I have become my mother. Or my grandmother. Or actually? The self-sacrificing ur-mother.
Yesterday's CSA pickup included five ears of corn, which we decided to have for dinner. My people were outside peeling it; when I went out to check on them, my husband announced that he'd thrown one away because of a surfeit of worms and worm slime. "Yeah, Mommy, it was gross!" concurred the six year old. I offered to take a look at it. Squeamishly, my husband extracted it from the compost bucket.
It had a little worminess at the tip and 2 or 3 spots elsewhere, nothing a paring knife and some running water wouldn't fix. So I fixed it.
And later, despite protestations - "don’t eat that, Mommy" – I ate it, divots and all. And it was just fine.
How about you? Do you eat the grisly ends and chicken necks, and give everyone else the choice bits? Or do you save the best for yourself?
(And another question: do you peel the corn, or husk it? I always say "peel" and my husband always corrects me. But "peel" is a verb, and "husk" doesn't sound like a verb to me (though I think it can be - hey look, nested parentheses!).)
[Did I put the period in the right place in that last parenthetical construction? It looks wrong, but it seems logically correct.]
{I think I'll stop with the parentheticals. Next time, I'll use footnotes, like Alejna, if I can remember how to make superscript numbers.}
I "shuck" corn, actually. And, I would have eaten it, too, probably, though I don't actually eat the grisly ends and the chicken necks...
ReplyDelete(And, I like parentheticals!)
Didn't we always shuck it in our youth?
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds me of when I learned to shuck clams shortly after Alex was born, leading Howie to lovingly refer to me as his mothershucker.
I shuck corn. And, yes, I've eaten those ears - they are usually more "closer to the earth" (more wormy patches) when I buy corn through the co-op than the grocery store. I know it's perfectly good. What annoys me is that 3 out of 4 of us eat corn and when I order 3 ears, I invariably get a 4th which either has to be eaten by someone who already has an ear or it ends up wasted.
ReplyDeleteSince I don't eat meat, I don't have any grisly bits and necks to worry about but I do heartily eat cookie crumbs. My husband never minds eating sandwiches made from the heels of bread. I hate waste.
I eat the yucky bits. And I neither peel nor husk: I shuck.
ReplyDeleteI husk, my husband shucks. He eats the grisly chicken bits---he kind of likes them but I'll take the funny vegetable bits...
ReplyDeleteWe cook the in the husk, and then shuck them at the table. So we wouldn't ave found the worms until after they were cooked.
ReplyDeleteYum!
We shuck the corn here, and the gristly ends and chicken bits are for our mother, not us. [Why am I using the imperial we here? ...]
ReplyDeleteBut if there's a little bit of mold on the cheese, I cut it off and eat the rest of the cheese.
T.
My husband shucks. I "take care of" the corn. For some reason, my brain is usually too addled to come up with anything more descriptive.
ReplyDelete(And I think your period was in the right place. Or at least, that's where I would have put it.)
Once, before we were married, I was making roast beef sandwiches for Tony and me at his mother's house. It was kind of gristly, so I did a lot of trimming. He later told me his mother was mad because I only made two sandwiches out of a half pound of meat.
ReplyDeleteSame goes for any food- I won't waste it, so long as the bad parts can be cut off.
Yep, I'm a shucker too. I won't eat chicken necks, but I will eat bruised, half-eaten apples, and so on.
ReplyDeleteNatch I went to look up the grammar solution--it should actually be brackets within the parentheses--but I would have done it your way.
ReplyDeleteI shuck corn, but don't eat wormy anything!
I shuck corn when I have it fresh, which isn't often because corn doesn't grow here so it costs 50 cents an ear and that just hurts, somehow. (Corn is supposed to cost 10 cents an ear in the summer, dammit! (OTOH my guinea pigs eat the husks so by buying 50 cent corn I'd be saving money in dried up piggy food, which just occurred to me. Hm. Now I'm off to buy corn.))
ReplyDelete... she said, then ate the remains of her children's breakfast.
I "clean" corn because then I don't have to think about "what" is correct. Yes, I take the ickiest stuff for myself.
