Working together

Pickled beans and blanched beets for soup.

Thursday was a great mother-daughter day with Paulina. I even told her how much I am going to miss our times in the kitchen together. We haven’t had a baking day like this in a long time. Now as I write about it, I remember the many times that I used to work with my mother in her café. After we moved back to Herreid in 1999, I didn’t have a job in the beginning, and I would go to the café and pitch in. Later when one of her waitresses moved on, I started working more and more. I was editor of the local paper, but I was only in the office on Monday and Tuesday, so the others days, I spent lots of time in the café. Now I realize that I could have learned quite a few more things from her, but we are never really as receptive as we should be when we can be.

We made banana bread together. She worked the mixer, put in the eggs, oil, bananas and sugar. I mixed the dry ingredients for her to add. She pointed out the Duh in my recipe. At the bottom of the card it says, “makes two loaves if you double the recipe.” Now really, who puts that on a recipe? Only me. Anyway, we ended up with two large loaves and three mini’s. I plan to take them to the Farmers’ Market tomorrow. What doesn’t sell might end up with Jaxon. She also made a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies for me to peddle. We shall see how it goes.

Banana bread.

Oatmeal-raisin cookies.

I also have dill again tomorrow, and this time cucumbers, though not many, and maybe a couple of bags of beans, but I might hold off on those. I should put up some for us before I sell them all. Today Paulina helped me put up seven pints of pickled beans. We used my sister Kathy’s recipe again. Seems I am always canning with her recipes. I was excited that we used our own garlic and dill and beans. The only thing we had to purchase was the canning salt and vinegar. Yipee. In the meantime, I cut up those five beets and blanched them. The problem is that we put too much salt in the water, so I will have to use them in soup and remember not to salt the soup. Oh yeah and we made home-made potato chips. We tried to flavor them to be like pickle chips, but we didn’t use enough vinegar and too much salt. That seemed to be our theme today. Anyway, we do plan to try this again, but with a different flavor.

Potato chips ready to fry.

Well, I will post this for now and give you the results of the whole Farmers’ Market tomorrow when it is over. I might be on over kill with two posts in one day, but I just had to give a shout out to Mother-Daughter working together in the kitchen time. And Jess and Vic, you are welcome to come home and help me can or bake anytime, anytime. Ha!!