Penny Sanford Designs

Good Neighbors and Farm Fresh Food!

Gonna catch you up on some pictures of the farm-grown fruit and vegetables we have been enjoying so far this year...and those veggies shared with us from some good neighbors. Isn't it nice to have good neighbors like this?

This is a collection of photos from the last few weeks. Our tomatoes have not yet come in so we were thrilled with these beautiful vegetables. In return, we were able to give them figs and an icebox watermelon and other vegetables.



Once again, my uncle Charles K. Hamer, age 84, is working every morning and late afternoon in the garden and loving every minute of it. He is also good at freezing food. He loves his garden, and the garden, in turn, is keeping him vibrant and healthy!

I had not shared it on my blog, but we lost a freezer earlier this year, and it WOULD be the freezer with most of the vegetables we put up last year! "Spilt milk", so we will just work harder to put up more vegetables this year.



The bulk of the vegetables in our garden will come in later, essentially a Fall garden. We started our own seed this early, trying to use up an over-abundance of old seed. For various reasons, we had to re-plant a couple of times.

The rabbits enjoyed the first planting of beans, and crickets have eaten up peas and string beans at least once. That's ok...we have a special , non-chemical weapon for those crickets! We are planning to introduce weeder geese to the farm this fall, and that will take care of the crickets!

Repairing the garden and orchard fence to hold in the geese will take care of the rabbits. "We're making progress," my mantra! If it were not for the crickets, the menfolk might not be motivated yet to fix the orchard fence...so there is a silver lining in most "calamities"!



We like to start our own seed and acclimate the plants to this Mississippi heat. They do better overall than store-bought plants grown in a hot house. We need plants with vigorous roots, not lots of foliage and root-bound roots!



The seed we saved last year for tomatoes were extremely viable, so we will save seed again. Open pollinated plants like heirloom varieties work great from saved seed.

We are working toward growing only open pollinated vegetables so that we are not dependent each year on the seed one can find in the local stores or orders far in advance of planting season. We are watching seed prices rise, so saving our own seed is yet another frugal step we are taking.



So far, Unc has put up 17 bags of peas, thanks to some generous neighbors, 6 bags of squash from our garden, 2 quarts of okra from our garden, 8 quarts of mulberries (it was a good year for mulberries here), and 6 quarts of blueberries (the best our blueberry shrubs have done to date.)



This is what we were harvesting last week.



No more blueberrries for this year.



Every day, Unc and I are enjoying an afternoon salad. Gordon does not like vegetables, so he is missing one very delicious treat!



In another blog post, I will share with you our "discovery" of a herb that has more nutrition than lettuce. We have been cutting it up for years, thinking it was a weed. It has proved to be a DELICIOUS summer lettuce substitute. No lettuce would be living in this Mississippi heat right now.



Did I make you hungry with these pictures?  *wicked grin*

Sweet Potato Pie in Bulk: Cook and Freeze Ahead

This past Thanksgiving, I discovered that Gordon was bonkers over my sweet potato pie. He grew up with pumpkin pie at holidays, so the sweet potato pie was a new experience for him.

Several times since Thanksgiving we have made at least a dozen of the sweet potato pies, cooked them ahead, and put them in plastic zipper freezer bags. Gordon can thaw out and enjoy one when he wants it.

He shot this short eight minute video of the process of making sweet potato pies in BULK for those of us who like to mess up the kitchen one time and make multiples of whatever we are cooking. It REALLY takes just about the same time to make a dozen pies to freeze as it does to make one pie to cook and serve!

If you have questions, just ask! Here are some other food-related or recipe-related posts on this blog.

Anina's Tomato Jam Recipe
Eloise's Easy Chicken Casserole
Eugenia's Farm Fresh Spinach Casserole
Cousin Marjorie's Herb Cheese Daisy
Mississippi Pecan Praline Cookies

Fun with Food!

Please forgive me if I post pictures twice here (like I did yesterday). I get a bit befuddled sharing a quick picture and one sentence comment on Facebook (very fast), writing a longer blog post here, and then posting the pictures to Flickr.

These are fresh, never-blogged-before photos about having FUN with our food! Food SHOULD be fun!

