A Chili Sunday...

What a glorious Sunday! Made a Turkey chili from scratch, and a critic for our food we invited over W 90 year old Grannie. So here's our spread:
-Turkey Chili with all the fixins
- Tomato Salad
-Ancient grains bread
-Peas and Corn

Conversations with Grannie are always entertaining. She loves talking about the good ol days. So most of the dinner conversation was about her life growing up. What we did find out:
1) Her mum baked 16 loaves of bread every week in a outdoor clay oven (It was a family of 18)
2) They had no drinking water on the farm. They had to bring it in by the barrels.
3) They didn't have a bath, weather permitting they were able to clean themselves in the local lake, but for the other months of the year they used to clean themselves with a damp cloth around the back of the barn.
4) Their meals mostly consisted of bread, chicken, perogies, potatoes, geese and homemade kobasa.
5) Her mother was a mid-wife and when delivering the neighbours baby it was born deaf and dumb, and no one was sure if it was a male or a female. So the family family decided it was going to be a boy.
6) They stored their cold food in a cellar underground. The men in the winter would go to the lake and cut 20 foot blocks of ice to keep the cellar cold year round.

This was a very common way of living back in the 20's, and I suppose like 3rd world countries today. So then why are we here in North America so selfish and greedy?

Times back then were simpler, and people were more thankful for what they had instead of complaining of what they don't have. You may want the newest IPOD or blue-ray disk, or maybe even the top laundry machines on the market, but sometimes you need to take a step back and look how far we've come...and just be thankful for what you have. Instead of wishing for the newest and most expensive just for the status...

Grannie briefly touched on the subject of laziness. Back in the day if your farm work was done you travelled to your neighbours farm to help him out without being asked to. Now-a-days people won't work an extra 5 minutes at work without wanting to be compensated.

Gone are the days of common sense, thankfulness and courtesy... I'd like to know when we became a lazy, selfish, greedy society? We're almost embarrassed to say we are part of it....Do we blame the parents, the greedy, the media or Hollywood? Perhaps all of them...

All our love,
Tucan
xoxo