It’s Hoosier Persimmon Pudding Time Again!
Mamacita says:
It’s beginning to edge onto autumn (translation: it will soon be autumn) and here in southern Indiana, and that means it’s time to start thinking about persimmons. It’s time to think about pawpaws, too, but this post is about the persimmons.
I bet most of you don’t even know what that is.
Persimmons don’t grow in too many places; however, southern Indiana is a persimmon tree’s favorite home, and the trees grow healthy and prolific here. In this community, most people pick the persimmons 
off the ground and run them through a special grinder to make the pulp. We can also buy commercially frozen pulp at any grocery store here, but it’s not fit to eat that way, and it’s best to use pulp you made, yourself, or that someone else just made. It keeps in the freezer for several years. My fantastic and generous Cousin C gives me persimmon pulp, fresh from her parents’ back yard, and I make homemade bread for her family. I think I get the better part of the deal.
That’s right. In southern Indiana we just go out in somebody’s back yard and pick persimmons up out of the dirt. They’re best that way, and we rinse them off before we grind them up.
You pays your money and you takes your chances.
Hoosiers use persimmon pulp for many delightful things, but the favorite by far is 
persimmon pudding. I made some just today. Come on over.
Hint: Don’t EVER taste a green persimmon, unless you like the sensation a blast of raw alum gives to your lips and tongue. Persimmons must be ripe before they can be used. VERY ripe. Asking someone you’re mad at to just “touch your tongue to this green persimmon for a second” is a fun, albeit cruel (depending on the age of the taster) trick to play on someone. Raw alum on the tongue. Yum. It’s a sensation vaguely akin to being turned inside out by the tongue.
On second thought, everybody should try that at least once. How else can you appreciate the fun of doing it to someone else? It’s scientific. Besides, until you try it, you won’t believe the sensation. It’s really not easily describable.
By request (ask, and ye shall receive) here is my very own tried-and-true persimmon pudding recipe again. I’ve tweaked it over the years until it became perfection in a pan.
Hoosiers can be very protective and possessive of their persimmon pudding recipes, but I’m not. People always ask me for it, so here it is:
Jane’s Persimmon Pudding
First of all, preheat your oven to 325 degrees. NO HOTTER.
Get out a very large bowl.
Put the following ingredients in it:
2 C. persimmon pulp (Use fresh or frozen; the canned stuff is terrible.)
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 C sugar (I use Splenda)
1 C brown sugar (don’t use fake) (It’s brown sugar, so there are no calories.) (Shut up.)
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt (don’t leave it out!!!!) (don’t use fake salt, either.)
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
2 C flour
2 1/2 C evaporated milk (not sweetened milk)
1/4 cup butter (not oil) (margarine works, but butter is better)
Put everything in that large bowl and mix thoroughly. Use an electric mixer if you don’t think you can get it blended by hand. Get the lumps out.
Pour mixture into a large buttered baking pan.
Put the pan in the oven. Set your timer for 60 minutes.
After the timer goes off, stick a toothpick in the center of the pudding. Clean? It’s done.
Let it cool just enough to slice. Most people like to top it with whipped cream. Non-Hoosiers often sprinkle nuts on it.
You can also add coconut or pecans or cocoa to the mixture, but then it’s not Hoosier Persimmon Pudding. Your call.
Those Who Burn Books Will, in the End, Burn People.*
Mamacita says: Banned Books Week is coming up this month – Sept. 30 – Oct. 6, 2012. It always saddens me to be reminded that there are such huge hordes of ignorant masses in the United States, and yet, sigh, there they are, forbidding this and banning that lest their children learn something their parents hadn’t already run through the personal values laundromat since, heaven forbid, the kids might come home asking questions and – we can’t have it, we just can’t HAVE IT – thinking. Maybe even. . . ASKING QUESTIONS! (shudder)
First of all, I despise censorship. Banning books is akin to banning people; both are abhorrent to the collective intelligence, and both bring us down as a culture. It’s one thing for someone to decide that a certain book will not be allowed in his/her house – every parent has that right – but it’s quite another thing for this person to decide that a certain book will not be allowed in my house, or yours. Or in a library, or school; for one person, or a handful, to be allowed to dictate what the masses might be exposed to is ridiculous, cowardly, stupid, and evil. Someone is offended? There are choices. Such people can remove themselves and their children from the nasty thought-provoking sources. They could also grow a pair and encourage thinking and questions, but that’s too hard and scary for such people, I suppose. God forbid their children might come home from school with. . . . ideas. Brrrrrr, can’t have it. Besides, people who advocate censorship and book burning banning don’t usually know the answers; their thoughts are scripted by others. It’s a lot easier to live that way; thinking for oneself can be so hard, you know.