Unc, now age 84, as of Sunday, January 24th. bakes from scratch biscuits every morning. He has been doing this for well over a year. This particular biscuit he made to look like a little Westie or Scottie! I could not bring myself to eat it! I think I am going to coat it in a matte polyurethane and save it as an example of his culinary sculpture!

Then last night we were baking more Toll House cookies to put in care packages (and in Gordon and Unc's respective tummies), and the last cookie from the batter bowl did not have enough chocolate chips or nuts to make it a REAL Toll House cookie. So Gordon shaped it into a heart and baked it.

I did not know about his little heart shaped cookie until he showed it to me at the very end of the cooking process. In our Cookies for Care Package Production System, Gordon watches the cookies carefully from the moment they enter the oven until they come out perfectly cooked, every chocolate, butterscotch or peanut butter chip melted to perfection.

Unc is one of the official taste testers, and the chief cookie sheet washer and washer of other vital implements to keep me mixing and dropping out cookies on the cookie sheets.

Speaking of which, Santa has been told to bring me next year some premium stainless steel cookie sheets...maybe some with those layers of air between the layers. I will be asking for your advice on the ultimate cookie sheet in the future

Another Fun with Food picture was Unc's 84th birthday cake on Sunday. He wanted a caramel cake, and I wanted to make it in the stacked round layers like Grandma used to make. I will come up/find or develop a from scratch recipe that will give me three tall layers. The recipe I used only had enough batter for two layers, but Unc tells me that Grandma made three layer cakes...so that is my goal!

I had FUN playing with the icing, but I REALLY do want to learn to make sophisticated cakes like one sees in magazines.

For some reason that I don't fully understand, I am OBSESSED right now with making things the way Grandma made them or with cooking utensils that Grandma actually used. More on that later when I share a crust-less custard recipe with you, hopefully tomorrow.

So in case Santa is reading this particular blog post, and since it fits in with the Fun with Food theme, here is one more item on my wish list for any gift-giving opportunity on the calendar! It even comes in my favorite Happy Yellow color right now!

Kitchen Aid is calling it "Citron", but I would not have minded if they had called it "Penny's Happy Yellow" color! *dreamy sigh*

Care Packages for Soldiers

We've been sending care packages to our U.S. Soldiers deployed overseas for a couple of years now. It has been a delight and a privilege I'm not sure how to put into words.

Some of these soldiers we hear from regularly and have gotten to know a bit. Some have moved onto different assignments as we hear from them only sporadically.
I wanted to share the process with you.

We joined as a volunteer with Soldiers Angels. The organization has grown so fast to now include Soldiers Angels groups for soldiers from other countries. Here is the one for Canada.

There are sub groups within Soldiers Angels to foster pets of those who are deployed, to make quilts for active duty soldiers and injured soldiers. The list of ways to volunteer is growing constantly, so please check out their website.

At this moment in time, there are 1546 soldiers who have signed up through Soldiers Angels who are waiting to be "adopted" by civilians like you and me. When Gordon and I first signed up to "adopt" a soldier, there were 30-something soldiers awaiting adoption.

This difference in the number of waiting soldiers may reflect a growing number of soldiers who are signing up with Soldiers Angels who need a caring connection to back home. Or it may reflect a diminishing concern about our troops because of the economy or because of changing attitudes in the media.

We get our approved APO Priority Boxes from the U.S. Postal Service...for free. We order them online here in groups of 25, delivered right to our PO Box. You can also pick them up (free) from your local post office. I gather if we only used a street address, we could let them be delivered to our doorstep.

There is something on the website about this one price shipping cost for this 12" x 12" x 5.5" box being less than if one shipped this same size box to a "regular" address in the states. It does not matter how heavy this box is. If it fits, it ships.

We've had some interesting requests. This box above has a big batch of cornbread. I hope it arrives still moist and crunchy. We'll find out when he receives his box. Another soldier specifically requested peanut butter because at his location, any arrival of peanut butter at the PX was sold out as soon as it arrived.

I have learned that nothing goes to waste. If one soldier does not like a particular cookie I send, he gives it to his buddies. In fact, I have gleaned that almost every care package is shared with other soldiers.

The main difficulty on our end has been having enough cookies to ship by the time Monday rolls around. The best baking time around here is on the weekends, but Unc and Gordon also love these home-made cookies.

