The Blonde in the house and I had a discussion about eating vegetables. She loves them. I do not. George H.W. Bush once said as I recall – and I may not recall it completely correctly, but the point is still there. In any case, he indicated that he was president of the United States, and if he didn’t want to eat broccoli, then he did not have to. Since I am not, never was and never will be president, I can’t use that approach. I can always blame it on the way that I was raised – even though it was not my parents fault.
I just did not like the taste of the green, red, yellow stuff – although I could eat corn on the cob. For one thing when corn was on the cob, it did not roll around the plate making it difficult to pick up. Thus, with butter and salt, I could eat that vegetable! A hamburger or even peanut butter were much better. As a child I was never able to figure out why vegetables tasted so bad. I know that you can cover them with sauces or whatever, but they were still just vegetables. In short, as a result of my un-vegetable liking childhood, The Blonde was stuck with someone for whom it was hard to cook.
There are certain food areas in which it was (and is) easy – dessert for example. My mother was a great dessert maker and so is The Blonde. I was really in heaven during a period of my childhood when we lived in Harrisville, PA. We lived about 1.5 miles out of the downtown (using the term loosely). Our house was surrounded by empty fields, and in those empty field grew just about every berry that you can imagine. We had black and red raspberries, blackberries, dew berries, boysenberries and even elderberries. We also had lots of rhubarb. My mother made heaps of jam from them, but she also made pies and shortcakes. We lived there during the latter part of WWII, and we would see convoys of bomber and fighter planes going over our area headed for the East coast. The planes made a great adventure for a small lad. What a life!
Another good thing about the Harrisville area at the time was that there was very little light pollution. As a result we could see the Milky Way including the Big Dipper and Little Dipper. I miss being able to sit under the stars and look at them. The Blonde unfortunately grew up in Pittsburgh so she never saw the stars like I did so does not know what she is missing. That being said, I was discussing food and another food (of a sort) that I miss is Wilbur buds. They are made in Lititz, PA where by the way, the first big twisted pretzels were made. Wilbur buds are little chocolate things that appear somewhat similar to the kisses made by another company. It seems that Mr. Wilbur and his sons back in 1894 developed a technique for creating a chocolate mold that resembled a flower bud. So what else could they name them but “Wilbur Buds”? Lititz in the event that you are not aware is in Lancaster County, PA. The county has loads of chocolate and candy companies.
This included Elizabethtown where I was their first city manager. There was a Klein chocolate plant there, and when you walked down the street you could smell chocolate in the air. Definitely, a nice way to walk around! Klein, by the way was bought out a number of years ago by Mars, but I bet it smells the same. Elizabethtown was located about 10 miles from Hershey. As I mentioned about the area, there were many chocolate companies around. This meant that for mulch you could buy bags of cocoa bean shells. They came in various colors and spruced up the old yard. They smelled nice too! Ok, I recognize that chocolate is not quite as good for you as vegetables – although everyone will admit that the former tastes better.
However, not all is lost when it comes to vegetables. The Blonde discovered that the supermarkets have fresh vegetable trays. I found that you can take a fresh vegetable, dip it in a sauce and it tastes pretty good when you crunch it. One of the problems with cooked vegetables is that they end up yucky and soggy. Fresh is better – even though the taste is still not as good as say Wilbur Buds or rhubarb pie!
Barry Evans writes about “Life in The Villages” for Villages-News.com
