I Can Make That

When I was about four or five years old, my maternal grandma's house was my favorite place to be. I loved it there because she cooked whatever I wanted for every meal, she read to me, she let me explore around their yard, I putzed in the garage with my grandpa, and at night, my grandpa told the most wonderful stories you could ever imagine. Of course, Finley (my almost 10 year old) thinks I tell the best stories. They are all about the Chicago Cubs and they are ridiculous. But she asks for them nightly. Back to grandma Cornelia. She lived about 20 miles out of town. She had a huge yard, raspberry bushes and canned goods for days. 

My favorite things were the Slippery Jims. Or Slimey Joes, as I called them. They were watermelon rinds pickled in sweet brine. They were amazing. None of my cousins liked them, so I got to eat as many as I wanted. And I did. 

I remember being fascinated with the fact that you could put food in a jar, put a cover on it, and it would not spoil. You could still eat it after a year. You could still eat it after two years. Amazing. 

Cornelia was a worrier. She worried about everything. So when I asked her if she would teach me how to put the food into jars, she balked. She did, however, let me watch her make doughnuts and rhubarb pie. But the putting food into jars thing was just too dangerous. Too much hot stuff and boiling water.

Enter Grandma Joyce, Joycie Mae, my dad's mom. Joycie lived in the city, so I could ride the city bus to her house in the summer. Ride the city bus alone at five years old? You bet. Because my grandpa was a city bus driver. I would get on the bus across the street from my house and get dropped off less than a block from grandma's house. 

The first thing I remember was getting food out of her garden. Carrots, green beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, hot peppers, onions, sweet peas. We would sit on her porch for, what seemed like hours, cracking open pea pods and taking the peas out. I think I ate a million peas. 

The carrots were eaten fresh. She didn't have a pressure cooker, so whatever we didn't eat fresh, were cut up and frozen. 

The cucumbers. Some of them were turned into the best cucumber salad in the world; thinly sliced sweet onion, heavy cream, vinegar and sugar with a little salt and black pepper. I asked her to make it every time I was over. Winter, spring, summer or fall. I didn't care if we were having lasagne or meatloaf, I wanted that cucumber salad with it. When my first husband died, my grandma helped in the only way she knew how. She made food. What did I ask for? Cucumber salad. 

And pickles. First she showed me how to scrub all the dirt off of the pickling cucumbers (pickling cucumbers are much different than the cucumbers you use to make the cucumber salad; they are smaller and much more adorable). Then you cut the blossom end off of the cucumber. If you don't, the pickles will be mushy. We tossed some fresh dill, garlic and a jalapeño pepper into each jar and then it was hours and hours of packing these little beauties into wide mouth quart jars. And they had to be packed nice and tight and just right or they would float and look bad. The worst part was that you had to wait two weeks before you could eat them. Torture. 

Some of the green beans were eaten fresh, others were frozen, and still others were transformed into Three Bean Salad. Once you've had homemade Three Bean Salad, the stuff from the deli is not an option. Even on a busy night after the worst day of your life and you are starving, you would turn your nose up at deli Three Bean Salad if you'd ever had my grandma's. 

What to do with all of these tomatoes? "We are going to make Salsa." Forty years ago, I had no idea what salsa was. "It is tomatoes, onions, green peppers and jalapeños peppers. You mix it all together, cook it for a long time, and then you dip chips in it." Sounded gross. 

Joycie got me a step stool and showed me how to cut an 'X' into the bottom of each tomato; "Don't cut into the blossom end, it won't work. You need to cut into the bottom of the tomato." So, the opposite of the cukes. Okay. Then we dropped them into boiling water for a minute, and pulled them out with a slotted spoon. The skin was hanging off. It looked disgusting. But when you grabbed the skin, it just slipped off. And, poof, you had peeled tomatoes. 

We then chopped up the tomatoes, onions, green pepper, jalapeño and garlic and tossed it all into a huge roasting pot; we added vinegar, salt and sugar. It baked, yes, baked, for about a hundred years; at least that's what five hours feels like when you're five; and it smelled like heaven. 

Once it was nice and thick, we carefully put it into pint jars, pulled lids out of boiling water and put them on the jars, and then put the jars into a pot of boiling water. So. Many. Steps. 

After 10 minutes, we used this cool grabby thing to get the jars out of the boiling water and set them on a towel on the counter. 

*pop* 

*pop*

*pop*

"Those are the lids sealing. Now they are air tight and the salsa will last forever."

I wonder if I would have even tasted this concoction if I hadn't had a hand in making it. 

About a week later, we got a bag of Doritos. We opened a jar and poured it into a bowl. 

IT WAS DELICIOUS. I could not stop eating it. 

This salsa became the foundation for our Wildly Delicious.