Saturday, September 21, 2013

Goat and Vegetables

                              Daughters and squash from my garden a million years ago

Dinner tonight was roasted cauliflower, squash, a stir fry of onions, zuchini, and sweet red pepper with garlic and ginger served with a slice of last night's veggie pizza on the side. All veggie dinner tonight, I told my mom as we were slicing and dicing. Fine with me, she said. And then she told me how she was raised on the vegetables from her mother's garden. Not much meat, she said, except for goat now and then. 

As we ate, I asked her how her mother prepared the goat. She remembered only that an Italian woman showed my grandma her recipe. My grandmother, in addition to tending her goats, chickens, garden, and seven children, was the cleaning lady for the Italian family. The Italians owned a store. What kind of store, I asked. Whatever kind of store Italians have, she said.

 Hmmm. There are some things that I may never find out.

3 comments:

A said...

Precious story fragments, like pressed leaves...

Ms. Moon said...

What a great picture!
And really? They hardly ever ate meat? And I do wonder what sort of store Italians had.
A short post with many mysteries, not the least of which is how in the world a woman could raise seven kids and still manage to clean someone else's house.

Elizabeth said...

My Italian relatives had a "store" in their town in Calabria. The "store" had figs and tomatoes and milk and coffee and probably shots of whiskey, as I remember, when I visited nearly thirty years ago.