Homegrown and homemade...

Pink Buffalo, 30 inch by 40 inch, Acrylic on Panel with Glass Beads

Guy Clark wrote a song singing the praises of, "Homegrown Tomatoes."

Last weekend, as has become tradition, I planted 10 heirloom tomato plants for Mother's Day.  My wife loves homegrown tomatoes.  I use rusted out horse water tanks for containers.  I take 50 gallon tanks and open the plug for drainage then place a layer of large rocks.  Then I lay down landscape fabric, then a layer of sand and finally a mixture of potting soil, compost and manure.  Since we live in the desert and water is scarce, so I do exclusive container gardening using 1/4" drip from our livestock well.

This works pretty well.  I got a very late start last year and the day before our first hard freeze, we picked 30 pounds of green tomatoes.  The larger, riper ones met their fate with cornmeal and hot bacon fat.  The smaller ones succumbed to spices, onions, garlic and boiling apple cider vinegar.

It is surprising how life can come full circle.  When I was a child, I remember my mom going out to pick wild currants with the ladies from the church.  They'd crawl through the roadside patches and those down by the creeks and draws in search of the tart little black beads.  With their harvest in hand, they'd return to the church kitchen and make currant jelly.  Still my favorite today!  Canning is something I have rediscovered.  If you get a Christmas present from us, it might just be pear butter, dill pickles, tomato relish, bar b q sauce or lemon curd.  This year, I planted jalapeno peppers and hope to can pickled peppers.

Guy's sideman, the Lookabee Sickles Flash, Verlon Thompson wrote a song, 

"Good Brown Gravy" about his homemade gravy.1

Retired Col. Merle B. Jensen, my father, taught officer's mess at Fort Sam Houston during the Korean Police Action.  He got his start in the kitchen on a troop ship headed to China in 1943, baking 400 loaves of bread a day in the bowels of the ship.  Once in Shanghai, they constructed 100 yard brick ovens and continued to bake bread.  I grew up in a home where the smell of baking bread was common and often taken for granted.  Time doesn't permit it often today, but for years I baked my own breads and every now and then I fix a starter and bake a batch of homemade bread.  But dad was all about homemade.

Despite the work, most meals in our house are from scratch.  I try to engage my children to help, to learn, to pass it on.  Between I Pods, Nintendo, Texting, TV, Netflix, it is difficult to interest children in the finer art of home cooking.  I hope someday they will look back these days, and miss daddy's home cooking.  As I miss dad's homemade bread or my grandma's fried okra and chicken necks, or my Aunt Johnnie's fried goat nuts (there's another blog in that one).

Not long after I married Patricia, my daughter was 6 and I decided to make homemade buttermilk pancakes for breakfast.  She refused, insisting on the Eggo kind you heat in the microwave.  I was heart broken.  In today's hustle bustle world filled with fast food, process food, the art of home cooking, I am afraid is being lost.  For the last 17 years, I have subscribed to "Cooks Illustrated,"  a magazine devoted to basic cooking, recipes and skills.  They have a new one out and they sent me a copy of:  "Country Cooking."  It is filled with old time recipes.  With my waste line, I have to be careful, but some of these recipes are sound wonderful.  Testing to begin shortly.

This got me thinking about art as homegrown and homemade.  Handcrafted.  Do I put the love into it that I do my home cooking?  There are artists out there who have high volume, mass processes to mass markets.  Process Art.  Fast Art.  I hope my paintings have the same love and appreciation my homemade mac and cheese or meatloaf does, then success can't be far away?

1) My friend Bill Mussdog Musser and I were at the old Liberty Lounge in Austin, Texas waiting for a Guy Clark show when we say Verlon Thompson wandering about.  We offered to buy him a beer and sat and talked.  I asked him where he was from.  He said Lookabe Sickles, Oklahoma.  (Pronounced La-key-ba)  I asked him how old he was.  We are the same age.  See, I lived in Geary, Oklahoma in the 5th grade and played little league baseball against Lookabe Sickles.  Damned if we didn't figure out we played little league against one another in the summer of 1966.


PS:  If you are visiting the blog from outside the continental USA, comment, drop me a line.