The box that shipped out this week (in the picture above) is to a SFC who teasingly suggested my two fellers leave HIS cookies and cornbread alone this time or he would put some guards on the cooling goodies to make sure ALL of his baked goodies arrived in Iraq on schedule.  *laugh*

I'm headed back to the kitchen this afternoon to bake some more cookies for the next box. Right now we are shipping to four soldiers in Iraq, Iraq, Afghanistan, and one in Colorado (headed to Afghanistan soon).

Gordon and Unc are doing their part to get me back in the kitchen mixing up more cookies this afternoon. We make it an assembly line. Gordon watches the cookies in the oven so  not a single one burns, then he takes them off the trays and puts them on the cooling racks. Unc washes the cookie trays and the mixing bowls, etc. I mix up the from-scratch cookies and drop them onto trays, etc.

Gordon and Unc get to eat every broken cookie, something I blogged about here. Fun memories. Fun shared times. I hope our adopted soldiers get even a quarter of the enjoyment from these care packages as we derive from baking and packing them.

Here is one more Soldiers Angels story about a fallen soldier from Mississippi and his parents who fought hard to get his K-9 partner back to Mississippi to be adopted by their family.

Is a Love Affair With an Appliance Considered Cheating?

If I am having a spicy love affair with my new 8.5 quart slow cooker, is that considered cheating on my hubby?

Santa delivered this new 8.5 quart beauty this past week, after Fed Ex held it hostage over Christmas!

So, this new baby, bought here, has a stainless steel housing, a sleek black ceramic cooking pot and a glass and metal lid.

Our soon-to-be-retired old slow cooker has peeling painted metal, the ceramic cooking pot was crazed (think leaking lead into food) and the handle on the plastic lid had broken, requiring us to use a lid from a stock pot.

I've let the Easter Bunny know that I want one just like this, but at 5.5 quarts or 6.5 quarts. The seller has a 3.5 quart version that is also beautiful. Visions of my counter lined with three of these sleek beauties cooking away bring a flush to my face!

So far, venison chilli...some to eat now and some left over to freeze. I'm so in love with every inch of this 8.5 quart big boy! I'm fantasizing now about the delectable rendezvous I will have with my new slow cooker this weekend!

Gordon, my husband, I am so sorry to break the news to you like this, on my public blog, but I plan to continue having an affair with my new slow cooker for a long while to come. *grin*

"Peeling, Slicing and Cleaning Tomatoes fresh from the Garden"

Here is some footage I shot of Penny during this canning season. She and her Uncle Charles (age 83) have been happily making preserves and Penny has been absorbing as much as she can about the various ways one can preserve tomatoes, pears, etc... A big hit has also been something new, one of Penny's blog friends translated a new delicacy to english and Penny was eager to try it. What was this new sensation you may ask? Tomato Jam! Neither had heard of it before but upon further examination, both love it and Mr. Charles has been proudly giving away some of it and has had great feedback from all. Another delicacy they both have enjoyed is chestnut jam. Penny loves it! Mr. Charles had been picking chestnuts off the ground each morning, which had fallen from the tree here on the farm. I've even helped pick them from the prickly hull in which they grow. We hope you enjoy and would love to hear what you think. Gordon

Butterbean Bliss

Today was the first day Unc picked enough butter beans for us to freeze. He picked two gallon buckets for me to shell. That yielded two shy quart packages. I think we will freeze them in pint bags from now on.

I love shelling butter beans and peas. If we could grow English peas, I would adore shelling them because I LOVE, love to eat English peas!

One thing I learned that I will pass along to you. On a whim, I asked Unc if we could feed the butter bean hulls to a cow (I'm storing information for when we get a milk cow or a couple of little steers to fatten up for the freezer). He said the sharp point of the butter bean hull might puncture a cow's intestinal tract.

Good information to have. So he has been putting the butter bean hulls around various plants in the garden as mulch.

Until today we have only had enough butter beans or green beans on any given day to shell for one meal.

Those first fresh picked representatives of each garden vegetable are always THE best, THE most tender, THE most flavorful you can imagine!

Unc, age 83, planted this garden, has tended it, and is picking the produce.  All I am doing is helping put up the veggies and fruit. Not a bad bargain, huh? 

One more fun discover during this butter bean adventure...the Westies LOVE the taste of raw butter beans! That is great! We try to give our dogs as much raw meat, veggies and fruit as possible.

