Once again in our family, fresh peaches mark a time of celebrating

In our family peaches always have seemed to be synonymous with a celebration; the events of a few days ago were no exception.

In this blog and in my new cookbook, Way Back in the Country Garden, I write about the Quick Peach Cobbler that once was served when my cousin, Lynda, and her fiance, George, visited our house to discuss their upcoming wedding ceremony. The peaches in that cobbler represented the renewal of our peach orchard, since floods had wiped out our first prolific peach trees some years back.

Earlier this week I stirred up Fresh Peach Muffins on the occasion of another great event. Family and friends from all over gathered here for a baby shower for our daughter, Katie, who's on the verge of giving birth to a baby boy.

I served the muffins to houseguests--our brother- and sister-in-law--who traveled down from Oklahoma to help honor Katie. Biting into these sweet muffins and tasting a peach morsel that hailed from our now-prolific orchard always has been pure delight.

These loved ones' visit produced another reason for celebrating. On Monday we journeyed back across the Red River for the grand opening of the brand-new, $145 million, state-of-the-art Chickasaw Nation Hospital in Ada, OK. Because my hubby and his sister (and all their Moore blood kin) are Chickasaw Nation citizens, the health care that they will be able to obtain from this beautiful medical center will be provided for them at no charge to them. No wonder they wasted no time in taking the grand-opening tour and seeing what this marvelous new facility had to offer them.

In my way of thinking these terrific blessings couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch. My hubby and his two siblings were left without a father when their dad, who actually was born on the old Chickasaw reservation just months before Oklahoma became a state , died an untimely death as the three Moore children were teen-agers. Their widowed mom struggled for years to support, on her own, her children. All three ultimately were college graduates; two obtained advanced degrees. But their early lot was not an easy one. Deprived of a father's love and nurture and provision during their crucial teen-age years, they did not have a family's financial security to undergird them as they were launched into the adult world.

Now, as these three Baby Boomers enter their senior years, the benefits that are theirs through their father's bloodline of his Chickasaw heritage are absolutely astounding. The once-poor tribe today flourishes because of outstanding modern leadership that practices the best of financial stewardship and management. Medical care is but one of the incredible, mind-bogging perks that recently have arrived at their doorsteps as a result of their father's kinship to Chickasaw ancestors (my new cookbook details this in the chapter, "One Smart Indian".) These youngsters who spent anxious years of heartache without a dad's paycheck to give them life's necessities now at long-last are having that made up to them as they become seniors. I can think of no more worthy group of people; I'm thankful that the Lord enabled them to live long enough to see their Chickasaw connection (of which many people once were ashamed because of discriminatory attitudes against Native Americans) bring great blessings to their lives.

Sparkling new hospital wings that offer dental, hearing, and eye care as well as clinics for routine physical exams and testing were proudly toured by our family group. Naturally an emergency room, operating rooms, and critical care areas were a part of the new structure as well. Certainly one can hope that good health will prevail and that the occasions to visit such a place will be few, but the Chickasaw Nation can be proud of having this fine facility for its people in time of need.

Hooray, Fresh Peach Muffins! Once again, you crowned a day well-worth celebrating.

Fresh Peach Muffins

1 egg (we use egg substitute)

1 cup milk (we use skim)

1/4 cup melted shortening

2/3 cup sugar (we use sugar substitute)

1/2 teaspoon salt (we use salt substitute)

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups all-purpose flour

3 teaspoons baking powder

1 cup peeled, chopped, fresh peaches

Beat egg. Stir in milk, shortening, sugar, salt, cinnamon, lemon juice, and vanilla. Sift together flour and baking powder. Stir into milk mixture until all is blended. Do not overmix. Fold in peaches. Fill greased muffin cups 2/3 full. Bake at 450 degrees for 20 minutes or until brown. Serve warm.

Recipe with highly unusual title is a wonderful discovery

Am I the only person alive who never heard of this unusual recipe?

In my "Celebrating a Healthy Harvest" cookbooklet I stared at it for weeks and wondered how on earth someone could make an entire salad out of celery. At best celery is a filler--designed to give some crunch to salads such as tuna fish and chicken salad or to the occasional casserole.

Yet I hate to see a growing-limp celery bunch sit around in my refrigerator and be headed for the compost heap just because I can't seem to think of any last-minute use for it. Celery is one of those food items that a typical cook uses just a little bit at a time--one or two stalks at the most. Timing food preparation so that an entire bunch of celery gets used until the very last crunch is difficult.

