Mary Lynn Archibald is a freelance editor and copywriter, and the author of two books: Briarhopper: A History, a memoir of one woman’s life from 1913-1945, and Accidental Cowgirl: Six Cows, No Horse and No Clue, a lighthearted personal memoir of a greenhorn’s life on a small cattle ranch. Her forthcoming memoir, due out in early 2011, deals in part with her life as a San Francisco chorus girl. You can find Mary Lynn at Wine Country Writer, at The Red Room and at Aaccidental Cowgirl.
As part of her WOW: Women on Writing blog tour, I’ve asked her to write about her life growing up on a ranch and growing your own food.
Food
I've been thinking a lot about the process of growing food, and of course, cooking it.
At the ranch where we spent 12 years growing our own organic vegetables and herbs, we had some magnificent meals, events that we spoke of often with awe, joy and appetites that wouldn't quit. I guess what they say about fresh air is true; one's appetite improves outdoors, not to mention the fact that we were doing so much physical labor that we were really hungry by the time we got around to eating.
Unfortunately, a lot of that physical labor involved the garden, the orchard, and the preparation of excess produce for canning, drying or freezing.
Most of our experiments in these areas went well, except for the time I had a huge zucchini crop (is there any other kind?) that went bad along with many freezer bags of Italian green beans, crookneck squash, homemade pesto (from our own Italian basil of course), and a small amount of organic beef we'd also grown ourselves.
What happened? You guessed it. We experienced a power outage at the ranch during one of our weeklong absences, and the frozen food, as they say, was history.
Guess who got to clean out the freezer.
Still, I loved planting seeds, waiting eagerly for the seedlings to come up, then carefully watching for the first tomatoes, cucumbers, summer squash, and other yummy crops.
One year we decided to grow Blue Hubbard squash, since we had lots of room for them to spread out in our nearly half-acre garden—which had apparently been designed to feed most of the 250 inhabitants of our mountain.
We chortled happily as we hauled the nearly 15-pound squashes from the garden up to the house, where we carefully placed them on the rug in one of the spare bedrooms. I think we harvested nearly eight gigantic squashes from two plants.
All was well until we discovered on lifting the last two squashes, late that winter, that they had rotted on their bottoms, and then stuck themselves firmly to the carpet.
I never liked that carpet anyway.
We generally cooked only for ourselves—plus the few friends and relatives willing to brave the long drive and the one-lane mountain roads to visit us. There were no restaurants on our mountain, so we had no choice but to cook.
Of course a lot of the local folks tended to drop in unannounced, as many of them did not own telephones, but most of them were so busy taking care of their own gardens, livestock and families that they didn't tend to have a lot of time to spend drinking coffee with me, nor did I with them.
The trick was, however, to always have some muffins or coffee cake in reserve, just in case. In the country, this means making it yourself. I tried to always make two of any of my standard goodies, and keep one in the freezer for occasional visitors.
My husband and I enjoyed finding ways to use our seasonal produce, attempting to make gourmet meals for each other, often without the appropriate ingredients. It wasn't a matter of going next door to borrow a cup of sugar or running down to the store for rice or fresh ginger or coconut milk.
The result, which I still consider a big but often dubious plus, was that we managed to learn how to be very creative with food.
© 2010 Mary Lynn Archibald
More about Accidental Cowgirl
Accidental Cowgirl: Six Cows, No Horse and No Clue was declared a finalist for three awards: the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Humor, the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Memoir, and the National Best Book Award (NBBA) for Humor.
Read an interview with Mary Lynn Archibald at WOW’s The Muffin.
How yoga keeps me balanced: a guest post by Linda C. Wisniewski
Guest post: The Satisfying Power of Protein and Fiber Rich Foods
The Denver Post food/dining section for 12/8/04
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
One of the things I learned from having a garden is to start collecting recipes for whatever it is I’m growing BEFORE the crop actually comes in. Otherwise we have green beans the same three ways over and over again when the panic of having 65 million green beans to work with hits me.
You are so right, Jodi! And now that the tomatoes are in and we are overrun with basil and zucchini and peaches and raspberries, guess who mislaid all the fresh produce recipes she has been collecting for the last ten years!
Fortunately, I own Deborah Madison’s “Local Flavors,” cookbook, that encourages one to make dinner with Farmer’s Market produce. Same thing. We have our own mini farmer’s market right here.
Mary Lynn and Jodi, there’s a new cookbook called “The Homesteader’s Kitchen – Recipes from farm to table” by Robin Burnside. Great recipes and gorgeous photos.
Thanks, Anne-Marie! I’ll look for it.
I would love to have a garden; visions of compost tilling and fresh heirloom tomatoes dance in my head on a regular occassion. Alas, I live in the desert and I’m not sure I could create enough compost in my lifetime to render this clay suitable…besides, if the dirt doesn’t kill ‘em the heat will. My compromise is fragrant plants like rosemary and sage, and the spanish lavendar in the wine barrel out back. I can’t eat what I grow but at least my yard smell nice:)
Mary Lynn’s book sounds like a wonderful read–I can hardly wait to pick up a copy, I could use some comic relief.