Canning vegetables and making choices

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Don’t you just love this time of year? All your gardening friends will bring you fresh vegetables. Isn’t it nice to get a big basket of tomatoes or zucchini squash? What do you think of getting a big basket of peas? It seems like everyone has a tale of shelling peas with their grandma. What fun that was. Sitting around with grandma and a big bowl of peas; what fun! You might even have those great tales of putting up corn for freezing. Some of my friends talk about all the vegetables that they put in the freezer that year. They also tell about all of the old corn that they threw out because it had been in the freezer for three years. One of my best friends loved to put up vegetables. He, his wife and mother would spend a night working on corn. His wife wasn’t a willing participant in all this canning. She claimed that she wasted many hours putting up the vegetables and then her mother-in-law would give away the vegetables to her sister-in-law who wouldn’t work in a pie factory. After finishing all this canning and running afoul of her sister-in-law, she had jars full of canned tomatoes. She didn’t like tomatoes at all. I wondered why they had so many cans of vegetables that they didn’t eat. Supposedly, this food fresh from the garden was the best tasting food ever. I didn’t really think that all the work was really worth the effort. My friend would spend all day messing with his garden. One day I told him I was going to buy some boiled peanuts. He told me not to do it. He had some peanuts that were ready to come out of the garden. It was early in the morning but if I would come with him we could get some fresh peanuts. Remember I said it was early in the morning? There was dew all over everything. We got wet walking into the field. We pulled up some peanuts. Dirt got on our dew soaked pants so now there was mud on our pants. Eventually we got the peanuts in a pressure cooker. After an hour of pressure-cooking we had some boiled peanuts. Now it was almost noon. I had muddy pants, spent almost four hours and had a dollar worth of peanuts. My friend bragged on his free peanuts and how good they tasted. It’s really my fault that my taste buds are not good enough to tell the difference between vegetables that just come out of the garden and vegetables that come out of a can from the grocery store. If I have the choice just fix me something out of a can. I can’t taste the difference. All of this is just a matter of choice. Just the other day, someone brought donuts to work. We also had some okra that had been brought in. When I was told about the donuts, I decided that I needed to go try one. (You know, mid-morning snack). I headed for the kitchen and was reminded that there was okra in the kitchen too. Decisions, decisions, what was I going to do? Should I eat a donut or bag up some okra to fry up tonight? I bet you can guess what I decided. Choosing is not always that easy. I came out of a fast food restaurant one morning. I guy came up and wanted to borrow a dollar to get a sausage biscuit. I told him that I could give him a dollar or I could just give him the biscuit. Which did he want? He looked at my hands. One hand had a dollar in it and in the other hand was a sausage biscuit. He merely turned and ran away. Well, beggars can’t be choosers.