Hey Mom...What's to eat?

The question asked many times over. Hey mom, what's to eat? Growing up in a time before fast food was on every corner and heat and eat dinners for microwaves were something you seen on the Jetsons. There was a time when mom cooked meals for the family. It was a time when buying fresh vegetables from a local farmer or going out to the chicken yard  to pick out the evenings meat entree was something normal to hear about or do. My family was like that. Though we lived in town, my parents had roots back to farming life, where living off what you could grow or raise, was, what was on the menu. Since my dad's parents lived within 10 miles of us we would make Sunday trips to my grandparents farm over at Evergreen where we could get about anything we needed to make up a meal or two. It was always fresh, I guess that's why later on, some of the things I would eat never seemed as good as the stuff we would get off the farm. My grandparents farm was a living supermarket just waiting for someone to come along and pick from its vines. My grandpa Patrick was a generous, hard working and to the point person. The farm was his life when he wasn't managing a work crew on the railroad. I was always amazed at everything that he could grow and the animals that he would care for. Picking up your food off the farm wasn't like going to the grocery store to pick out items from the shelves. My grandpa always had the necessary picking items available for you when you showed up. It was always a choice of either a bucket, burlap or paper sack, with or without a potato fork or spade. He ( my grandpa) always told me, go get what you want, as long as you pick it. He would then proceed to grab up one of his lawn chairs and sit in the shade under a tree and watch as we would go after what we wanted. It was the same each time we would go into the garden to pick vegetables. My grandpa's garden had many things. Here is what I remember about what he grew. Pumpkins, watermelons, cantaloupes, grapes, strawberries, pears, peaches, apples, plums, cherries and blackberries. He always grew enough fruit to have grandma bake him a pie or cobbler and to have jelly made out of what he had when he didn't sell it to people that were always coming by. He also grew tomatoes, potatoes, corn, green beans, cucumbers, squash, okra and peppers. It was like walking the dirt aisles of an outdoor vegetable and fruit store. On the other side of the farm is where the animals were. Cattle, pigs, turkeys, ducks, chickens and down over the hill was a pond that you could get fish from if you wanted to try for them. Milk, eggs, homemade butter, it was all there for you. We would fill the back of the ole 62' Chevy station wagon with fresh food to bring home. As my grandpa got older, the garden got smaller and the animals were slowly disappearing from the farm but he always would share what he had. As a kid, I got to know the meaning of fresh food and what it took to grow it and bring it in to the house to prepare. These days many of the younger generation think that fresh is something you pick off the vegetable shelf or out of the meat section at the local grocery store or stopping by the frozen food section to get dinners that are packaged up and ready to heat up is the thing to do. That all may be fine for them but they have never tasted anything like what my grandma Patrick could cook up from the fresh items she could use everyday from the farm. There have been many times that I have come in from picking vegetables in grandpas garden and he would would follow me into the house and ask grandma one thing. "Hey mom, what's to eat?