Corn, Ice Cream & a Dessert Potluck for an Entire Town

This post is long overdue by just about any person's standards, but since I've only just about finished my unpacking, I still haven't cooked in the new place and so now is an opportune time to share this with y'all.

(btw, there truly is something wrong with this scenario that WILL be fixed this weekend. more specifically, i WILL be cooking this weekend. thank goodness!)

While spending 4th of July weekend in Texas with my Grandma Mary Lou, we did some cooking and the like. Among the dishes we made was corn grilled with butter and fresh parsley from her garden.

Talk about fun. Not having a yard, I don't have a garden. Having a cat that likes to get into things, I don't have a window sill herb garden. So, for me, it was a novelty to go out to the garden and pick fresh herbs. Especially since I had to remember which bits of green were parsley and which bits of green I should avoid like the plague. (for the record, i was successful in this venture.)

The corn turned out fabulous. So simple and fresh. I will caution others though to not peel back the husks about two minutes after the corn comes off the grill unless you actually enjoy the sensation of having the top layers of skin on your fingertips singed a bit. I don't, but I still did it. Not very bright, eh?

We also made a few other goodies, including burgers, baked beans and potato salad. No photos of those though. I blame the lack of photos on the homemade ice cream. Not that I have any photograhic evidence of that either. But, let me tell you, when your grandma is an officer in the town's Garden Club and said Garden Club has promised to coordinate the potluck dessert table for the town's 4th of July celebration, there isn't a lot of time to be wasted and certainly not enough time to be taking pictures.

For her contribution, Grandma Mary Lou made the kind of ice cream that you make in those wooden bucket ice cream makers with the ice and freezing salt you put down the sides.

Please excuse me for a moment, but...

Hello! You mean I get to dump ice and salt all over the place and will be rewarded with homemade ice cream? Really? Wow... It was like being a kid again because, gosh darn it, I was going to make darned sure there was plenty of ice and salt dumped on the ice cream maker if it meant I had first dibs on the ice cream.

And bless my Grandma. I did have first dibs. When we pulled the paddle out, she gave it right over to me so that I could eat all the ice cream off of it. Granted, this priviledge would be part of the beauty of having been the only grandkid on the premises. Regardless, I still would've called dibs and won. I'm sure of it. Well, relatively sure.

Anyhow... I got first dibs on the ice cream and it was heaven. On the downside for me, we had to share. Darn the Garden Club and its promise to coordinate the town's 4th of July dessert potluck!

Now, in case you're wondering about this town potluck and whether or not the whole town attended, I can tell you that yes, in fact, just about the whole town attended. Like I said before, it's a small town. Plus, I have reason to know because, in addition to coordinating the dessert potluck, the Garden Club also served up the desserts. And, somehow, I was dragooned into helping.

Okay. So I wasn't really dragooned into helping, but what else was I supposed to do when confronted with picnic table after picnic table of sheet cakes that hadn't been cut before they were brought to the potluck? Just stand there and stare? No. I couldn't do that. Instead, I grabbed a spatula (there wasn't a knife to be found anywhere) and got to work cutting cake for the town's 4th of July Dessert Potluck brought to you by the Garden Club.

Also, while two of these three of pictures don't have much of anything at all to do with the grilled corn, ice cream or other goodies I helped make while visiting my grandma, I wanted to share them nonetheless.

As background, Grandma Mary Lou lives on the very southern edge of town and, across the road to the east, is a neighbor's field. To south and west of her house are the old golf course and more fields. Personally, I find the landscape fascinating and gorgeous in its own right and I hope you enjoy these pictures as much as I do.

Grandma's Grocery Store

I suspect that when my parents read this, they’re going to scold me. After all, I just moved into a new apartment and the vast majority of my stuff is still in boxes.

They might have point. After all, those boxes aren’t going to unpack themselves. However, I can only unpack just so many boxes before I go stark raving mad.

In any case, between the move and some recent work travel that's taken me to Minneapolis and Raleigh for days at a time, I haven’t had much time to make anything more complicated than a faux quesadilla cooked in the toaster oven. Heck, I almost didn’t have enough time to pack before the movers arrived.

Since I haven’t made a lick of progress toward accomplishing my goal of cooking from all of my cookbooks before the end of the year recently, I thought I’d take a moment to share with you one of the reasons why I’m so obsessed with all things food.

I’ll start by telling you that one of my early memories is of me toddling around my Grandma Mary Lou’s grocery store. This is a very, very vague memory from my childhood. I have no recollection of what I was doing exactly, but I’m willing to bet this “memory” is actually an amalgam of several memories of playing in the store or shopping for groceries with my mom or even just stopping by for a visit.

When I was little bit older, Grandma Mary Lou moved her store to a new location. The new store I remember vividly. I spent hours and hours there. I have so many good memories of the time I spent there and the freedom of being able to go into just about any room, aisle or cubby. Although Grandma Mary Lou and Cathy, the store’s butcher, were very serious about being careful around the butcher block area. There was no fooling around there.

I’m sure when I was little, I must have been underfoot a lot. I played silly pranks, played hide and seek with my brother in the back of the store (and the front, if I'm being honest), and would try to help stock shelves.