So far, the Westies love carrots, squash, butter beans, figs, banana and orange! The raw meat part was not a problem for them to embrace. Raw egg, buttermilk and yogurt are also favorites. Google the "BARF" diet for dogs if you want to learn more.

Unc picks our green beans small and tender (see the Chapstick for size comparison), have been so wonderful! They are small enough that they do not have any strings to be pulled off. TENDER! All we do is cut of the ends of the beans.

We boil them with salt in the water and add a little butter when they are tender. That's it. That fresh-from-the-garden flavor is so nutty and green! We've not picked enough green beans to have enough to freeze yet. Unc will be planting green beans again very soon for the fall garden!

A Southern Woman's First Southern Fried Chicken

Tonight I am a card-carrying member of the Sorority of Southern Women Who Fry Chicken!

I'm 46 years old, and today was the very first time I have ever attempted to fry chicken.

To be honest, I've been afraid to fry anything since my attempt to make french fries back in 1984 or 1985. My girlfriend's husband made some comment like, "Do you think you could have added more grease to these?"

That was my last attempt to fry anything until today.

Today's rite of passage has brought back so many wonderful memories. As a little tyke, I watched Grandma make fried chicken, sitting on a tall stool by the stove so that I could watch her work her magic.

I can see her twisted arthritic fingers flicking a tiny pinch of flour into the hot oil in a big cast iron skillet to test it's readiness for the chicken. I think that was the same cast iron skillet that I used today.

So many years later (Grandma died in 1979) I can just smell that  heavenly aroma that permeated her house and floated onto the porches around her house!

The anticipation for that first piece of Grandma's chicken was so intense that I always picked off pieces of the crust as the freshly fried chicken was cooling on its metal cooling  rack on the kitchen counter.

Thighs were (and still are) my favorite piece, along with the gizzard and the chicken heart!

Grandma and Unc would save me the gizzard and heart to enjoy when Mama and I stopped by Grandma's house on the way back home from school.  Before we walked through Grandma's front door, I could smell that fabulous Southern fried chicken aroma, and I would practically run to the kitchen for my thigh, gizzard and heart!

So, today, bolstered by good advice from my friends on Facebook, I joined the esteemed ranks of Southern Women Who Fry Chicken!

Today, Unc cut up the big ten pound bag of chicken and provided a second opinion on the hotness of the oil and the readiness of the pieces to be turned or taken out of the skillet. I was very thankful for his help and advice!

He even tasted that first piece with me to evaluate my technique. 

What I learned is that I really want my fried chicken to taste just like Grandma's fried chicken. I thought I wanted to make crunchy chicken with thick crust like one of the fast food chicken chain restaurants. To make Grandma's chicken will necessitate a few changes in my recipe for next time.

Here is a synopsis of what I learned (that might help you join me in this tradition):

1. Soaking in buttermilk gives the chicken a faint sour/tart flavor reminiscent of fried dill pickles. Soaking in buttermilk helps the meat stay moist and juicy, and helps hold onto the flour coating.

2. Next time I will soak our chicken in sweet milk with an egg.  This is what Grandma did...I'm pretty sure.

3. I did add a little corn starch to the flour today to make crunchier crust like the fast food chicken. It REALLY does do that, but I realize that I want Grandma's chicken, so I will not add the corn starch next time.

4. For a bit more crust (especially since we remove the chicken skin), I could soak the pieces in milk/egg, dredge through the flour, dip again into the milk and dredge again in the flour.

5. I've read numerous techniques for seasoning the chicken, including soaking the chicken in brine (salty water) or adding the salt/seasoning AFTER the chicken has been fried. 

What I will do next time is rub salt and pepper into the chicken meat before soaking it in the milk/egg....OR, it may work best to rub the salt/pepper into the chicken meat AFTER it soaks in the milk/egg. I have yet to experiment with those two techniques.

At any rate, the flesh today was not seasoned as I remember Grandma's chicken, or Mama's chicken or Louise's chicken or Dollie's chicken...four ladies who have spoiled my family with superior Southern Fried Chicken. (By the way, Miss Dollie said she uses a little seasoned salt instead of plain salt. I called her when my first piece was not flavored like her fried chicken or like Grandma's fried chicken.

6. I also learned today that keeping the hot oil at the proper temperature for optimum frying is more of an art than it is about following directions.  I just need some more practice in this area.

