Kentucky Cream Candy

Growing up in small-town Kentucky I experienced some of the best home cooking that exists. We didn't have fast food, and the restaurants we had were mostly little diners.  That meant that everyone I knew cooked, and they did it from scratch.  I remember frozen TV dinners, but they were a treat.  We ate home-cooked, made-from-scratch meals every night.  My mother made meat loaf and macaroni with a homemade cheese sauce and topped with buttery, toasted bread crumbs.   Her mother wasn't a great cook, but I always loved her coleslaw.  My aunt Doris made an incredible blackberry jam cake.  Dad makes the best gravy.

With food and mentors like that I learned to cook at an early age.  Betty Henderson taught me to bake peanut butter cookies and how to flip pancakes before I could even reach the stove.  Mom taught me to make things like divinity and cabbage au gratin. The first cake I ever baked was in a wood burning oven with my aunt Joyce. 

I can, and have, cooked just about everything.  I make a pretty good transparent pie from a family recipe. I love to bake cheesecakes and make candy.  In the winter I relish a big pot of soup or stew.  Summer finds me crafting salads for myself, and dishes with fresh vegetables for anyone who will eat them.  I enjoy cooking, but there are, regrettably, two things I just never quite got.  One is my dad's gravy.  He's shown me.  I've practiced.  I just can't get the hang of it.  

The other is Lorene's cream candy.

Cream candy is a Kentucky specialty.  It seems so simple because the only ingredients are sugar, heavy cream, vanilla, and water.  It's pulled like taffy, cut, and then left to sit overnight.  That's when the magic happens.  The candy transforms into a delightful airy confection that will absolutely melt in your mouth.   

My step-grandmother, Lorene Fultz, made incredible cream candy, and one of the last days I spent with her involved her showing me how to make it.  She boiled the mixture and knew when it was ready without even using a candy thermometer.  I hauled the marble slab in from outside, where it had been chilling in the winter air, and she poured the mixture onto the cold marble.  When it was time, we pulled it together.  Then it was cut and left to do its magic.  The next day I had cream candy to enjoy as I drove home to Cookeville.  

I tried to make cream candy after that.  I got a small marble slab I could put in the freezer when I made it.  Mine just never worked.  I don't know if I didn't pull it long enough or what happened.  I just know that I tried it three or four times, and it never came out right.  

I found a good tutorial on cream candy at My Country Table.  If I can find a marble slab, perhaps I'll try it again someday.  Until then, I have some delicious memories.

Ode to a Baby Brother on the Anniversary of his Birth

Today is my brother’s birthday. Yep, he turns the big 5 – 0 today. It’s hard to believe he’s that age because I always remember him as my little brother. That’s quite funny, though, because he became bigger than me when he was 3 and I was 6, and I was never able to look down at him again. Yes, he may be 3 years younger, but he’s a good foot taller.

Life with a little brother can be interesting sometimes. Mine wanted to go everywhere I did, which is aggravating when you want to go to a slumber party with your friends. He was fascinated with fire for a while, and I lost two sets of pompoms because of it. He always loved to build things, and he learned to use a hammer by hitting me in the head with one.

Brother and I were close growing up. One day we’d play with his Matchbox cars or Tonka trucks by building elaborate roads in the driveway. That meant the next day would bring my choice of toys, and I usually chose Barbies. He never quite got the hang of Barbies, though. He usually had his G.I. Joe hang Ken and then kidnap Barbie by tying her to a Jeep or something. Ken’s head never stayed on like it should have after that, and Barbie’s hair didn’t grow back, no matter how much I wished.

I learned to sew by repairing a little boy’s favorite teddy bear. I made clothes for Buzzy the Bear to hide the scars he earned by being well loved. Brudder helped me stay thin by eating faster and then stealing the food off my plate. I didn’t finish a meal until I moved into my own place.

He was never a morning person, and sometimes he wasn’t an afternoon one either. He cried when Bambi’s mother died, named every chicken we had Jody, and once named a calf after a girl he thought was cute.  (And she was flattered!)

