The Heartland Series - A Peck to the Hill 

Damn, with all that talk about food you're making me hungry. I could use some cornbread, butter beans, greens and turnips any right now.

@@WhispersFromTheDark For all the good food and family, we cousins were horribly abused emotionally. 😉 The adults ate in the dinning room. My cousins and I had to eat in the kitchen, kids were not allowed at the grownups table. I don't know why when families get together they don't still do that. It's great. The kids could laugh and chatter, get caught up, decide what we were gonna do while the grownups napped. The grownups could laugh and chatter, get caught up about grownup things. What tied it all together was the food. My granny, who taught my mama, who taught me, wasn't a fancy cook. She didn't have a vast repertoire of cuisine. It was just plain south Georgia farm cooking. I've never been able to get my chicken and dumplings as good as her's. These aren't fluffy dumplings, they are rolled out, cut into rectangular strips and dropped into the simmering chicken & stock. The heat is turned off and as they sit in the hot stock they cook. Her collards were to die for. She always said "A good collard is a greasy collard". When she made stew beef and rice, I was in heaven. She would brown stew meat, then cover with an inch or two of water and simmer until the beef was tender. Just before the beef was ready, she chopped up and added generous amount of onions. Adding them late made sure they weren't mushy. She cooked rice and you put your rice on your plate then top with the meat & beef stock and onions. She'd have Crowder peas or purple hull peas, turnip green. The peas and turnips cooked with home cured "season meat". We always called it fat back or sow belly but city people always think it's gross, so for any delicate sensibilities lets say season meat. Always pone cornbread. Sweet tea naturally. No lemon for the tea because as a woman of the depression, lemons for cooking or lemonade was fine but just to slice up for iced tea was a ridiculous expense. Later in the afternoon, after the grownups had taken a nap, my grandaddy would cut up a huge ice cold watermelon. Us young'uns wold have watermelon juice all over our faces, running down or arms and off our elbows, probably in our hair sometimes. It's almost impossible to laugh and spit watermelon seeds at the same time. In Georgia, the gnats are plentiful and they were determined to get their share of the juice on us. As an adult, having that juice all over me would drive me nuts. Add to it the hordes of gnats buzzing my face and I would be insane. I thank you for your comment and am sorry I responded with a short story. For me the best memories of my life revolve around food. Have you ever had boiled peanuts? I miss them so much.

@@AVToth alot of us still do this ! Or we send the kids out side to eat in the spring and summer

@@diwannaeye8388 As do we. I think it builds better family bonds. In the kitchen, all of the kids could talk about anything we wanted, could laugh or tell jokes that the grownups wouldn't have approved of as being appropriate dinner table conversation. It's also like sleeping on the floor. These days I hear people talking about staying with family and they are scrambling to find air mattresses for kids or worse, finding sofa space or air mattresses for adults while the kids stay in their bed. Oh hell no! Adults get any beds and kids get what's left over. It is a matter of respect. If grandparents are involved, then they are given the most comfortable place to sleep. As a kid, I loved it when I realized that my parents had someone who could tell them what to do, my parents had someone who was their superior! In talking to my parents and in laws, they felt the same. Their parents had superiors. In the long run, sleeping on the floor was something the cousins, all of us young'uns, looked forward to this. No sleeping bags, just a couple of homemade quilts. Two sheets on top of quilts. Insert young'uns between sheets after spraying room 30 minutes prior with DDT that my father had appropriated from Moody AFB in Valdosta Georgia. After that preparation, let the giggling, poking, prodding, whispered ghost stories commence!

@@WhispersFromTheDark I loved turnip greens but the turnip, the turnip root was good raw but cooked, the taste changes dramatically and I would have sworn that my mother and Satan concocted it just to make me suffer.