Finish the Sentence Friday - Food

After taking a little time to let my conscious self ponder the subject of food, I jotted down some thoughts that came to mind and am sharing them in a post to be linked to the blog hop Finish the Sentence Friday - Food. The host is Kristi Campbell of Finding Ninee and co-host Kenya G. Johnson of Sporadically Yours. This is a stream of consciousness post since it is the third Friday of the month. Click one of the above links to see what streamed through the minds of my fellow bloggers when they thought about food.

For many years our family drove up to a campground in the Cascades for a family reunion of many descendants of the first ancestors of my mother-in-law to settle in this state. Some family members camped out the night before to make sure they could get the best picnic area which meant the one with plenty of room to play softball and to throw horse shoes, and of course a covered area to spread out all the potluck dishes everyone brought. The covered area also had a fireplace which was nice in case there was unusually cold weather that weekend. Even though it was a potluck, people looked forward to the certain dishes from some of the relatives. One of my husband's uncles always brought fresh picked cherries so he could send some home with other relatives. My mother-in-law was known for her delicious sourdough chocolate cake. 

Food reminds me of the various kitchens in the apartments or homes where we have lived. Two apartments were on the second floor of a home. In each of those kitchens it was impossible to stand  completely straight in parts of the room. 

In another apartment, which was a one-room efficiency apartment, the kitchen was basically behind a sliding partition making it impossible to be in the kitchen with the partition closed. We ate our meals on TV trays. It was in this kitchen where my very young scientific minded husband/science teacher wanted to prepare a badger skull for display in his classroom. (Badgers are listed as one of the unprotected animals in our state.) He needed to boil the head and remove any flesh. Just so you know, the smell of a boiling unseasoned badger head is not a smell I'd wish on anyone. Unfortunately some of the neighbors probably felt sorry for my husband, knowing his new bride was still learning to cook, and not knowing he was the one tending the kettle this time.

One spring morning when I was starting to heat up the griddle on one of the stove burners, a mouse popped up from under the burner. In case you are wondering, I screamed. Breakfast preparation went on as planned, after a short delay to trap the mouse. That was many years ago after we had become first time home owners. Fortunately, we have never had a repeat performance of a mouse under the burners.

This was the kitchen where a mouse came for breakfast, but thankfully not for this Christmas dinner.

In our younger years, my husband went elk hunting a few times. He and a friend shot an elk and shared the meat, but we weren't sure where we were going to be able to put it. Our friend had a large freezer that was like the kinds one would have seen in grocery stores back in the 40's and 50's. You could lift up the the lids on top and reach down and select an ice cream bar or popsicle or a quart of ice cream. He loaned the freezer to us to use. There was plenty of room to store the elk meat and other frozen foods.

When our children were growing up, we did our share of gardening, canning, freezing, and drying food. My husband even built a very large wooden food dehydrator.

As much as I love food, there have been times in my adult life when I have had reactions (allergies) to eating and/or touching certain foods. It is not anywhere as much of a problem these days. Yeah!

I have enjoyed trying out so many different recipes over the years, and amassed more cookbooks than I really need, especially now that recipes are so easy to find quickly on the internet. It is easy for me to still get a lot of enjoyment from thumbing through cookbooks, and seeing how the recipes and trends have changed through the years, and boy have they!

I wonder what kind of dishes were served at this family reunion at Mooney Grove Park in the late 30's, maybe early 40's. (This was my mother's side of the family.)