In spite of all of his flaws, my baby brother grew up to be a fine man. He raised some wonderful children and now grandfathers eight, soon to be nine. He’s loving, faithful, and a darned good cook. I’m proud of him. Those early decades were a little rough on me, but I guess I’ll keep him now.

Happy Birthday, Michael McCormick! I love you!

When I Was Your Age

 Remember when your parents or grandparents would start something with “When I was your age” or “Back in my day”? It didn’t matter what followed, you just knew it was out of date, completely irrelevant, and had absolutely nothing to do with whatever it was you were trying to talk your parents into or weasel out of them. 

The funny thing is that I now frequently find myself thinking about “when I was that age” or “back in my day.” The only saving grace is that my sons are grown and don’t have to listen to my memories. You however, dear reader, are stuck with me.

The summer-like days we've had lately have me thinking of summers and things “back in my day.” As I have said before, my hometown of Maysville, Ky. was pretty small back in the mid-70s, and there wasn’t a lot to do. It didn’t matter though. Children made their own fun then. We didn’t spend summer days at the mall, texting on our cellphones, or posting selfies to the Internet. Instead, we played ball with our friends, visited their houses, or rode our bikes until dark when our parents would call us home. Then we would gather in one neighbor or another's backyard for an impromptu cookout. The adults would enjoy a cold beer while playing Jarts, and we kids would down one too many pops while avoiding the small weapons our parents were throwing about.

Mom and Dad kept an extra refrigerator in the garage just for such occasions, and it was always full of Barq's Root Beer, Shasta Ginger Ale or Faygo Red Pop, as well as beer for the adults -- Hudepohl, Schoenling, Burger, Wiedemann and even the occasional Little Kings Cream Ale, all "local" brews from just down the river in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Covington, Ky. That's the way beer was done then, made and sold locally.

Then beers went national, even international, and the small, local brewery almost disappeared, along with many of those brands.  But nothing is small or local anymore. We can't send the kids to Sherman's Store for a quart of milk.  We drive miles to Kroger or Walmart instead.  Families eat at fast food restaurants, the kids text their friends about how lame everything is, and that passes for the family dinner. Teens chug energy drinks instead of red pop, and all I can think is that's not how we did it in my day.  

Maybe we'll round a curve, though. PBR is hip again, and microbreweries and brew pubs are all the rage.  We're seeing a return to smaller and more local.  Maybe we'll even see a return to the family dinner and the backyard cookout, only without the Jarts.  Then I can say this is how we did it in my day.

Happy Easter!

Today is Easter. I know this is a religious holiday, but I’m not going into that aspect of it. Instead, I’m sharing another childhood memory. (Get used to it. I’m an old lady, and we do that a lot.)

One thing we got every Easter was a new outfit and shoes. The night before Easter we would put the empty shoe box out on Dad’s workbench in the garage, or someplace like that, and fill it full of that plastic green grass. The next morning we would rush out to discover that the Easter Bunny had left us some goodies in the nest we had made. It was never much, but we could always count on a few things: a chocolate bunny, some jelly beans, marshmallow eggs, and a small toy or two, like a yoyo or maybe a coloring book and crayons. One thing we could almost always count on was a fly back paddle, or at least that’s what we called the thing.

Ah, the fly back paddle – the toy I hated to see in my Easter basket. First, I

have no hand/eye coordination, so I was absolutely awful with that thing. I never managed to actually hit the ball with the paddle. The most I ever hit was air, and maybe a bug that accidentally got in the way. Second, those were never meant to last. The rubber band would break the first day, maybe the second if I was lucky, and that broken rubber band brought about the third reason I hated to see that thing in my basket.

Once the rubber band broke, the paddle became Mom’s. She would put it on top of the refrigerator and threaten us with it. I don’t ever remember actually being spanked with one, but I remember being threatened, and that was usually enough for me. I learned to just leave those paddles and balls alone and in the toy box. It was safer all the way around.

