Fern Oleta

I first met Fern when I was 17 years old. I had become smitten with her tall, lanky son. We had been dating just a short while when I was invited to dinner. I say dinner because that's what they called it. To me it was a feast. The table was filled with fresh vegetables, a big pot of chicken and dumplings, the requisite fresh onion, bread and butter, fresh sweet tea, and a pitcher of grape kool-aid.

Fern's husband was a farmer. He tilled the ground, and brought in fresh vegetables on a daily basis. Fern also worked full-time. She would come home at lunch every day and cook up a meal for munch and then return to work. She would then come home and fix an evening meal. Wow.

This was not something I had ever witnessed take place anywhere but my grandmother's house. It was part of Fern's life. Taking care of her family, working, and working hard. She did not work in a building, with air conditioning and desks, or a retail store (until later in her life), no Fern worked as a farm hand. She was born in Oklahoma, married at 14 and a half (mostly to escape raising her younger siblings) and moved to California with her husband in the mid-forties and began a life together that kept them working hard for nearly 50 years.

Fern began working in a potato shed. She cut potatoes for a living. Every day she stood for 9 hours in the same spot, cutting potatoes into pieces getting them ready to plant. After a few seasons of cutting potatoes, she added picking onions to the mix. While she was pregnant with her first son, she picked onions while 8 months pregnant. Then, when he was old enough he joined her in the fields harvests crops with his mom. Yes, very grapes of wrath here.

She moved on to the rose company where she spent days in the rose gardens budding roses. It amazed me that she spent so much time in the hot sun and still would go in at noon, cook, clean a bit and then return to the labor of the day only to come in at night and begin again. Her sons did not want for a thing. Between her and her husband they worked hard to provide for their family and put a roof over their heads.

That day I was invited to dinner, I was amazed at the meal presented. It was not for show, or to impress me, as I was only one girl her sons had brought home. I was welcomed and fed. The meal was delicious. I had never had anything so tasty in my life. Yes, I'd had frozen chicken and dumplings, gross representations of biscuits over cooked chicken, but never had anything I'd ever eaten before tasted so good. I was in heaven.

For years Fern tried to show me how to make a good pot of chicken and dumplings. You see I married her son. He liked them and so did I. Yet neither of us could replicate them! My daughters all ate them and loved them. Gramma Fern's dunklings were the best in the world! Finally someone had tried and was able to make them just like gramma's. The youngest one has finally mastered them and when she was here last weekend she a made a pot fo rall of us to enjoy.

Recipe:

2 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons milk

Take one whole chicken and cover it with water to boil on low until fully cooked. I cooked mine for about 1 1/2 hours so it was really tender and made a good broth. Take the chicken out of the broth to cool. While cooling the chicken, combine all of the dry ingredients in a bowl ad mix well. Next add the milk. Mix gently together. Allow the dough to rest for about 5 minutes to allow the gluten to start working. Roll out to 1/4 inch thick and cut into strips. Bring the broth to a boil. Drop strips into the boiling broth. They will swell up at first and then start to shrink as they dissolve and make the yummy gravy. Right after you drop the dumplings into the broth bone the chicken shredding it into bite size pieces. Drop into the pot. Let it cook for about 20 minutes. Serve.

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Grandma's Goulash

"Pepper will put a man on his horse, and a woman in her grave!" Those were the words of my maternal grandmother, Ethel. We would go to stay with her for two weeks each summer, my brother and me. Then my sisters would join her and she'd repeat the previous two weeks with them. She cooked every meal pretty much from scratch, never used any spices, unless cooking a turkey, then sage was the usual choice. The statement above is one we heard at breakfast when asking for pepper on our eggs like grandpa's.

Ethel was the quintessential fine lady. Her avocation was homekeeping. She did it with great honor and very few complaints. Cooking became her signature, along with entertaining friends. She was a modern woman in her time, the envy of friends for certain. I can only imagine groups of friends gathered at her home every plate impeccably prepared, women fawning over her food and men sharing a cigar and a highball with grandad, Sid.

For a month each year, their home became grandkid central and all things stopped for a time. She then entertained us with food, cleaning and strict behavior. When I look back at those weeks spent at grandma's house I have many great memories. The best being Goulash.



