FAMILY TRADITIONS

Digging through my recipe box, what I have in my hands is a box of family traditions. Some of the cards are so stained that I can hardly read them but because the instructions and ingredients are in my grandmother’s handwriting, the thought that someday I will have no choice but to discard them breaks my heart. Each creased and dog-eared rectangle is soaked in memories.

And with each passing day, I appreciate more and more the importance of family traditions. It gives me pause to think what part of our lives that my girls are storing away in their minds that will be remembered in their adult lives. Somehow I know that what might strike them as memorable and important may not be the things that I regard as profound. I can already tell that from talking to my niece who is slightly older than my oldest daughter. I will ask her if she remembers this or that day that is crystal clear in my mind’s eye only to find that she has no recollection of the events whatsoever.

What I am counting on is that as my baby girls get older and find themselves in difficult or upsetting circumstances that they will have comforting memories of a stable childhood to bring them comfort. What I’m doing to foster these memories is keeping variety to a minimum especially when it comes to the holidays. My basic Thanksgiving and Christmas menu will always include certain dishes with a few experimental dishes on the side because I believe that repetition is the key to family traditions.

My sister and I have a standing joke about how every year until we left home mom and dad decorated shoeboxes with aluminum foil to hold oranges, apples and nuts supposedly left by Santa. It worries me that my girls will remember this coming Christmas as the one when dad was so sick and mom was worn out and worried. This thought has put my wheels in motion to focus on building fun holiday family traditions that will overshadow their dad’s current health crisis.

Before the season get in full swing, I’m organizing my favorite family recipes and making a list of fun holiday traditions from my own childhood that I want my daughters to enjoy. I’m not going to put a lot of pressure on myself to decorate the house like I’m trying to win “Home of the Year” or buy tickets to every holiday production within a 100 mile radius but I am going to do my best to keep it fun and keep Christ in Christmas. And I am not going to repeat my mother’s mistake of forcing Christmas stuff on my girls. One funny memory I have is mom telling us to get ourselves dressed and get in the car before we completely ruined everything and that we were going to LOVE the Nutcracker whether we liked it or not!

Come back later to see my list of Fun Holiday Family Tradtions that I come up with and please feel free to leave some suggestions for me in case I come up short.

MAMA'S QUICK RECIPE FOR PEAR COBBLER

I call this Mama’s Quick recipe for pear cobbler because this was the dessert that was served when fresh pears were coming in by the bushel basket full and quick family meals were to be expected. After the crops were in and jars of canned fruit were lining the shelves, when a more relaxed pace fell in place we could look forward to pastries that took more time to produce. Another good thing about these pears is that I know they have never been treated with pesticide.

MAMA’S QUICK RECIPE FOR PEAR COBBLER


2 cups of peeled, sliced fresh pears 2 cups of sugar (1 ½ if using canned pears)
4 ounces of unsalted butter
¾ cup of plain flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon salt
¾ cup sweet milk
1 whole egg

Pour 1 cup of sugar over sliced pears in a bowl and set aside (if using canned pears, half the sugar and use a little syrup out of the jar). Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Melt your butter in a 2 qt oven proof baking dish either by placing dish in the oven or microwaving for a few seconds.

In a separate bowl, combine the remaining sugar with the rest of your dry ingredients including spices and salt (less a half cup of sugar if you chose to use canned pears) and mix well.

Beat the egg and sweet milk together with a spoon, pour over the dry ingredients and blend until a batter forms. Pour this batter over the butter that you melted WITHOUT STIRRING. Then pour your pears including syrup on top of your butter and batter, AGAIN WITHOUT STIRRING.

Bake your preheated oven for about an hour at 325 watching to see when batter (which has now miraculously risen to form the top crust) begins to brown.

Most cooks would leave it at this, but Mama would brush the top of the crust lightly with butter and sprinkle it with sugar which gave it better flavor. In my traditional southern home, more butter and sugar were added to practically every recipe.

Pies with rolled pastry were more time consuming than Mama’s quick recipe for pear cobbler and more visually showy but it would be impossible to find fault with the sweet, buttery filling of this easy pear dessert no matter whether what!

Return to Oooh Baby Parenting, Family and Environmental Issues to find more frugal southern recipes that include fresh fruit and produce.

PEAR HONEY RECIPE with PINEAPPLE

From as early as I can remember, August was the month mama made her pear honey recipe with pineapple. My favorite pear tree, the one that my daddy planted the day I was born, could be depended on to deliver many bushels of firm cooking pears around the first of August and this treat was just one of the many delightful dishes made from its bountiful harvest.