As I got older though, I did do some actual work around the store. I bagged groceries. Stocked shelves. Rang up customers. Helped make pizzas for the deli. Sorted coupons while watching Bob Barker on the “Price is Right.” (And no, I didn't purposely volunteer to sort coupons at the exact time that "Price is Right" came one. That was merely a coincidence. I swear. No, really, I promise. Pure coincidence.)

In return, Grandma Mary Lou paid me in comic books I read while sitting on bags of dog food, ice cream treats, candy and hugs. And then there was the end-of-summer, back-to-school shopping spree. My brand-spanking new Trapper Keeper and big, fancy box of Crayolas with a built-in sharpener were my pride and joy.

While some kids might have resented working in their family’s business, I never really thought twice about it. For me, it was a fun way to spend time with my grandma. There was also the side benefit of being able to talk and talk and talk with goodness only knows how many people. That was nice.

Plus, without even realizing it, it was a lesson in how important a grocery store can be to a community. The town in which Grandma Mary Lou lives isn’t that big and a lot of folks live out in the country on their farms and ranches. Coming into town to go grocery shopping was a big commitment. I know. When I was little, I lived with my family out on our farm, which was about 20 or 30 minutes outside of town. In an area like that, Grandma Mary Lou’s store was a place where people would run into one another, visit for a bit and share news and gossip.

Grandma Mary Lou sold the store quite some time ago. The first time I went to the store with her after the sale was weird. I wasn’t allowed to go in the back or behind the deli counter. I sure as heck couldn't get an ice cream out of the freezer for free either.

One thing hasn’t changed much though. Folks still have to go to the grocery store and you’re sure to run into folks you know while you’re there – even if you’re like me and you only get back to visit and share news and gossip just every once in a while.

(Note: I published this Aug. 30 originally, but edited it a bit on Sept. 1.)

Confessions of a Recipe Guinea Pig

As I may have mentioned one or two or a dozen times, I used to live in a B&B. This was a family business in Lubec, Maine, the easternmost town in the United States.

Now, first things first, don’t let those morons who live in Eastport, Maine, convince you that they live in the easternmost town or city or whatever it is they claim. They don’t. Oh. And those kids who went to Mt. Katadhin to see the first sunrise of 2000? Yeah. They didn’t see tiddlywinks because it was fogged in and overcast. Instead, Lubec saw the sunrise first. I watched it from brother’s bedroom window, in fact. After I’d been out for a good portion of the night celebrating. Oddly enough, there’s even photo evidence of my celebrating the incoming millennium. If I recall, correctly, my picture is right next to a picture of the Pope John Paul II in the New Year’s edition of the Bangor Daily News. I know. You’re jealous. I hope you can restrain yourself.

And that bit of digression has next to nothing to do with much of anything.

The point I was trying to make is that I used to live in a B&B. For those of you not so familiar with the lingo, that’s a Bed & Breakfast. In 1989, my family purchased a rather large house with loads of bedrooms and turned it into a B&B. After six months or so of renovations (it was supposed to be six weeks, but that's another story), we opened it just in time for the summer season of tourists that visit Lubec to go whale watching or to visit the easternmost point in the United States, which is at West Quoddy Head State Park (East Quoddy Head is on Campobello Island, which is in Canada – hence the reason a park named “West” is the easternmost point in the United States), and other touristy things.

Anyhow, again, I digress…

The reason my family’s ownership of a B&B matters to this blog is because of how it shaped my love of food and cooking. Not to mention my ability to talk to virtual strangers for hours at a time or to give you a tour of a building that would knock your socks off.

One of the distinguishing services we provided at my family’s B&B was a full, sit-down breakfast. No buffet. No stingy smorgasbord of muffins or cold cereals. Nope. Not at our B&B. My Mom and Dranny served guests a full, sit-down, bring-an-empty stomach, worth-getting-up-super-early-for breakfast.

As a kid living in a B&B, I had a lot of different jobs that varied as I got older. However, the one job that never changed much was my solemn duty of being a guinea pig for the recipes my Mom and Dranny tried. Let me tell you, that one was a tough job. I was “forced” to sit through many a test recipe to help determine if it was any good and if it was easy enough to make en masse for guests.

Yeah. Tough job. Especially when Mom and Dranny would test chocolate waffles with raspberry sauce, oatmeal pancakes with homemade apple syrup, egg blossoms and other assorted goodies.

I know. This time you're actually jealous. Please try to restrain yourselves though.

As we settled into the B&B routine and built a serious clientele of first-timers and return guests, my Mom and Dranny built up quite a collection of breakfast recipes. If I recall correctly, you could stay at our house for about a month and not have the same breakfast twice. And we had a few guests who would stay nearly that long thanks to a music camp for adults that set up shop in town.

That said, I’m not sure that we ever actually did that. If a guest was staying with us for that long, they typically wound up having a favorite breakfast or three that they would request and that we would make – assuming that it wasn’t an issue for another guest.

My Mom and Dranny don’t own the B&B any longer. They sold it a few years back and moved back to Texas. And let me tell you, while I loved being the breakfast guinea pig, I love celebrating winter holidays in Texas way more. I mean, c’mon. I get to wear flip flops on Christmas.

And, if I ask really nicely, Mom and Dranny even make up one of my favorite breakfasts from the B&B days.

Hmm… Speaking of…

Maybe I’ll make up some of those oatmeal pancakes or scrounge through my cookbooks for a new breakfast recipe or two. I’ll have to be my own guinea pig, but I can deal with that.