That's why the Warm Celery Salad recipe from the Chickasaw Nation ultimately drew me in. I hate to be a wasteful cook and believe in being a good steward of the food that God has provided for our table. I knew the Warm Celery Salad recipe would gobble up the remaining three stalks in my refrigerator. I just had to try it.

Man, was I (and was my Hubby) surprised! Warm Celery Salad (indeed, served warm--right out of the skillet on top of the stove) was impressive--so much, in fact, that we ate everything the skillet held and then tipped the scales a little bit the next day. (Each of us does a daily weight monitoring as part of our lifestyle fitness program.) We couldn't help ourselves from going back for repeated helpings. The black-eyed peas are a great accompaniment to the celery as well as a provider of fiber and bulk.

To top off the Warm Celery Salad we put a few of my friend Mary Ann's Sweet Garlic Dills pickle chips on top. (Her recipe appears on page 149 in Way Back in the Country Garden.) No better summertime menu combo than this one exists.

Warm Celery Salad

2 tablespoons cooking oil

1 medium onion, coarsely chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

2 cups canned blackeyed peas (or canned garbanzo beans/chick peas)

2 tablespoons vinegar

3 large stalks celery, chopped

Cook oil, onion, garlic, and thyme in a large skillet over medium heat until onion is soft, about 6 minutes. Reduce heat to medium-low. Stir in vinegar and blackeyed peas until blackeyed peas are warmed. Stir in celery. Cover and cook for 2 minutes or until celery is warmed. Serve warm. Makes 4 servings.

To avoid the drab, even farmwives of yesteryear needed help with recipe inspiration

What do I do with all this stuff?

You've had an exhilarating day at the farmer's market and returned with a backseat-load of produce--colorful, healthy, and diverse.

Or, your trip to your garden plot has yielded a potpourri basketful of bits and pieces--some random okra, a few corn ears, a handful of tomatoes, an onion here and there--not enough to stock a cellar with canned goods but never-so-fresh-as-now and calling to be prepared and eaten.

What to do? Where do you go for inspiration?

Farmwives of the past, believe it or not, faced the same dilemma.

We tend to regard women of bygone days--when gardens were a necessity and when frugal food preparation meant the difference between survival and starvation for some families--as born wise in the "how-to" department. We tend to think of granny ladies of that era as people who hatched out mature and well-versed in automatically knowing how to use their garden produce.

Enter our Aunt Frances and her first job out of high school.

As a young woman entering the work world in Delta County, TX, Aunt Frances was hired by the county extension agent as an office helper. Her job was to type the recipes that the agent then carried to rural homes throughout the region. The recipes were welcome helps to farmwives who were stumped about how to use their garden pickin's so they didn't have to fix the "same-old, same-old" for supper. (An entire chapter, "Downtown", is devoted to this in my new cookbook, Way Back in the Country Garden.)

An example of the kind of recipes Aunt Frances would type--and also tuck away for the eventual day she, as a married lady, would be queen of her own kitchen--is today's feature: Sauteed Okra, Corn, and Tomatoes. A few evenings ago, when we brought in just "a bit of this and a bit of that" from our garden, this dish was a perfect medley. As I mentioned in my blog post, "Fresh vegetables unadorned make for some delightful seasoned greetings", Hubby and I always are incredulous how the fresh vegetables season themselves--with only limited salt and pepper recommended to be added--yet how immensely flavorful!

What the county extension office did in Aunt Frances' day is the same kind of help the Chickasaw Nation Nutrition Services office provides today to help Chickasaws learn to cook more healthily and to use homegrown produce. My hubby and I stand amazed each time we visit our closest Chickasaw offices in Ardmore, OK. The nutrition-services building has free recipe cards on display in its entry. Live food demos are scheduled several times a day; they feature test kitchen and personnel to show how recipes on the freebie cards are prepared.

(Of course in today's Internet age, merely "Googling" the names of ingredients you have also can turn up a wealth of ideas as well.)

Hubby and I enjoyed our Sauteed Okra, Corn, and Tomatoes for dinner alongside Sauteed Zucchini and Fettuccini (featured in Wednesday's blog). The fact that we had this okra medley recipe in our collection (thanks to Aunt Frances, who by the way died a year ago at age 102) made us really happy that those farmwives of yesteryear needed a little help now and then!