One year we went to an egg hunt over in Ohio somewhere. There were dozens of children and hundreds of eggs. Some of the eggs were special, and the finder received a dyed chick or rabbit, something I’m glad I didn’t win. Others could be traded in for candy. I was happy to find a couple of those, and that’s when I discovered bulls’ eyes, caramel creams. I still love those.

My favorite Easter memories of all, however, are of the family dinners, when we would all get together after church for something special. If it were at my grandmother’s house it was probably barbecue chicken with mashed potatoes, cole slaw, and corn. That’s really the only thing I ever remember my grandmother serving at big dinners.

I think family is the best memory of all, as it should be.

Happy Easter, everyone.

Horn Honking, Jaywalking and Littering – Oh My!

I was watching a couple of episodes of The Andy Griffith Show this afternoon, and one of the things Deputy Barney Fife said just cracked me up. He told Andy they had to do something about a situation or it was going to lead to “horn honking, jaywalking and littering.” The innocence of that time is gone because those certainly aren’t the problems we worry about now.

I grew up in a place and time my grandchildren will never experience. Maysville, Kentucky, might have had a population of about 7,000 from the mid-60s to the mid-70s. It was just big enough to seem like a city to me and, yet, small enough that everyone knew each other. Okay, maybe everyone didn’t know everyone, but they certainly knew a member of your family, so you didn’t get by with much.

We didn’t have fast food, unless you counted Kentucky Fried Chicken, until the early to mid-70s, when Burger Queen and Long John Silver’s opened up “out on the hill.” We did have the Dairy Yum Yum and White Light, and Dairy Queen was open in the summer. We ate at home around the table, and we talked.

My brother and I regularly played at friend’s houses without always telling our mom where we’d gone. It was no big deal then. She’d just open the door and call our names. If we didn’t hear her and come running, someone in the neighborhood would know where we were.

The entire student body of Washington Elementary School was smaller than my graduating class. We had Halloween carnivals and Christmas pageants. If you were with someone in one class, you pretty much knew you’d be with them the next year as well because we were all growing up together. We also rode the school bus together and played together in the summers. We were a community.

We didn’t stay in the house and play video games. We didn’t have them, and we didn’t have air conditioning either, so we played outside -- all day. We’d get up in the morning, eat breakfast and head out the door, where we’d climb trees, build forts, ride our bikes or play baseball with the neighbors.

Speaking of baseball, the Big Red Machine was in full swing then, and I was firmly convinced that I was going to grow up and marry Johnny Bench -- number 5 and the catcher. Of course, Johnny was if I didn’t marry Donny Osmond, Bobby Sherman, or my first love, Speed Racer. My heart broke when I realized Speed Racer was a cartoon and would never be my Prince Charming, but Bobby came along at a good time, and he was eventually replaced with Donny, who was then replaced by his brother Jay. Yes, my loves were many in those days, but young girls didn’t always have a lot to do in a small town if she wasn’t a cheerleader or into sports.

I loved to read. My mother would sometimes go downtown to the beauty shop my cousin worked at, and I was allowed to walk over to a place I called Eats for a cheeseburger so delicious that I can still taste it. I’d then walk around to the library. I was a voracious reader and would take home books by the dozen. If my father felt I was spending too much time inside reading and not enough time outside with friends, then I’d take my book or latest copy of Tiger Beat and climb the crabapple tree. I did a lot of reading in that tree.

We played board games, not video games. We learned to build because we built our own tree houses. They didn’t come in kits from lumber stores. We learned about animals because some of us were more likely to come home with a snake in their pocket than others. (Not me. I was much more into pretty rocks. Still am.)

We only got four channels on the TV, and you watched one of those or nothing. If the President was on, well, the President was on. We were the remote control. If Dad wanted the channel changed, he’d tell us to change it, and we did.