Goulash became a centerpiece of entertaining the grandkids. It is quick, simple and likable by all. How can you go wrong? I cooked up a batch the other night. While I was cooking my daughter at my side I shared my love for goulash, the changes made in our home and how she didn't remember eating it as a child. Then the phone rang, it was daughter number three. She asked if I was preparing dinner, affirmative I answered, "What are you cooking?" I answered Goulash. He reply came, "It is one of my favorite meals. I can't believe sis doesn't remember it."

Grandma's Goulash for all.


Begin with a pound of good ground beef, 7% lean or better.
2 - 10 oz cans of Del Monte Stewed tomatoes (original recipe)
4 to 5 peeled carrots, sliced 1/4 to 1/3 of an inch thick
4 to 5 stalks of celery, sliced the same as the carrots.

While you are browning your meat, sliced your vegetables. I add a bit of garlic granules to the meat as it cooks. Drain meat once it is cooked. Add the carrots, celery and tomatoes all at once, placing the lid on the skillet and allow it to cook for 15 to 20 minutes. Once your vegetables are tender you're ready to eat.



I serve it with a salad, rolls and that's it. Family variation, if you don't have rolls, my husband asks that I add some whole wheat flat noodles to the mix to give it more of a hearty dinner. Enjoy.

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Black Licorice and Orange Sherbet

Not your likely combination, unless you're talking about Grandpa memories. The peanut butter and butter post evoked some memories for Carrie, her memories sparked some of my own. She is going to get back to me on a few recipes she loves but until then...

her best memory of her grandad was black licorice. In her comments she said "
As for my Grandpa, who has been gone for 7 years (and must thrilled to have Grandma with him now): black licorice. My kids think its disgusting. I love it." I'm the same way with Orange sherbet ice cream. I cannot drive by a Thrifty's Drug store (a rare site indeed) or see a scoop of sherbet without thinking of grandpa.


We would visit my grandparents each summer, for two weeks. Grandpa had little to do with the girls, he took my brother under his wing and spent the majority of time with him each day. Even still, not an afternoon went by that we didn't walk down to the local drug store and get a 5 cent cone of orange sherbet. No other flavor would do. We'd walk down Horne street in Oceanside a couple of blocks, buy an ice cream and walk back home. We'd point out neat stuff like magnolia seed pods and bird feathers and talk with grandpa. I'll have to tell you about the bird courts someday.

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Peanut Butter and Butter?

As a child, lunch was always a bit of a surprise. Mom was usually sleeping or not at home so we had to forage a lunch without her. The surprise was - surprise! there's food to eat - or surprise! get creative. Most of the time being the latter, we learned to eat almost anything between two slices of bread. My favorite was mustard. Yes, that was the sandwich. My brother's was peanut butter and butter.

My niece, Erin, recently wrote to me and said "I have to let you know, I cannot eat a peanut butter and butter sandwich without thinking of my Dad. I have no idea if the stories are even true but, for some reason I think someone once told me he used to make them for us as kids. So whenever I feel lonely or heartsick, or even just plain bored. I pull myself out of whatever chair I am in and go into the kitchen to make myself a peanut butter and butter sandwich on plain old cheap white bread.

Yes, Erin it's true. Erin's dad was my brother. Some of my readers may already know that he died when he was 32. His oldest son died also in the accident. They left behind his wife and four younger children. Yes, it's sad, but that's not what this is about. Erin was next to the youngest. She has very little true remembrance of her father. She was just a tiny little one when he died and has had to rely on many relatives to tell her the stories of her father and older brother.

When I asked her about food memories, this was the first to spring to mind. A simple, but well made, peanut butter and butter sandwich with cheap white bread. Mike came to love them. I did not. I tolerated them as they would take away the hungry feelings in an empty tummy. My brother, the brave conquering hero that he was, embraced the challenge and made them a part of the person he was. He even, to my dismay, fed them to his children. And they gobbled them up as if everyone who didn't like them was crazy. Creamy peanut butter spread thick on a slice of bread, the other slice a smear of butter, - actually margarine - butter was reserved for us a grandma's house not home, when put together made lunch for a king.

Simple food. Great memories. A father long gone. Memories to this day that make a heart full and comforted in the quiet hours of an afternoon.

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