolate pudding recipe she wanted to make for her sweet little grandson. She'd been making my BC recipe for vanilla pudding and she sent me pics of him eating the vanilla. The little boy loves his grandpa and they are best buddies.

She told me her daughter would have a baby girl in February (2019) but I never heard more about that.

My son sent me pics of his quiet birthday. He made 31 jars of strawberry jam today in about 8 hours. He cans lots of things and bakes incredible breads. His cinnamon rolls look like they came from a magazine. He makes almost all of his family's meals from scratch.

He is big on Cook's Country recipes. He brought us pickled green beans, canned pickles, peaches, peach jam and strawberry jam last summer that he had canned.

[Mike Nolan]

That's a lot of jam! They had strawberries for sale at $1.50 per pound today, I bought a 2 pound package, they were almost over-ripe, so we ate as much as we could at supper and then cut the rest up and added some sugar (not that they needed much) to help preserve them for tomorrow.

If my wife wasn't in the middle of taking a rather intense class on online teaching, I might have gone back and bought 10-12 pounds worth of strawberries and made Cardinal preserves (best as a two-person task, because there are times when it needs to be stirred constantly), but I think we've still got some left from the batch we made last year.

[S_Wirth]

He said he got 13 pounds of local strawberries and 6 pounds from Walmart. We counted 31 jars filled and cooling in one of the pics. He used some apple shredded in it. The berries looked nice quality. There has been so much rain and that often makes berries not as nice as they are in a drier year but his pics looked like nice quality.

[BakerAunt]

Oh, I hope we get good strawberries here this year.

S. Wirth--Did your son learn about cooking and canning from you, or did he take it up on his own after he left home?

[S_Wirth]

My son learned all about cooking, canning, and baking from me. He helped us gather fruits from local orchards and watched and helped me cam them and make preserves and jams. We had a huge garden and I canned 400 jars/cans each year with garden vegetables, pickles, apple butter, applesauce and the like. I had 2 freezers I filled each year, as well. We had beef we got from my dad in the freezers, also.

Each year, I made eight kinds of jams/preserves, not always the same ones as spring freezes would wipe out peach and apricot crops, but I could always get eight kinds.

One year, I got June apples from down the road and froze 105 pints of applesauce. The first year we lived in our new house in the country, I canned 89 quarts of lime pickles.

I grew up on a no-boy dairy farm and helped with daily meals when I was old enough. Then, I was in 4-H and took a Preserving and Canning project which helped me learn all the safety requirements. I took many cooking and baking 4-H projects along the way and always loved to cook and bake. During fall silo filling, we had several men come to help us and we had them for the noon meal which I helped with.

My mom taught me well and my grandma did, as well. Grandma made bread or rolls almost every day. Her house smelled so good when we walked in. She was baking bread when she fell and broke her hip at age 84. She never recovered from the hip surgery and died.

So, my son had a lot of good examples to learn from.

[skeptic7]

Thats wonderful preserving all that food and using it. I am so envious. Good strawberries are expensive at the farmers' market and hard to find elsewhere. I had a big box from the supermarket and it was unripe and tasteless. I cooked the last of it with a pork chop as it wasn't worth eating fresh.
I'm now working on finishing up 2 pints from the farmers' market. Red and sweet and wonderful.

[Joan Simpson]

Swirth I know you're proud the way your son has learned from the best how to bake,cook and can and Happy Birthday to him.
cwcdesign I know you're proud to know yours can get around in the kitchen also.
I know Mike's son bakes too.
Our son learned to cook in the kitchen with me and is a very good cook and is very good at smoking or BBQing on the grill.He didn't bake with me but he has told me he makes the seven-up biscuits with bisquick and he swears they're the bomb.

It amazes me that so many ladies don't bake or cook anymore...sad.Thank God for the men in those families that do cook.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by Joan Simpson.

[cwcdesign]

DL said I was welcome to share with you. She has 2 grandchildren - a grandson from her son and granddaughter from daughter. She cares for them during the week. Because they are in Upstate New York, they are all being really, really careful. Her daughter's BIL got COVID in April and the last time we talked about it (early May) he had a fever and cough - he works in healthcare, naturally. I'm assuming he's better since she hasn't said anything.

She's still baking, and looks out for her elderly neighbor - outside and 6 feet away and the weather is getting good enough to start gardening up there.

[Mike Nolan]

Our older son left for college back in the early 90's, before we built the house we're in now and before I started doing most of the cooking and baking, I'm sure he learned a few things from us, mainly from his mother, but most of what he's learned he got from other sources, with Alton Brown being a major influence. He's a very methodical cook, though sometimes I think he overdoes his seasonings. He's gotten more into baking fairly recently.

Our younger son knows how to bake and cook a few things, but he works at YouTube and, before the lockdowns, they fed him from Monday breakfast to Friday lunch, over the weekends he'd go to the food court in the local mall. I don't know how much cooking he and his roommate do, I know I asked him about baking and he said he still had the flour and yeast he had when we visited him, in 2013! I think they order in a lot.

[Italiancook]

When the pandemic closed restaurants, I read that 51% of Americans rely on restaurants for their daily meals! Surely some of that 51% knew about bread-baking, given the flour shortage. Unless they were buying flour for cookies.

[BakerAunt]

Given the run on yeast, as well as flour, people were planning to try baking bread. A lot of places had empty shelves in the bread aisle, perhaps because of all the children home from school who needed sandwiches, or perhaps it was the hoarding compulsion driven by fear.

Some attempted sourdough, either successfully, or else their effort became permanent "discard."

Baking and cooking take time, and a lot of people do not feel that they can fit those activities into their lives, so they grab take out, go to restaurants, etc. With the stay-at-home orders, people suddenly found time to cook and bake. Whether they will stick with it, remains to be seen. Some may figure out how to include it in the future, especially if they like what they are cooking and baking and decide that their efforts are superior to what they were buying. It's also possible that people are going to be short on money and will need to prepare more food at home.

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