Many book censors are too insecure in their own backgrounds and beliefs to risk questions from others, and a huge lot of them are just plain too ignorant to deal with anything that isn’t very, very simple. Learning is hard. Stick with what we already know. Go that extra mile to make bloody sure our kids aren’t exposed to anything that might threaten what these adults consider “safe.” Again, every parent has this right – in his/her own home. Outside of that home, guess what? Other people have rights, too. Imagine.
This post is a rerun, but before Banned Books Week actually begins, I want to share with you again this memo from a college-educated man who was in charge of a building full of impressionable middle school students.
I firmly believe that any memo, letter, or piece of written information that is sent by an administrator, should contain no idiocy or errors.
I also believe that any memo, letter, or piece of written information that is sent by an administrator that DOES contain idiocy or errors should be posted publicly and that the general public should be allowed to mock it.
I suppose that my belief that administrators should be required to be intelligent and able to proofread would be thrown out by the PC police.
This is the letter a principal gave me several years ago, demanding requesting that I take down my bulletin board about Banned Books Week. I had used that same bulletin board for over ten years, and in those earlier years, he had actually praised it for being timely and creative. That was, of course, before he saw Waldo on there.
This is the same school system that had a virtual meltdown because I was bringing in speakers; the curriculum director didn’t want me to bring in people from the outside to talk about careers because, and I quote, “it might give the students ‘ideas.'” These people volunteered their time, and would have continued to volunteer their time, and it would have been of enormous benefit to the students, but no. Ideas are scary, and, to the ignorant, dangerous.
A few years later, the same man who denied permission for me to bring in speakers for free, spent nearly a million dollars of taxpayer money to take all the middle school students to town and have paid speakers talk to them about the same thing I could have done for free. By this time, you see, the Trend Wheel had spun back around, and it was now permissible to give the students ‘ideas.’
One of those speakers represented General Motors, and her speech was 
excellent, although it didn’t sit well with administration. She spoke about high school ‘graduates’ for whom a diploma was nothing but a piece of paper that connoted untruths. She spoke about how an employer should have the right to assume that a diploma pretty much guaranteed literacy and general competence. She spoke about all the money big corporations were having to shell into remedial programs for employees who had diplomas, pieces of paper that represented four years of showing up and not much else. She spoke about how businesses would really appreciate a diploma that told the truth: that if a student had been graduated out of respect for really trying, the diploma should say so, discretely of course, but in terms that the business world would be able to interpret. If the student was just going through the motions of graduation for self-esteem’s sake, the diploma should say so. And if the diploma was rightfully earned because the student had become fully literate and generally competent and had genuinely and individually and truthfully learned how to care for himself/herself in the world in general, the business world should be able to see that kind of diploma and interpret it for what it was: a real diploma.
Oohh, the remarks that were scattered throughout the auditorium. And when we returned to the individual buildings, there was much talk of blueberries and self-esteem.
My friends are mostly lawyers, musicians, writers, speakers, businesspeople, and other educators. Before the edict went out, I often had one of them come to my classroom and talk about what they did all day, and then the students would ask questions. Silly me, I really thought it was helpful.
Sure, they asked my lawyer friends about their individual rights and stuff, but. . . . .
Oh. I get it.
We certainly can’t have our students understanding their basic civil rights and those of their fellow citizens of any age, now can we.
What a narrow escape.
P.S. A few years later, I dared to submit a speaker proposal for my classroom again, and it was again turned down, but this time the reason was different. 
Apparently, it was unfair to other students if one group got to have a speaker and others didn’t. I suggested that other teachers could just as easily invite a speaker into their classroom, too, but nobody else cared to go to the trouble, so I couldn’t, either.
