How Does the Garden Grow?

We haven't planted a garden in a few years, but this year, given the pandemic and utter weirdness going on in 2020, we planted a small one.

It's about the size of a pickup truck.

It has zucchini, yellow squash, green beans, peas, cucumbers, and tomatoes in it. The tomatoes are still green.

I froze six quarts of green beans this morning. We've been eating squash for dinner nearly every day. I made two loaves of zucchini bread and froze one of them. I haven't found a way to freeze squash that actually works and I don't can (no pressure cooker), so we just eat squash or give it to my mother-in-law. Sometimes I make a casserole and freeze half of that, but we aren't rolling in enough squash yet for me to consider casseroles.

A very long time ago, we had a huge garden, and I did the canning and freezing and putting stuff up crap. It was incredibly time consuming, and since I generally either worked part-time or full-time and was always in school or sick, it wasn't something high on my list of things I really wanted to do. Not when the Green Giant has cans of beans that taste perfectly fine.

And here's a secret: I hate to cook. I don't mind baking occasionally, but mostly, I find cooking to be the most time-sucking thing I have to do. It's worse than laundry. It's worse than cleaning the toilets, even.

Cooking involves dealing with raw meat. Blech. It involves peeling, dicing, slicing (oh, there goes a piece of a finger - oops), boiling, baking, heating. It means finding the right spices or herbs or whatever. It takes hours of time and it's gone in 20 minutes. Or less. Cooking means having a hot kitchen on a 100 degree day. 

If I never had to cook another meal again, I would be perfectly content. When my husband worked, I ate a lot of Stouffer's meals and sandwiches on the days he was at the fire station. Now he is home every night. He wants a meal.

I'd just as soon have a ham sandwich. I swear, if I lived closer to a K&W Cafeteria, I would order enough from there once a week so all I had to do was reheat and be done with it.

This means I don't eat healthy foods. I know that. The premade meals are full of salt and preservatives and probably do not help my health issues at all. 

I hate cooking so much that I do not care.

My friends think this is crazy. What woman doesn't love to cook? This one. The one who would rather read a book or play the guitar than cook. The one who would rather eat a ham sandwich than cook something. The one who never, ever reads a recipe magazine.

This goes back a long way. One of my friends tried to help me figure it out the other week. "What do you remember from your childhood about dinner?" she asked. She described pleasant meals where her father and mother talked about their days. Leave It To Beaver kind of meals.

"Not anything like that," I said. I won't go into detail, but while I am sure there were occasionally calm family dinners, I can't remember them. 

"Didn't you help your mother in the kitchen?"

"She made me help her when she was punishing me for something," I replied.

Then I recited a story from when I was about 10 years old. My mother worked a full-time job. She came home around 6 p.m. every day. My father's hours varied; he owned his own business and came and went on an irregular schedule. I kept my brother for the two hours after school after I was deemed old enough to do so (I think they call them latch key kids, or did at one time). I was responsible for ensuring we both did our homework, that we hauled in firewood, that we fed the chickens and other birds, and did whatever other chores were required of us, which included gardening in the warmer months.

One evening I had no homework and decided to fix dinner for my mother. I don't recall what I made, but it was edible. I was so pleased with myself for having did this. My mother came in from work, made no comment about the table being set, or dinner being ready. She sat down and ate, and told me to clean up. Finally I couldn't stand it any longer, and said, "Aren't you going to say anything about my fixing dinner?"

"Now you know how I feel," she said. "Nobody ever says thank you. Go wash the dishes."

Wow.

Writing that out and thinking on it, it is no wonder I hate to cook. I doubt "hating to cook" was the lesson she was trying to impart, but that is the one I received, along with the fact that nothing I did was ever going to be right no matter how hard I tried. She was not someone easily pleased.

I'm an old woman now. I take full responsibility for not learning to cook better than I do. I cook well enough to keep us fed, but not well enough to make us healthy, I guess. Otherwise I wouldn't be fat, right?

Right.

I also take responsibility for not learning to like it. Or learning to do it better. It was my responsibility to make it a priority, once I became an adult.

I didn't. And I won't, because I hate to cook.

So there you go. That's how my garden grows. It's a good thing I like squash. (I stir fry it usually. That's easiest.)