I'm really an Aunt Bea wanna be

I grew up with a huge family garden every summer...

There were miserable hours spent picking vegetables....

There were even more miserable hours spent shelling peas and butter beans....

I can remember all of us sitting around in my aunts living room with bushel baskets everywhere full of peas and beans and we were not allowed to go have any fun till we had shelled at least one big bowl full...

I can remember not going to the bathroom for fear that my cousins would steal out of my bowl making theirs fuller and mine empty...

I can remember the house smelling wonderful while fresh veg. cooked...

I can remember eating tomatoes off the vine and Aunt Gal's wonderful tomato sandwiches till I was sick...

When Aunt Effie's pear tree was full I remember eating pear preserves, pear salad, pear jello, pear cake, you get the idea...


I really wish I had that big garden in my back yard and my kids were tortured with picking and shelling peas.

I think learning from my mom and aunts made me love to cook and enjoy fresh food.

I know they had grown up during lean times and they loved to have a stock pile of anything they needed...
They canned and froze veggies, jelly, pears, figs and anything else they could put up.  They bought sides of beef and split it up between them.  In the summer since we were right on the coast, they bought hundreds of pounds of shrimp and put them in the freezer(that didn't make the house smell good...).

Last night my door bell rang and my sweet neighbor from next door was there with a HUGE bag of fresh squash from her parent's garden...

Oh, the happiness!  I spent a little time last evening looking at squash recipes and planning what I was going to do.

I spent the quite morning while kids were still sleeping "putting up" the squash...

I have three squash casseroles, two big bags of breaded to fry squash, and two bags of just sauteed squash
in the freezer!  I am a happy girl.

Just yesterday I added a camera app to my phone that makes the pic's look old and have been loving it!

I really think I should have lived in the Aunt Bea and Andy Giffith era.... I would be so happy to just be home all day in my apron, entering pickles in the county fair, making pies...


I would be in heaven except for the no air conditioning part....

Come on over for some squash...