Are our schools in trouble? Darn right they are, and most of it isn’t coming from the students.
Censorship and book banning, indeed. If our society gets any more politically correct, it will be so boring and insipid and cowardly, it will be indistinguishable 
from an ant colony.
Except, of course, that ants are not cowardly.
Book banners are, though.
Censors. The lowest common denominator of humanity. Can there be anything lower than those who strive to keep the rest of us in the dark? Those who fear creativity, ideas, questions, and knowledge are somewhat less than human, by my way of thinking. The human being was created to soar, not bury its head in the sand of fear.
Do I read banned books? I do. And so should you.
*Heine
My Mother’s Hands
Mamacita says: My mother hasn’t been feeling very well this week, so I’ve gone over there every night after school to bring her some food, do a few little chores, and make sure she’s still there. If you know what I mean. She’s still weak and shaky, as she’s described her own illnesses all our lives, but she’s getting better, thankyouforcaring.
As a kid, I never thought of Mom and style in the same breath. She looked like the other girls’ mothers, and back then, moms weren’t supposed to look like anything but moms – what we would, these days, call frumpy. 🙂
Not anymore. There’s nothing frumpy about Mom now; however, I personally tend to lean that way. Mom outclasses everyone else, Red Hat, boa, and all.
Oh, she doesn’t wear the Red Hat and boa every day; I just wanted to make sure you all knew she had them. And wore them. Mom has a better social life than anybody else I know personally.
Mom is one classy broad.
After all the kids grew up and moved out, Mom decided she’d had enough frump for one lifetime and bought some new clothes – bright colors, which look great with her coloring. She looks especially good in red. Her hair is dark and stylish, her makeup is subtle, and her voice has always been beautiful. When Mom was younger, she was breathtaking. Pictures of her, in her late teens and twenties, look like photos of a movie star. No exaggeration.
What I hadn’t noticed, until this week, were Mom’s hands.
They’re lovely.
Mom’s hands have had quite a workout over the years; with four kids, that’s a lot of hair brushing, shoe-tying, hugs, backrubs, buttoning-up, cleaning, washing clothes, dishes, cooking, and all the other activities good moms do.
Most women my her age have hands that have begun to show wear, but as I brought Mom some ice this week and leaned over her bed to give it to her, I noticed that her hands did not reflect her actual age at all. She has the hands of a young woman, smooth and shapely. I can close my eyes and see those hands playing paper dolls with little girls, and stacking blocks with a little boy and those same little girls. I can see those hands trimming a Christmas tree, wrapping gifts, and feeding ham into a grinder that was clamped to the edge of the kitchen counter. I remember Mom’s hands rolling out pie crust, breaking eggs into a big yellow bowl*, unpeeling Band-aids, tweezing out splinters, sewing little nightgowns, holding a book and turning pages as she read out loud to us, and turning frying chicken in a big black frying pan. Mom’s hands, changing diapers, bathing babies, washing little kids’ hair. . . I can picture perfectly my mother’s hands caring for my bedridden father, pouring Ensure in a feeding tube, checking the bedside IV stand and all its connections, monitoring every detail of his last few years. I can see her, washcloth in those hands, cleaning the faces of little children and, later, Dad. In my mind’s eye, her hands looked then exactly as they look now. This isn’t wishful thinking, either; I got a good long look at her hands, resting quietly on her body as she lay in her bed, and those hands are absolutely beautiful. Mom was, and still is, the pivot around which all the rest of us revolve. She held our world in those hands.
She’s feeling a lot better today. Tomorrow, I hope she feels even more like herself.
I’ll tell you the honest truth: I am NOT ready to be grown up all by myself without my mommy right there to help me figure things out. I’m counting on her to live to 110, still in her right mind and able to wipe her own butt.
Actually, those are my own goals as well. ( So far so good with the latter; not so good with the former.)
*Oh, and that big yellow Pyrex mixing bowl? She gave it to me. I break eggs into it now. Mom got the whole set of mixing bowls as a wedding gift in 1950. They’re, like, you know, old and stuff.