Sauteed Okra, Corn, and Tomatoes

2 pounds fresh okra, with stems and tips removed

3 pounds tomatoes, skinned and seeded

8 ears fresh corn

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons oil

4 cups onions, coarsely chopped

1 tablespoon salt (we used salt substitute)

freshly ground pepper

Cut okra into 1/4-inch rounds; discard tops. This should make about 6 cups of okra. Put tomatoes in stainless or enameled pan and cook slowly for about half an hour. Do not scorch. Drain any liquid. This should make about 2 cups of tomatoes. Use sharp knife to cut corn from cob. In a skillet heat butter and oil. Add okra and onions. Cook until onions are wilted and okra has begun to brown at edges, about 10-15 minutes. Turn often; add reduced tomatoes and salt; cook 5 minutes. Add corn and cook 3-4 more minutes. Add salt and pepper; season to taste.

Good health (and skinny-ness, for at least one person) begins in the garden

These days my hubby is a shadow of his former self—high-school skinny once again—and he credits everything to his dining on garden yield.

No pre-packaged diet meals or commercialized weight-loss programs were involved in this major shedding of pounds (33 of them, to be exact.)

He's simply replaced twice-a-week McDonald's large chocolate milkshakes with homemade fruit smoothies made with nonfat yogurt and any kind of fruit he might happen to have in the refrigerator.

He's subbed snacking on cookies with munching on apple slices and carrot sticks.

What's more, he will tell you that he's never eaten so well in all his life nor enjoyed his meals any more robustly.

I agree with him wholeheartedly; in support of his new plan to become svelte, I've lost 20 pounds myself. (When you're a short person, many people presume you don't have weight to shed, but I was quietly accumulating a sizable closet section of pants and dresses that I could no longer wear. I'm proud to say that, now, EVERYTHING fits once again. I couldn't be more thrilled.)

Vanity on my husband's part had no part in bringing on this new look, although I'll be the first to say I think he's truly a "hottie" now that he's all lean and trim. (Resuming jogging for 2 1/2 miles a day and regular gym workouts had a role also.)

A scary bloodtest report last November--particularly in the area of high triglycerides, high cholesterol, and blood-pressure out the roof--made a believer out of him fast. A nutritionist provided by the Chickasaw Nutrition Services reviewed his daily food intake and told him to jettison his vices (such as a dab of coffee served in his sea of French Vanilla creamer, if you know what I mean) or possibly face diabetes in the very near future.

All this happened at the same time I was accumulating recipes for my new book, Way Back in the Country Garden, which features foods prepared from fresh produce--recipes that have been in my family for generations as well as new ones. I was needing to taste-test many of these items, so I began trying them out for our family meals. Most recipes are health-conscious and feature foods that are garden-fresh--those food groupings we're supposed to have 5-to-9 servings of every day. This taste-test need coincided perfectly with his (make that OUR) need to revise our eating habits.

Our meals began including such items as Vegetable Quesadillas (see recipe below), Zesty Penne and Broccoli, Spinach and Mushroom Frittata, Turkey Cabbage Stew, Hot Bacon and Black-Eyed Pea Salad, White Bean Salad with Asparagus, and Zucchini and Tomato Galette, to name a few. Insane as it sounds, we became so enraptured in experimenting with these delicious new dishes that we lost our interest in eating out (well, no woman ever truly turns down an opportunity to dine away from home, but I at least got sidetracked for the cause of healthy food preparation.)

Six months after that horrifying pre-Thanksgiving physical: my husband's bloodwork recently showed massive drops in all the right areas, with his triglycerides impressively down from 229 t0 52! (from higher than high to low normal). Last week his doctor was agog at the lean specimen who appeared at his office--mainly because Hubby actually paid attention to doctor's orders. "Most people don't ever listen to me when I tell them they must lose weight," the physician murmured as he shook his head in surprise.

I wish I could tell you that we always make lemonade out of life's lemons, but this is one crisis that turned into a gift--the gift of good health, plus an extraordinary new recipe collection. I only lament the fact that my new, growing untried recipe collection for foods from the garden has expanded so, I'll probably still be clicking them off many physicals from now.

Vegetable Quesadillas

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 large green pepper, cored and chopped

8 ounces sliced mushrooms

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon pepper

8 fajita-sized flour tortillas (7-inch diameter)

1 1/3 cups shredded pepperjack cheese

2 medium ears corn, steamed and cut from cob, enough to make 1 1/4 cups fresh corn kernels

In a large, nonstick skillet heat 2 tablespoons olive oil. Add green pepper, mushrooms, salt, and pepper. Saute over medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until green pepper softens. Stir occasionally. Remove from heat. Place flour tortillas on a flat work surface. Place about 1/3 cup pepperjack cheese over each tortilla. Top each with another tortilla. Wipe out skillet; coat with nonstick cooking spray and heat over medium-high heat. Place 1 quesadilla in the skillet. Cook 2 minutes. Gently press down with a spatula. Turn and cook an additional 1 to 2 minutes until quesadilla is slightly browned and cheese melts. Remove from skillet. Keep quesadillas warm. Repeat process with remaining quesadillas. To serve heat corn. Cut each quesadilla into wedges and serve with the corn. Serves 4.

