Feeding The Brood
I love to cook. There is just something soothing about stirring a pot with the aroma of yummyness permeating every corner of the house. These days my companion in cooking is Miss Frieda, lying on the mat by the kitchen door with ClassicFM in the background(have to love GlobalPlayer and the Internet!). What could be more bucolic on a cold Ottawa winter’s night?
Growing up at the beach ‘food production’ was somewhat regimented, a necessity with 8 mouths to feed. The primary cooks were my Mother and sister Pam, with the rest of us filling in the setting table, cleanup, wash and dry roles. Each week my Mother would make up ‘The Schedule’ rotating us through our jobs and it was some controversy later on when I disappeared from the schedule due to my Sun paper route that would usually take me away from about 5:30 to 7:00 pm.
Saturday mornings were bread baking time. My Mother would start just after breakfast and by noon a dozen loaves would be ready for the freezer. Well maybe 11, with one sliced open hot for a ‘tasting’. It’s ironic that back then we would ‘kill’ for store bought bread in our lunches, today there is nothing better than fresh baked bread.
After the bread was done it was time for pies or cookies, muffins sometimes and maybe even a cake. Whatever would fill hungry tummies at lunch for the next week! My favourites were the peanut butter cookies and the rare deep fried doughnuts. Today we would call them Tim-Bits, back then they were nirvana.
After the bread it was my time to stand next to my Mother at the second counter, a small portion of dough ready for me to ‘experiment’ with. It was with some pride that I saw my misshapen ‘whatsits’ emerge from the oven!
Being more than 10 miles from town, there was none of this popping out to the grocery store for us! Every Saturday afternoon my Mother would pile as many kids in the car as she could find and head for the Overwaitea. Grocery shopping was something to be avoided, a whole afternoon of pushing a cart then lugging the oversized paper bags to the car. I learned early to to escape quickly after lunch! For my Mother I think it was a time to chit-chat with friends or simply saunter along the aisles, with several children in tow.
While the grocery store was the place for the ‘extras’ like flour, eggs, Pacific evaporated milk and AlphaBits, many of our foodstuffs were ‘local’. From up the road Mrs. Plaice supplied us with raw milk, usually 2 gallon jugs every week. It was kind of fun watching my Mother skimming the cream off the top of the milk. Potatoes arrived in the back of my Father’s car in 100 wt sacks almost the size of me! It was my job to get the potatoes out of the trunk and into the basement. This involved a lot of grunting and a bit of ingenuity but eventually I would have them where they needed to be.
Meat was acquired twice a year in the form of a side of beef, roasts in the winter and steaks in the summer, along with a zillion other ‘cow parts’ in non-descript brown butchers’ paper with cryptic notes on their contents scribbled in felt pen. In the basement we had a repurposed ice cream freezer of unknown origin, the kind with three flip up doors on the top. The freezer would exactly fit a side of beef and was a ‘battle tank’ for sure. During the infamous spring flood (more on that later) the freezer actually floated in 4 feet of water, still plugged in and purring!
During the summer JL would work at one of the local resorts, general handyman and fish cleaner for the tourists. This meant a steady supply of salmon arrived in large green garbage bags, which would be crammed into the top of the freezer in the basement.
Remember me saying my Father was from Saskatchewan? Looking back I think he would have been quite happy to spend his life farming and hunting on the Prairies! Even long after he retired he would jump in his car (driving being his other great joy!) and drive to Saskatoon or Lethbridge just to ‘tootle around’ as he liked to call it. But with a wife and 6 kids underfoot on Vancouver Island the closest he would come to farming would be his greenhouse.
Half out of necessity, half out of the joy of digging his hands into dirt my Father built greenhouses in the backyard every year, each successive edition larger than the previous years! Eventually the greenhouse covered a full third of the backyard, 12 feet across and a good 30 feet long! And what grew in his greenhouses was nothing short of amazing! Green peppers by the bushel basket, zucchinis and vegetable marrows that took two kids and a pony to lug to the house, and tomatoes, my Father’s pride and joy. Great beefsteak tomatoes everywhere, with Early Girls for spring salads (my Father ‘required’ a salad with every dinner!), Roma’s for preserving in the fall. Even when the Spring weather was cold and damp, one foot into his greenhouse and you were sweating like you had entered a jungle safari!
When my Grandad first bought the house at the beach the backyard was filled with fruit trees I understand. Eventually these were removed, leaving one cooking apple tree in the middle of the garden and a plum tree at the western edge. Both provided bountiful fruit every year, though the cooking apples had a distinctly negative effect if eaten raw, as JL found out one Summer. The plum tree bore dark, luscious fruit the size of your fist. Sadly they were too close to edge of the property for proper ‘security’ as we discovered one Sunday afternoon when upon returning from a Sunday drive (another family ritual)we realized that one of our ‘neighbours’ had stripped the tree bare!
Between what we grew, what the sea provided, the gunny sacks of potatoes and frozen sides of beef you could never say we went hungry! Even if on those rare occasions the dinner vegetable was creamed corn.
But that is a whole other story!