Yellow Gold

I love Phil's grandparents!  They are the spunkiest 80-something-year olds I have ever met.  They travel all over America visiting family and casinos.  Grandpa can about knock you over when he 'pats' you on the back.  Grandma cooks, cans, and is still trying out new recipes for our delight.  What really blows me away is the size of their garden.  It's probably about the size of an average ranch house.  Melons, potatoes, and sweet corn are a guarantee.  This year we were finally able to help put up sweet corn.

I hadn't put up sweet corn since I was a kid.  I gotta admit I was a bit nervous, because when I was a kid it was a ton of work.  My brother and sister and I would go out with grandpa to the fields and pick the corn.  Then we'd come back and shuck it, carry over to grandma's kitchen and she'd wash it in the dishwasher.  After it was sanitized we'd start cutting the corn off of the cob.  When I was younger grandma used to can the corn, but as she aged my grandpa bought an extra deep freeze and we put it in baggies instead.  This process took the whole day (or at least that's how I remember it!), and the thought of going into the fields and getting corn rash and having sore fingers from all the cutting wasn't very pleasant.

We pulled up at grandma and grandpa's shortly after 8am (on a saturday this was a pretty impressive feat for Phil and Lizzi!).  All the cousins were in the back of the truck shucking the corn.  I breathed out a sigh of relief (no impending corn rash woohoo!) and dug in.  Shucking is my favorite part of putting up corn.  It's like Christmas, you never know what you're going to 'open'.  And being the competitive first born that I am, I like the challenge of getting all the corn silks off in one fell swoop.  Oh yeah, and getting the last cob to shuck was a big deal as a kid.  Not so much for Phil's family apparently!  People just walked away when I announced that I had grabbed the last ear.  Strange this family...

Lunch was great, boiled sweet corn paired with some lasagna (veggie for me, thanks mom!), garlic toast, and oriental salad.  Buckets were set out in the middle of the crowd for people to chuck the cobs in, a fun family tradition I guess.  

With 22 of us pitching in, the work only took about 3 hrs, and 70 qt bags filled up with yellow gold.  And we got to bring home 18 of those bags.  Oh yeah!

 

Cutting the corn off using grandpa's cob holding device

mom and her sisters cleaning corn

We brought my brother Taylor along.  He didn't remember putting up corn as a kid.  Doubt he'll forget it now!