A bubbling good use for farmers market apples--and an assuaged conscience, to boot!

Visiting a farmers market is great fun, but the challenge occurs when you arrive home: how to quickly prepare those great fruits and vegetables before they go bad.

One day last week my hubby and I drove back from Oklahoma with a truck full of goodies from the Chickasaw farmers markets we visited in Ardmore and Madill. You can read more about our farmers-market shopping in my new book, Way Back in the Country Garden--especially in the chapter "One Smart Indian."

The Chickasaw Nation, of which my husband is a citizen and an elder, provides funds to its elders so they can buy locally grown, fresh produce and learn more healthy food preparation instead of cooking canned vegetables that likely have more sodium and other additives. We love to utilize this benefit and during our trip last week visited several roadside stands and brought home some delicious-looking produce.

But how to get it all prepared quickly--especially the huge sack of apples we toted in with us?

I remembered a recipe for "Farm Apple Pan Pie" (featured below) that has been in the front sleeve of my "summer" recipe binder--yet never prepared. Do you have recipes such as this--always on your wish-list to fix, yet you bypass them again and again with a promise of "some day"? This recipe requires five pounds of tart apples--a perfect usage for this bounty of gorgeous apples that we needed to utilize fast.

While I left to visit the cemetery (Sunday 5/16 was the anniversary of my dad's passing--17 years) to put some fresh-cut roses on his grave, my sweet hubby agreed to peel the apples. Bless my dear hubby, before you feel sorry for him, please know that he used one of those no-brainer Apple-Peeler-Corer-Slicer devices that you can get through Pampered Chef. It skins the apples, peels and cores them, and slices them into tiny, delectable bites all at one time. So he zipped through those five pounds of apples in a heartbeat (and saved the skins--the healthiest part of the apple--to use in his homemade smoothies. I'll write more about that later in another blog.)

After that part, the remainder of assembling the Farm Apple Pan Pie was simple--a dusting with sugars (brown and regular) mixed with spices, an egg-yolk pastry, and placing all this in a jelly roll pan. The recipe calls for a double crust, but I used a lattice top instead (so I could watch the apples baking.) Truthfully, I had an excess of crust and apples, so by making a bit extra amount of the sugar "dusting" I had enough for a second pie in a small pie plate!

You can't imagine what a delicious dish this made! We thought we trumped the folks in Willcox, AZ, who run the Apple Cider Mill (one of our favorite stopovers on the road from Dallas to Phoenix) and serve memorable apple pies. Stopping in there for one of their homemade pies makes the last four hours of that long trip to Phoenix more bearable. But now I had one on them--my own apple creation!

Fifty minutes later out popped my Farm Apple Pan Pie--brown, bubbling, and wonderful (prepared with health-conscious substitutes such as Splenda, No-Salt, and Egg Beaters, by the way). I had used up a significant portion of my farmers-market produce; I had assuaged my conscience by preparing a long-put-off recipe; best of all, I had a spare pie to store in the freezer for another day when a homemade dessert would be handy!

Farm Apple Pan Pie

Egg Yolk Pastry:

5 cups all-purpose flour

4 teaspoons sugar (I use sugar substitute)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 1/2 cups shortening

2 egg yolks, lightly beaten (I use egg substitute)

3/4 cup cold water

Filling:

5 pounds tart apples, peeled and thinly sliced

4 teaspoons lemon juice

3/4 cup sugar (or substitute)

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon salt (I use substitute)

Milk

Additional sugar

In a bowl combine flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder; cut in shortening until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Combine yolks and cold water. Sprinkle over dry ingredients; toss with fork. If needed, add additional water 1 tablespoon at a time, until the mixture can be formed into a ball. Divide dough in half, On a lightly floured surface roll half of dough to fit a 15-inch-by-10-inch-by-1-inch baking pan. Sprinkle apples with lemon juice; arrange half of them over dough. combine the sugars, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt; sprinkle half over apples. Top with remaining apples; sprinkle with remaining sugar mixture. Roll remaining pastry to fill pan; place on top of filling and seal edges. Brush with milk and sprinkle with sugar. Cut vents in top pastry. Bake at 400 degrees for 50 minutes or until crust is golden brown and filling is bubbly. Makes 18-24 servings.