ReplyDeleteAnd for Jennifer - Here in Jersey, known for the freshest corn, where corn fields are everywhere (except beside the turnpike)...it's $0.59/ear. Sigh. I remember my parents getting it by the bushel to freeze and haggling over $0.04/ear because we were picking it ourselves so they should get a discount. Yes, 4 cents per ear.
You shuck the husk of an ear of corn. That is, until someone filches it from you to cut off the wormy bits. Which, by the way, is a very admirable thing to do.
ReplyDeleteI am a shucker, if I do say so myself...
ReplyDeleteShuck. But please don't shuck until AFTER it's been roasted for 40 minutes at 500 degrees farenheit.
ReplyDeleteThen butter and salt it.
Ambrosia.
But don't take my word for it, read it for yourself in Murder is Corny by Rex Stout!
we shuck or husk corn..peel? never heard of it ;)
ReplyDeleteand yes, I am always the one eating the ends of loaf of bread...
My mother says "husk", I usually say "shuck". Perhaps it's from living south of the Mason Dixon line these 22 years...
ReplyDeleteBut I don't do either until after I've cooked it in the microwave for 3 minutes and run it under cold water so that I can hold onto it.
The corn I got this weekend was visibly icky at the ends, but I snapped those off after cooking, end of season.
The Man hates throwing ANY food away. I am forever sneaking stuff into the trash, or nowadays, out to my redworms....
Peel.
ReplyDeleteI would have put the period outside the last closing parens. But I probably would not have noticed it if you had not been shouting "parentheses!". (which leads me to a problem - the period after/before the close quotes. It looks terrible both ways.)
I eat the ends of the bread loaf, but partly because I like the ends. It is less that I eat the bad parts and more that I give up part of my portion to my hungry children. This could be a good diet trick.
I clean corn. Peeling is something you do to a potato with a knife. If you don't leave the skin on, that is. Mostly I do.
ReplyDeleteI also hear 'husk'. I'm pretty sure most people in Ontario don't shuck.
I shuck. Definitely shuck.
ReplyDeleteMy kids are young enough not to argue with me when I say that a fruit or vegetable is good if you cut off the bad spots. I do occasionally have to stop my husband from taking some items out to the compost heap, though. I sometimes give myself the best bits, sometimes take the questionable ones. (But happily vegetarian faux meats have no gristle.)
I enjoyed your varied parentheses and bracketing. Square and curly brackets! It's like a feast of punctuation. And I love parentheticals, both in written and spoken language. (They have cool prosodic properties.) I always find it tricky to deal with exclamation points and question marks inside parentheses or quotation marks if they come at the end of the sentence. I have no answers.
And as for footnotes, I tend to keep my "character palette" handy, and have the superscript numbers in my "favorites."¹
¹ Just so I can easily put footnotes in my posts.²
² And every once in a while, in a comment.
I shuck the corn. I have been known to pare small moldy spots off the bread and veggies, but never with meat.
ReplyDeleteI read that "removing" mold from cheese does not work, as the mold has already permeated the cheese but is not yet apparent to the naked eye. My husband still "removes" the mold, while I "throw" the entire cheese away. Betsy
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteas the granddaughter of a corn farmer... you shuck the corn
ReplyDeletei cut off the slightly moldy bits from cheese, and use it. I have to do this in secret, because my husband flips out. but just because one end gets a slightly fuzzy green spot on it does not mean the whole thing is bad. i learned this from my mother.
i would have eaten the corn, too.
I don't husk corn or peel it...my husband does. ;)
ReplyDeleteI won't eat anything gross. I'm quite picky!
(my captcha is "salveg" perhaps a nod to your veggie salvage?)
I shuck, but then my grandparents' farm was in Ohio. And they were Depression-ers. (I've decided that is a word. The author of "The Glamour of Grammar" has freed me from all sorts of constraints. You should check it out, it's just LOVELY. And I never worry about parentheticals. My fiction journal at livejournal is called parenthetical heart.)
ReplyDeleteAnd I totally cut out the buggy bits and trim them. Sometimes I even serve them to guests, not just myself.