7. I just learned from my friend Teresa that leaving the skin on the chicken will give it more flavor. Today the dogs got the chicken backs and chicken skin...raw...look up BARF diet for dogs to understand.

I would rate my first attempt at fried chicken at a 5 out of a maximum of 10. The meat was moist and cooked well. A couple of pieces were cooked a little too much. None of it was undercooked. The crust was crunchier than I wanted, and the salt/pepper did not reach the meat as well as I wanted.

When I achieve the Southern Fried Chicken that Grandma, Mama, Louise or Dollie have cooked in the past, then I will proudly accept a rating of 10!

Unc and Gordon were so supportive! Mr. Wardell was here tonight to go with Unc for some late afternoon fishing for catfish, and he said the chicken was delicious. Mr. Wardell is a sweetheart, and he knew this was my first fried chicken. *grin*

So tonight, I am again flooded with happy memories of watching these four women cook Southern Fried Chicken. I feel a bit chagrined that my chicken was only a 5, even though I KNOW I will achieve that perfect 10 with some practice.

Today's cooking adventure has awakened deep feelings in me of wanting to earn my place in a long, long line of excellent Southern cooks, my genetic foremothers. I want my two fellas to be sneaking a freshly fried piece of chicken to eat almost as soon as it comes out of the skillet.

There are some nuances of emotions to today's experience that I don't fully understand yet...something I can't quite see...but this rite of passage today has moved me deeply. Maybe it has something to do with Mama's death in January and taking my place as Top Female in our little family of three. If you know what I'm experiencing, please email me and help me understand these emotions.

First Butterbeans and Snap Beans of the year

Nothing can possibly taste any better than the first snap beans of the year. Even if one cans or freezes vegetables to enjoy year round, that flavor of veggies fresh from the garden, still warm from the sunshine...is impossible to capture in words or seasonings!

We like to eat our green beans/string beans/snap beans very small, before they develop any "strings" to pull off. We boil them with salt and butter. That is it. They have THE BEST nutty flavor.

Then yesterday and today, Unc brought in the first butterbeans for us this year. Again, we pick them small, definitely smaller than a dime. They are so tender and flavorful when they are small like that. A delicacy to be able to harvest one's vegetables at the size one prefers.

Same with squash. We like them at five to seven inches long. Nice pretty quarter-sized slices. Tender. Flavorful!

Today Unc pulled one okra pod. Just one. We cooked it with the green beans. It was divine! We'll start freezing the baby green beans and baby butterbeans as soon as we are picking more than a one-day's serving of each of these veggies.

Unc's garden has done well this year. He has had to plant a few vegetables twice because of the heavy spring rains, so we have not had the quantity of vegetables we want to share with friends. He plans to start planting some things for a fall garden, so our canning and freezing season will last for months more!

I'm thankful for every morsel of home-grown, chemical-free food that goes in our freezers!

I'll have to photograph and share the squash casserole recipe with you. We tweaked it a little from Grandma's recipe, and Unc and I are besotted with it. Gordon still will not eat veggies. What do I do with him to convince him to eat veggies? *sigh*

Cooking by Kerosene Lamplight!

Whooo weeee!!!! We had a humdinger of a storm this afternoon, and the power was out for almost five hours! We were three hot humans and seven hot dogs!

At least we could continue cooking because the stove and oven are powered by propane! We were well into making beef and chicken enchiladas...and cooking squash to freeze...and making some squash and chicken soup to put on the dog food every day.

That was a lot of cooking putting out a lot of heat without air conditioning! Phew! The four kerosene lamps also put out their fair share of heat!

Because we are the LAST customer on this power line, we have experienced plenty of power outages over the years, some of which have lasted days! A 117 hour outage is our record so far, and thankfully that occurred in the winter! We stayed warm with propane and wood heat!

Gordon and Unc, as always, pitched in this afternoon, and we got it all done with squash frozen and a couple of casseroles of enchiladas in the freezer, ready to cook another time. I do like to make enough of whatever we are cooking to freeze for an easy meal another day!

The food photos are from some time this month! I need to take more photos to share with you as the squash and green beans and as of today, cucumbers, are beginning to come in. Unc and I had a cucumber sandwich at tea time...even though we do not have a formal tea time every day. LOL