8.17.15 Corn

There is a promise that angels will surround you and lift you up. This week we froze corn. It is always a whopper of a project. From getting up early in the morning to pick to shucking all those ears and then cooking, carrying, cooling, and cutting the corn. It is one of the most physically demanding products to put up. 1. Because it all involves wrist action and 2. because it can't wait till tomorrow because the faster it's done the better the taste quality of the corn.
Knowing this to be the state of affairs it did not help matters that the night previous Greg and I were up studying and counseling through our latest learning how to be parents. And Afton is not sleeping well. So we didn't do the 6 am wake-up call to pick corn. When I got out the door with 3 unwilling boys it was about 10. We got the corn picked, and hurried home in our powerful dodge cummins. The boys were so impressed it could roar and throw them back in their seats while going 100km per hour. Very different from 100mph. It's about 60 mph...
We started the shucking and I got informed we were going to the temple that afternoon. That put a double hurry on things. We shucked and shucked and were about 1/3 through when it was time to start cooking. I called this friend to come and get some corn, as he loves it! He came to retrieve corn and stayed and helped keep my shuckers shucking. It was such a huge service. I was just trying to share with him and he made this project happen.

It is easy to shuck at first, but after the first hundred ears or so shucking corn gets very tedious! This man kept the kids working while talking. And he brought rewards. A case of Sunny D juices, we don't ever get those and the kids were so excited to get their treat.

Day two with Grandpa helping shuck more corn. We had Anna and Harold back for day two. I so miss my kids when any are gone. It's especially difficult when the older ones are missing when we are doing big projects.

Aliza was a trooper cooking and cooling all the corn. Note the ever present book in her pocket. There's always time for a paragraph or two! This year I started our normal routine cooking out side hauling inside to my kitchen. But realized after load 1 that I couldn't keep an eye on the shuckers and it was a lot of wasted energy to haul it in and a lot of purified water to cool and run down the drain then bring it back out to cut. So we switched it up and cooked it outside, cooled it in my big picnic coolers with well water, then cut it on our super-duper cutting station!

The crew loved sitting and sampling many ears of corn.

 

The station. Man designed super fast and nice on the body. There is no way we could have done all the corn in such short time slots without this set-up. Cutting is much easier on the wrists ,although hard on fingers that get in the way of the sharp blade. But the best part is when I was done with all the exploding starchy wonderful corn we hosed off the deck and walked into our clean kitchen, story over. No hours of scouring the entire kitchen! It was more open so less perfectly sterile, but you do what you gotta do to get the job done. We will be boiling the corn after pulling it from the freezer and most likely microwaving it to defrost so I think the three processes will kill whatever we introduced. Thank goodness for good friends who shared their abundant crop and for sweet angels who gave so freely of their time to make this project happen. It's the first year Greg did not participate but it was only because of his friendships that we had the opportunity to freeze the corn in such an efficient manner.  Life is good.

A happy camper who is loving corn cobs!