I grew up with Uncle Al and Batty Hattie from Cincinnati. I stayed up late to watch the Cool Ghoul, sometimes through my fingers, but I loved his movies. I remember when Gilligan got shipwrecked and the Brady’s got married – the first time, not in reruns. TV was more innocent then.

It was all more innocent then. There are things about my life today I wouldn’t change, but there are things I wish my sons could have experienced. We didn’t know the fear our children know today. We were safe in school or at the Saturday matinee at the Russell. We could take candy from strangers on Halloween. We could enjoy our youth. It wasn’t as easy for my boys, and it will be even more difficult for my grandchildren.

I laughed at Barney today. He brought back good memories. The ability to tune in to shows like that almost at will is one of the things today that I appreciate. If I can’t give my children the innocence, I can at least share my memories.

My Summer Camp Adventure

Or … How I Came to Fear Russian Amazons

The summer of my 10th year was enormous for me. I was allowed to stray from my very over-protective mother’s side and attend camp. Oh the joy! A child’s rite of summer passage was about to be mine, and I couldn’t have been more excited! I didn’t care that it was church camp. I didn’t care that my step-grandmother, as well as most of her family, would be there the entire week. I didn’t care because I was going to camp.

Mom thought I’d be homesick, but I don’t recall feeling it.  I loved sleeping in the “cabin” with the other girls because it was like a big slumber party, although I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why they were called cabins when they looked nothing like a cabin at all and were really just big dorms. 

The cabins were sort of like duplexes, with 10-12 girls in bunks on each side, the counselor’s rooms up front and bathroom facilities between the two sleeping areas.  Well, bathroom facilities as in a toilet and a sink.  The real bathroom facilities were these crude block buildings with everything sort of in semi-open stalls.  I hated the “showers,” as they were called. 

I’m not sure I’d ever taken a shower before that week.  I only recall having a bathtub in the three houses I’d occupied up to this point in my life.  So … combine my first showers with the fact that they took place in a huge room with what seemed like a hundred other girls, you had to stand on cold, rough concrete floors, the door that you closed on the shower stall was only a flimsy half door, it was all within sight of the girls using the sinks, the toilets with no doors were just around the corner, and all of this occurring on my first true trip away from home – alone, and I was mortified and truly over-whelmed. 

Oh, did I mention I was very shy as well?  Yep, I was definitely mortified.  And then some.  

A typical day at church camp meant up and dressed in the morning, breakfast, activities, lunch, activities, dinner, church service and then bed.   Then it was up the next morning and doing it all again.

Meals were your typical camp fare: lots of burgers, hot dogs, spaghetti and things like that.  Activities were either arts & crafts in nature or sports related, and the church service every night wasn’t too bad.  It was held in an open-air tabernacle under some old pine trees, and there was a lot more emphasis on skits and laughs than preaching, although every service ended with a bit of that and an altar call thrown in to boot.

And let me tell you, there’s nothing that will stir the blood like a good, old-fashioned Nazarene altar call.  It came complete with tears and shouts of hallelujah, and that’s a pretty powerful sight to a child away from home for the first time.

In fact, I answered the altar call on Thursday night.  I’m not sure why I did, but it was pretty obvious that I was one of the few who’d yet to go up there and cry, so I gave it a go.  Some folks cheered, some cried along.  Everyone rejoiced over the fact that I’d been saved.  I had no idea what I’d been saved from, but it sure made everyone happy, so I was glad I went.

The arts & crafts activities were your typical church camp sort of things.  We made God’s eyes out of sticks and yarn, glued little offering boxes together out of popsicle sticks and just general stuff like that.  I completed them all and would have been quite happy to do them again except for one little catch.

The Cabin Competition

Ah … the cabin competition -- the sadistic plan set into motion by Satan’s minion disguised as a camp director.

The cabin competition was exactly that: a competition among the camp cabins.  Points would be awarded for various activities, and the winning cabin would be announced at lunch on Friday.  Sounded simple enough, right?

Wrong.

The point system went like this:

·         1 point for your cabin for participating in an arts & crafts activity, limited to one point per each activity.

