4 minute read
Simple Times
SIMPLE TIMES THE CO-OP PANTRY
BY SUZY McCRAY
Eat Them ... (or use them to wash your Thanksgiving dishes!)
This month our meals will include a new-to-us vegetable whose blooms can be battered and fried, and whose “fruit” can be similarly cooked. This vegetable can also be used to SCRUB our dishes when we’re through eating Thanksgiving dinner!
What other vegetable can you grow that you can eat plus scrub your truck with? Or even use to soap your body during a luxurious bath?
Like us you may have thought a loofah “sponge” was something that came from deep within the ocean, and prices online for organic ones can make you think they are indeed a rare luxury.
But we have discovered that those wonderful sponges can be grown simply and even in pots (if you have room for them to climb) in our bright Alabama sunshine!
You can use the blooms raw in salads or fry them like you would yellow crookneck squash blooms. The fruit of the younger gourds can be sliced and cooked like any other squash, either baked or fried.
According to the USDA, loofahs contain lots of vitamins A, B5, B6 and C as well as manganese, potassium and copper.
The older loofahs can either be left to ripen on the vines or picked and left to dry. (We’re experimenting by letting some dry inside the greenhouse.) They
The colorful loofah blooms can be used in salads.
need to be thoroughly dry and brown before you peel the then-crinkling skin off them. Then you shake out the seeds and dry the washed sponges from inside in the sunshine.
Good Housekeeping magazine also noted the sponges are “tough on dirt but not abrasive.” Others say that when the insides are used as sponges to let them dry thoroughly between uses.
The sponges can be used whole, cut into flat sections to use as scrubbing pads or cut crosswise to embed in soap, which is what I plan to do with most of mine if everything works out OK.
There’s the added benefit of the beautiful flowers they produce on the vines! It’s hard to feel depressed when you have big yellow flowers draped across a fence line and buzzing with happy bees!
There’s a saying going around on social media that we should “build a life you don’t need a vacation from.” That’s what I’ve always strived to do in my simple life. “Sheltering at home” is not a problem when home is truly where your heart is.
These past months and the past year have been extremely hard for lots of people. I guess that’s why Thanksgiving and Christmas will be even more special to our family this year. No, we likely won’t have a lot of family here surrounding our table on either holiday (and if they were ALL here it would be a crowd with five grown children plus spouses and 23 grandchildren and greatgrands!”. Even if it just winds up being the two of us, we have so much to be thankful for not only here on our little farm but all around us as well.
When the first Thanksgiving meal was celebrated between the first colonists and the Wampanoag Native Americans in Plymouth in 1621, things had been hard as well. At least one-half of the Pilgrims had died as they struggled to make a home in the new land. They had been miserably hot, freezing cold, hungry, lonesome, heartbroken and more, but they realized God was still with them in their struggles. For the next two centuries, states set apart their own dates to celebrate Thanksgiving.
Then in 1863, in the midst of the War between the States, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving was to be held in November. Although he was a lawyer and our nation’s President, Lincoln had always been known as a simple man of few words, but words that hit to the core. His words then can be our prayer as we celebrate our Thanksgiving this year.
President Lincoln proclaimed: “The year is drawing toward its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come …. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God ….”
In his proclamation, he asked God “to commend to His tender care all who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife.” And he asked God to “heal the wounds of our nation and restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and union….”
I don’t know if President Lincoln had ever seen or even heard of a loofah before. But I suspect he walked the grounds of the White House and enjoyed the beauty of the plants in his surroundings, watched the lightning crash across a cloud-filled sky, and looked into his children’s eyes, and was thankful for God’s blessings in spite of the turmoil around him.
“For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with Thanksgiving because it is consecrated by the Word of God and prayer.” 1 Timothy 4:4-5