MAMA’S PEAR HONEY RECIPE with PINEAPPLE

12 cups of firm, peeled, sliced pears
12 cups of white sugar
1 (20 oz) can of crushed pineapple undrained
1 washed, thinly sliced lemon including the peel

After you wash the pears and cut them up, keep them covered in cold water until you have twelve cups. Drain the water from the pears and run them through the coarse blade of your food processor or thinly slice them. Put pears and sugar in a large pot and heat over very low heat (to give the juice a chance) stirring occasionally and don’t worry about crushing the pears. Simmer until the pears are cooked clear (I’m not going to put a time here because pears in different stages of ripeness take different amounts of time to get the right honey- like consistency) stir in the crushed pineapple and lemon and cook 5 to 10 minutes more. Pour the Pear Honey recipe with pineapple into hot, sterilized jars and seal. The results should be 6 to 8 pints of a delicious treat that is wonderful on a hot biscuit and makes an attractive gift.

Tips:
1. Some cooks drop a cherry in each jar for a little added color if you want to dress it up to give as a gift

2. If you have some over ripe pears. Half the amount of sugar recommended for crisp pears

3. Try using Pear Honey on your kids peanut butter sandwiches instead of jelly

Some cooks use pineapple juice instead of crushed pineapple in their recipe. But Mama’s pear honey recipe with pineapple just tasted better to me, had a better texture and was easy to make with less cooking time than when juice was substituted. There were times when frugal cooking was a necessity that the juice from a can of sliced pineapple was substituted for the crushed pineapple. Many reading this may be thinking that a can of crushed pineapple is so cheap that they could not imagine altering the taste and appearance of the pear honey recipe to save a dollar. And I pray that those ladies never have the need to watch every cent like our family had to when times were bad.

FAMILY PEAR RECIPES

I have more favorite pear recipes than for apple, peaches or most any other fruit. The reason for this might be that my daddy thought of an old family tradition to commemorate the birth of his baby girl. He headed right out to that pretty, field right beyond the pasture and planted a pear tree. Actually, he planted a bunch of pear trees, but I always knew which one he planted on the day I was born because he pointed it out to me regularly every time we took a walk in that direction. So, we have always had lots of canned pears on hand.

But that’s not the only reason my childhood memories are packed with every kind of pear recipe from pear cobbler to Pear Butter most of which were cooked for our family by my grandmother who says that she did her best to duplicate her mother’s recipes in spite of the fact that the only directions she was ever able to pry out of her was, "Oh, I throw in a little of this and a little of that and never have used a measuring cup or spoon".

I do not want my girls in the very distant future to have to guess at how I made their favorite old fashioned southern pear recipes like Pear Honey with Pineapple, pear preserves and mama's famous recipe for pear cobbler. My plans are to leave them with detailed recipes so that long after I’m gone they can enjoy natural goodies that they had when they were at home.

At the moment I’m looking at a bushel basket full of pears that need peeling. But right after I get through canning them I’m going to start typing out all those old fashioned, family pear recipes and if you make it back to Oh Baby Green Living, Family and Parenting Issues I'll share them with you and yours. There are lots of pear recipes on the net, but I may have a few old southern recipes that you might like better.

PULLING AWAY FROM FAMILY TRADITION

Fourth of July weekend is drawing to a close and the only good thing that I can say about it is that the children slept late this morning and that it rained. This is a good thing because when the children want to set off the few firecrackers they have left over from Friday night, they might not set the woods on fire. Don't think for a minute that those horrible images of wildfires in other parts of the country didn't make an impression on me when we had not had any rain for several weeks.

As far as the holiday weekend went there was the usual round of picnics, backyard softball games splashing in knee deep kiddie swimming pools in a vain effort to beat the heat. I suppose we did our part to represent a picture of the traditional American patriotic family at play.

Speaking of tradition, I couldn't stop the thought from running through my mind that while there are so many things that are truly right about our country, one of the things that I see wrong (my apologies to President Bill Clinton) without country is that young people seem to have no appreciation for tradition or what came before them.

When I was a child I loved for my parents and grandparents to tell me about their childhoods and the way things used to be. I adored my grandmother and grandfather and enjoyed spending time at their home where I knew there was lots of time for hugs, kisses and stories about little girls and boys that were long gone but would have loved me to pieces if they had only known me.

After dinner they would open the family photo album and not only tell us that those people in the pictures were the details about the background of the photograph and details of the day when the picture was taken. I am relatively certain that my oldest daughter even at a young age would find this to be somewhat less than exciting and probably downright boring. How could my children that I had raised not find the same things entertaining as their own mother?

I loved the one on one time that this older couple was willing to give to me and was so proud when they came to my school functions or ballgames. I recently went to see a neighbor girl play ball and was sitting with her parents. In the second or third inning her grandparents joined us. Her grandfather went to the dugout to wish the little girl luck and she seemed utterly embarrassed and seemed unwilling to speak to him, much less thank him for coming. Who has put the idea that older people are not “cool” and should be ignored into these young people’s heads?

My goal for the week is to try and teach my children respect for tradition and to appreciate the history of her family. I’m open to suggestions if anyone else has found a way to do this and work against the growing tide of the anti-tradition movement.

I would like to say that I doing this out of respect for my parents and grandparents, which is true, but I'm smart enough to know that I'm going to be older one day and I don't want my grandchildren to feel that they shouldn't speak to me in public.