·         1 point for your cabin for participating in a sports activity, with additional points awarded for coming in first, second or third. 

Obviously, the points were to be made in sports.  And that is just a cruel, evil thing to do to a child who was born with two left feet, no grace or hand/eye coordination, and who was entering that really awkward and clumsy stage of puberty a little early.  Plus, I was small for my age.

I was brave and did what I could for my cabin, though.  I participated in the nature hike, did morning calisthenics and a few other, minor, sort-of-sporty things. 

And then I ran out of options, something my camp counselor just couldn’t grasp.  There wasn’t a single thing left for me to participate in, but my counselor would hear nothing of it.  So we looked around for something I could do.

Tetherball

Hey, tetherball looked fairly harmless.  After all, what was there except for a pole and a rope with a ball on the end of it.  You just had to stand there and smack it a few times.  Surely even I could handle a few moments of that!

In order to keep things on an even playing scale, the demonically-inspired powers that be decided the tether ball competition should be first – third graders compete, fourth – sixth, etc.  Since I was going into the fourth grade that meant I could be pitted against a sixth grader, of course.

I strode up to that tetherball pole about as confident as I could get for someone as puny and non-athletic as they come.  And then I saw my opponent. 

They’d obviously brought in a ringer.

Svetlana, as I have come to call her, must have failed the sixth grade at least a half dozen times because she was all of 6’2” tall and built like a Russian Amazon, complete with a unibrow, a mustache and chest hair.  And … she’d obviously been taking steroids because she had muscles out to THERE.  She had so many muscles that she had no neck.

I swear.  As sure as I’m sitting here writing this, I swear that’s what she looked like.

Or at least that’s what she looked like to me.  It was a long time ago.  Anyway …

What then transpired between Svetlana and me left me scarred and broken.  I still have nightmares all these many years later. 

Svetlana wound up, took a mighty swing and nailed that ball, which proceeded to nail me right in the side of the head and violently throw me up against the pole.  Another swing of Svetlana’s beastly paw, and the ball was wrapping the rope around the pole.  And around my head.  Her beefy mitts continued their assault on that poor ball, and in effect on me, and I was quite quickly trussed to the pole.

There I stood, my head tied to the tetherball pole, my glasses askew, and my poor little face bulging out from between the wrapped rope and metal pole, while Svetlana threw her muscled arms into the air and let out a monstrous roar of victory.

I had been defeated, and in a most ignoble way.

A counselor helped me untangle myself from my web of embarrassing defeat, and I slunk away with my one point for participation.  A point I had earned through my thorough and complete humiliation.

I didn’t participate in anymore sports events that week.  I gave all I could to the Cabin Competition with my close brush with death.  I’m not sure anyone else who tangled with Svetlana that week lived to share their tale, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.

You can guess which cabin won the competition.  It sure wasn’t mine.  And I don’t remember what prize the winning cabin received.  However, I’ve never forgotten church camp, Svetlana and the terror that is tetherball.

 

 

 

Happy Birthday, Squirt!

Today is my son’s 31st birthday, so of course I want to wish him a happy birthday, a wonderful day, and everything fabulous and tremendous in the world.  

Today also brings up memories.  

I called him Squirt because that was what Kenny called me. He was such a little thing. It fit.

I remember when Squirt first introduced himself and said hello. I was standing in the 5 East nurses’ station at, what was then, Cookeville General Hospital. It was a quiet night, and suddenly there were these little butterfly wings in my abdomen.    

The day I went to the hospital was beautiful. There were daffodils blooming and birds singing. It was warm and sunny. I thought it was a wonderful time to have a baby. Over 24 hours later Dr. Shaw asked me if we were going to have this baby today. My response was, “I have to have it by 11:30 because that’s when everyone upstairs gets off.” I almost did it – 11:34 p.m. on March 24. My coworkers were all at the nursery. They saw him before I did.

