Pass the Butter Please!

Summer is undoubtedly my favorite time of year. One of the reasons for this is the plethora of fresh vegetables available. There’s a Farmer’s Market on every corner and it seems like every other day I have someone shoving a bag of zucchini into my hands saying, “Take them, please!”

(If we could only ship our excess zucchini overseas, we could feed the world!)

You would think I would be able to lose a little weight, too, because veggies are wonderfully fatfree and low calorie. When I was a kid, my dad had a huge garden every year, and neither he nor my mom ever struggled with their weight, so it must be because of all the fresh produce they included in their diets. We had yellow squash, zucchini (of course), beets, cabbage, cucumbers, corn, tomatoes; you name it, dad grew it.

But, thinking back, I don’t remember eating many steamed vegetables. I guess summer squash is good that way, but it’s even better when it’s been dipped in egg batter, slathered in cornmeal and fried in bacon grease! That’s how we ate vegetables back then! If you have never had fresh fried cabbage (yep, in bacon grease), then you are missing out.

And mom also made the best cole slaw, with plenty of Miracle Whip, a little vinegar and lots of sugar. Beets? Buttered or pickled. Cucumbers? Good in vinegar, but better in sour cream sauce. Corn on the cob? Dripping with butter (“butter” butter, not margarine).

About the only thing wedidn’t fry or soak in something fattening was tomatoes, but a big slice of tomato is really good between two pieces of fried squash! You can, of course, fry them when they are green, but daddy never wanted us to “waste” them that way!

Now, tomato salsa is not fattening if you just eat it with a spoon, but most of the time you dip some kind of chip in it or mix it up good with cheese or sour cream. We had lots of green beans, too, snapped on the shady front porch into the old metal dishpan, then cooked on the stove and flavored with a couple of tablespoons (or cups) of bacon grease. New potatoes, sliced and fried … sweet potatoes, candied, of course.

Scalded lettuce, oh my! Freshly picked leaf lettuce should be healthy for you, but not when you add some diced green onions, a little sugar and vinegar, and wilt the whole mess with hot sizzling bacon grease, but man, is it tasty! Okra, too, was breaded and fried. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

And what about fruit, kind of hard to make that fattening, isn’t it? Nah, fried apples! Yum! And we had lots of blackberries and strawberries, but they were either baked up in a cobbler and covered with fresh cream or smashed up with lots of sugar and served over “shortcake.” Ice cream was optional. Now that’s the way to eat fruits and vegetables!

Come to think of it, just about everything we ate was fried in Mom’s heavy iron skillet: fried chicken, fried steak, fried pork chops.And we didn’t know what olive oil was back then. Mom either used Crisco or bacon grease. She kept a jar on the stove top to pour up the “drippings” from bacon. And at least one time when I was very small, we butchered a hog and rendered down the fat to cook with - sort of homemade Crisco, only much worse for you.

My grandpa had a huge iron kettle. It was set up in the yard with a fi re built beneath it, and all the trimmings of fat from the unfortunate pig were thrown in to melt. It had to be stirred with a wooden paddle, and whoever had that job was wilting by day’s end. But when Mom skimmed off those fresh “cracklin’s,” bliss awaited - homemade pork rinds! I’ll bet not many of you can remember that.

Anyway, so I had some squash the other day and was so torn on how to cook them. My mouth was just watering for fried squash; but my bathroom scales were screaming, “No, don’t do it!” I decided to compromise and fry them in olive oil.

Well, half a jar of olive oil later, I fi gured I wasn’t saving on the calories much. And of course, I had to have some cucumbers in sour cream to go with the squash. And my sister had given me a big jar of freshly pickled beets. I know, this is not helping me to stay healthy; but, hey, my dad lived to be nearly 90 and mom nearly 80, and they ate this way all of their lives. Must be all the hard work they did that offset the fat in their diets. Now most of us work hard, too; but sitting at a desk all day, unfortunately, doesn’t burn the calories that farming or being a farmer’s wife does. Oh, well, I will just diet next fall when the gardens are done!

Tamela Weeks is a freelance writer in the Gentry area. She may be reached by email at tamela.weeks@ gmail.com.