We put up corn a few weeks back - in fact, it was in the middle of my folks' visit, and was a challenge with the two extra kids they brought.
I got an early start. It was a Saturday, sadly. I began shucking the corn the girls and I had picked (from Hubby's coworker's field - NOT our garden) on the previous Thursday evening. How much corn? Hm... About this much:
Plenty, methinks. When I had a good start on that, I boiled some water for blanching, got out my nice big bowls, and set to work. Ears need 4.5 minutes of blanch time, then dunked into ice water before cutting the kernels from the cobs. Just soyaknow. Eventually, the rest of the house awoke, and some kids (and a grandpa) finished husking what I hadn't done.
Blanching six ears at a time, and each set of six taking nearly 5 minutes, adds up to many hours. Especially when I was usually the onliest worker and had to pause occasionally to catch up on cutting kernels or emptying the ears from the ice water before the next batch was done. Hubby kept me in ice, and kept the chickens in corncobs, and my mom helped me bag the stuff into ziplocs.
And every time I got a little sore in the wrist, or achy in the feet, I just looked around me for a motivational reminder. Grandpa and the kids apparently didn't want me to slack, as they left no ear unshucked:
Laundry baskets...
Coolers...
Storage bins...
Nice of them, eh? That's okay: When they looked at my harried self and asked what was for breakfast, guess what I served? Yep: Corn. All around. All-You-Can-Eat. Because I am nice, I let them have butter and salt also. I tried a repeat for lunch, which didn't fly very well, but by then my mom was up and I think she made peanut butter sandwiches or something. Organique decided to introduce (raw) corn into her diet, and helped herself from the abundance.
The next day (because we are classy that way), I decided that the front porch looked like something out of the Appalachian neighborhoods in the book Christy - so my dad and I cleaned up the husks the kids had dropped. There were a few:
After a good 12 hours of kitchen work, I ended up with fifty-some quarts of corn - I gave 10 to a friend, and the rest will suit for chili and soup and such.
So far this week:
1 gallon of Garden Stew
20 quarts peaches
2 quarts tomatoes (c'mon, ripen!)
6 quarts blueberry applesauce
And since I'm running out of freezer space *gulp*, we'll be canning the rest of the peaches*.
*Sweet Jesus, deliver my kitchen from the layer of peach juice that already covers it, and protect it from further burial by such. Amen.
5 comments:
Whew, I am worn out from reading about all your work! Sounds yummy!
This reminds me of my childhood. Every year we had a "corn party" at my grandparents' house with the whole extended family. There's nothing better than home grown sweet corn. My garden this year didn't yield enough to freeze any, but that just means I'll have to plant more next year I guess!
I got tagged, so I am tagging you. You likely don’t know me, but I am a friend of Mary Grace’s.
You can see my blog at http://thelordsday-psalm118-24.blogspot.com/ .
My name is Benny, by the way. Nice to meet you. ;o)
Holy Toledo that's a lot of corn! Yikes! We don't grow corn ourselves, but I have been buying it weekly at the Farmer's Market. We can't grow it ourselves because our soil is too sandy, but fortunately a little farther northeast in our county the soil is better. It's not as good as raising our own, but good enough. The price is a little steep, though.
Anywho, you've been busy! Tell me about your blueberry applesauce....it sounds...interesting.
Benny, Hi! I checked your blog and realized I'd been there before... I'm going to bookmark it. Thank you for visiting, and for tagging me!
Annie, yeah, we got corn... The blueberry applesauce is okay; I just cleaned and quartered apples (left cores in), steamed them (more or less) with a few handfuls of blueberries, and ran the mess through my strainer thingy - it's purple and cool. I sugared it a BIT, and put in some cinnamon. I only had one kind of apples (ginger gold), but all reports are that multiple apple kinds in the same recipe are much better. Mine is bland, and not so fancy, but it's healthy and the kids will eat it.
:) I found a recipe on some blog, but am not sure. I didn't follow it, however. :)
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