I didn’t see him at first because he wasn’t breathing and needed to be in CGH’s version of NICU at the time. The next morning a wonderful nurse – I wish I knew her name, brought me a Polaroid. There was my baby. With a cake dome over his head.   

I walked to the nursery every chance I could, just to sit and look at him. Finally, a nurse asked, “Have you even gotten to hold him yet?” She took him out of the isolette and placed him gently in my arms, wrapped in wires, oxygen, IV, and all. He was nearly two days old, but I was finally able to hold him. It was one of the most precious moments of my life.

After eight days we finally got to go home. It was snowing. I had come in with sunshine and flowers and gone out with clouds and snow. It was such a change, and I hadn’t even taken a jacket with me. The weather changed, and so did my life.

Things picked up after that. There were lots of firsts and moments. The smell of his head and the feel of his cheeks when I gave him a kiss. He hated green beans from the first. His first word was “kee kat” at 7 months. I thought I was hearing things, but there was Sunshine the kitty cat.  

He was late to walk, but I will never forget that moment because it was on Mother’s Day and was accompanied by his first sentence. I was sitting in the floor, and he pulled himself up on the coffee table, turned, walked four steps to me, wrapped his little arms around my neck, and said, “Wub my Mom Mom.” He always called me Mom Mom then. He was 14 months old.

He had those blonde curls and managed to con old folks out of money at Kroger. Sometimes he’d actually come out of there with a dollar or two. He carried that blanket everywhere, even out to the yard just to play.  

He was a picky eater, so I packed his lunch when he went to kindergarten. I cried that day. I also forgot to warn his teacher about his tendency to run fevers – normal to 105 in about 13.2 seconds. I can still see the look on her face the first time it happened at school, and she had to call me. She cried because she thought she’d done something wrong. Thank goodness he grew out of that.

He and his cousins were best friends – Ghostbusters and GI Joe were the faves. He loved Ralph’s Donuts even then.  

He still carried that blanket.

He developed a theory about how dinosaurs became extinct. It was all the fault of the T Rex. He was a meat eater so he ate all of the veggie eaters. When they were gone, he had nothing left to eat and starved to death. He even illustrated the concept. It made sense.

And he still carried that blanket.

He painted his dad’s truck white and the cat green.

Blankie kerner remained.

We drove around with music blaring, and he sang right along with me. We had a few adventures.  

He kept growing, and I was always amazed at his intelligence. He loved Jere Whitson. Avery Trace not so much. So much changed then, though. His dad and I divorced, and that was huge. Life’s not always easy for a middle schooler, and that made it worse.

Somewhere in there the blankie was put aside, and he started wearing hats.

Then he got a baby brother, and I moved to Nashville. I missed so many things then: birthdays, parties, school concerts and events. He missed a lot, too. He was with me in Nashville every weekend, so he wasn’t with friends or having fun. He never complained, though.

He did complain, however, about babysitting his brother. He called me at work once. “Mother.” I knew I was in trouble when he said it like that. “I’ve discovered the cure for the teen pregnancy problem.”  

“What’s that?”

“Make them babysit their little brother! I AM NEVER HAVING CHILDREN!”

Wally got revenge on the Beav from time to time. There was The Swinger Incident.

Things changed again in the summer of 2003. He didn’t just babysit his brother. He was my caregiver. He made sure I ate, he got me to appointments, and he saw me at my worst. He was a trooper, and that's when it really hit me that he was grown and would soon be leaving.

He moved off to college, and then he moved even further to graduate school. He spent his last day in Tennessee with me before he moved to Oregon. I was scared to have him so far away. I cried, but I was so proud. He was a brave young man, off on an adventure.

He’s still on that adventure. I miss him every day because he’s thousands of miles away, but he’s grown into a wonderful man, married to a terrific woman. I'm proud of him. 

I think he’s backing down from that never having children declaration. We’ll see.

Then he’ll have memories as his child grows. It’s a wonderful thing.

Happy Birthday, Jonathan. I love you.