My kitchen smelled amazing Saturday. The stovetop was a happy place of simmering aromatic good stuff from the garden.
Not from my garden. I don’t have a garden.
But you wouldn’t know it judging by the abundance of garden produce that accumulates regularly on my countertops and in my fridge.
Cucumbers and green beans in the spring. Potatoes and tomatoes midway through summer. And squash in the fall.
Good, wholesome stuff, all of it.
And every single colorful piece delivered thoughtfully by my 85-year-old mother-in-law.
Who insists each year she’s going to scale back on her garden, but then forgets in the spring and puts all the seeds in the ground.
She should consider retiring. She’s earned it. Gardens are a lot of work, or so I recall from my childhood helping my own mom.
But if Mary Ellen were to retire, that would mean an end to my countertop produce that magically appears when the little blue Ford wheels into the driveway.
And, I’d need to consider a garden of my own.
Until then, I’m happy to accept the fruits of her labor. And the fruits that get preserved in the little neat jars with carefully labeled lids.
Like the pint-size ones with bright red pickled beets – that are exactly as I remember my grandma’s tasting some 30 years ago.
Turns out, Mary Ellen and I are the only ones in the immediate family who enjoy beets, so I often end up with “extra ones” in my pantry.
She and I have often discussed the beet canning process and that if I liked them so much I should learn how to do them.
After all, she isn’t going live forever.
None of us are, but it’s harder to believe with some people, like the little 85-year-old firecracker that runs circles around me.
Determined to pass on the beloved pickled-beet preserving method, she showed up Saturday with a large pot of already dug, cleaned and cooked beets.
And we launched right into peeling, slicing, and pickling.
And, because there was still room on the stove, we boiled an apples and red cabbage recipe she’d been wanting to try — with a head of red cabbage from her garden, of course.
And while we listened for the distinctive “nok” of each lid popping into the seal, we made a hot dish (with some of last year’s frozen sweet corn) for the guys in the field.
At the end of the day, when the oversized pots and countertops were cleaned up, we took stock of our afternoon’s work.
Which included seven little pints of beets that Mary Ellen generously proclaimed I had canned myself.
After she left, I studied the recipe she wrote down for the next time. And it occurred to me, I now know how to can beets, but do I know how to grow them?
That would have to be a lesson for another day. Hopefully next spring. In the garden she keeps threatening to retire from.