I've been doing some farmish things I never did growing up in a coal camp (or anyway never did beyond helping mother). I've been drying green beans to make shuckey beans, or, as my father called them, leather britches. If you have eaten shuckeys, you won't need any explanation, and if you haven't I can't really describe the difference in taste from fresh green beans (slightly smoky, maybe?), but I like them very much.
I've learned since starting to winter in Kentucky that shuckey-bean drying has changed over the years. Mother and I used to punch a needle threaded with strong twine through the center flat side of the whole green bean pod and continue that until we had multiple long strings of them. We'd hang the strings outside in the sun or inside over doors to dry. These days I find my neighbors - those who produce shuckeys - break them ready for cooking and spread the broken pieces under the back window of their closed-up, hot car to dry, or spread them on a piece of tin or aluminum out in the sun, or even put them in an electric dehydrator. Ah, technology. I'm using the car method, although we have an SUV and so no shelf under the back window. As a backup, we have them spread on the console under the windshield. Since the beans and the newspaper they sit on reflect so dreadfully it makes it hard to drive, that means a lot of taking-out-the-beans and putting-the-beans-back-in before and after each use of the vehicle, which the under-the-back-window-folk don't have to cope with. I'II have to admit it's more convenient to use the beans if they have been broken before drying, and they might dry faster as well, but I still love the process of stringing and the look of the strung beans, not to mention avoiding the repetitive in-and-out, the so I may go back to tradition next year.
I've also been consumed with picking, eating, processing, and giving away apples. We have two large apple trees - winesaps - on our land. They don't usually yield enough to worry about but this year we had a bumper crop. I eat several a day, but the tree yields a lot more than that. Many of them inevitably fall to the ground and often are damaged. If they are only moderately bruised, I pick them up, wash them, and save them for eating. Refrigerated undamaged, they will keep for months, and I cram as many of the undamaged ones as I can in the interstices between other food, to the point that, if the refrigerator had a more forgiving coefficient of elasticity, it would bulge. Unfortunately, it would take a refrigerator a lot bigger than normal to hold all the tree has produced this fall, or all I can eat in a year. Or, this year, it seems, all even the deer can eat.
I'm also pursuing mixed pickles which, belying the common non-Appalachian assumption, have no cucumbers in them. They are a mix of green beans, corn, and cabbage, processed like sauerkraut. I find that I'm surprising myself with this foodie activity, since I have never been domestic. In the interests of truth, I confess that I am buying the mixed pickles from a lovely lady here in town named Sexton who put up 32 quarts of mixed pickles this year, and is willing to sell me five of those quarts. (For those who don't know, one drains a jar of mixed pickles, and pitches them into a skillet of hot oil to heat. That skillet once held a generous amount of bacon grease, but these days, in the interests of our arteries, it holds a little olive oil.) If the mixed pickles have had years to marinate and are very sour, many people soak them in cold water for a while to moderate the sour and take out some of the salt, after which one can proceed to the drain and pitch step.
We of course brought back a lot of frozen salmon from Alaska, and we are the beneficiaries of a doe's weight of venison, (plus we occasionally receive gifts of personally raised and killed pork) so we will be eating little from the grocery store this year and much from the freezer. There's so much I don't know if the two of us can eat it in a year, but it feels good to kind of live off the land.
I'm off to wash the apples we picked from the tree or picked up from the ground this morning.
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