I Am All Ears

There is something magical about good food. It brings people together.  Memories happen, and stick with you in a way that you will never forget.  Recently I had the pleasure of making freezer corn.  Freezer corn is not where you buy the corn from the grocery store,  and toss it in bags and call it a day.  Freezer corn is so much more than that. Really good freezer corn is a taste of summer at its finest.

My friend Lizzy let me experience what it really means to make freezer corn happen.  We drove out to the middle of Amish Country, where I saw more horse and buggies than gas stations, and through some family connections, I found myself in a field of corn that was ready to meet its destiny.  I have never been in a corn field. I have lived near plenty of them, and remember them to be full of poison ivy and corn flowers.  They were a thing of beauty and danger to me. Mostly because I have a high allergy to poison ivy and think that cornflowers are pretty. This field had no poison ivy, and was full of ears.  The ears have probably heard it all. I know for a fact it heard me trying to figure out the best way to harvest corn. I may have plucked 25 out of the 200 ears that we left with.  I am absolutely amazed at the speed that some people can pick corn. All 200 ears were in the car with in 20 minutes.  Complete with corn bugs.


 When you have 200 ears to husk and silked, you learn to find a rhythm quickly. You also learn really quickly that corn is a sticky. Not a little sticky, but very sticky. The reason sweet corn is sweet, is because of the amount of sugar and starch at is nestled in each kernel.  I am pretty sure that if you were to juice corn, it would be a type of cement. They type of cement that you would never really be able to get off your hands with a single washing and multiple washing will only make your hands smooth. I wouldn't recommend using corn to smooth your hands. It is not an efficient way to exfoliate.

Once corn has been husked and silked, it gets cooked in a pot. Thirty ears of corn at a time, is still a lot of corn. Once the corn is cooked it had to be cooled. Not just on the out side, but all the way down to the hot molten core. If I had a portal that I could zap the steaming buckets of corn to the middle of the arctic tundra to cool it off faster.  Since I do not have a portal to transport corn to a cooler climate, I got well acquainted with well water. Well water is cold. Cold water and hot corn in a bucket doesn't make the corn cold immediately. Lots of water was used in cooling corn down and  a good bit of it got dumped in my shoe.

I think it might be a tool of magic that was used to take corn off the cob. It resembled a knife stuck in a piece of wood that you run the corn against it like a mandoline. Only there is a higher risk of chopping a finger off if you aren't paying attention.   After the kernels of corn are separated from the cob, you are left with the gold delicious taste of summer.  Tossing it in bags, labeling them and putting them in the freezer for the future, makes it worth all the work that was done.

I feel like I am a better person for having taken such time to put good food on the table, and I feel a lot more appreciative of the work that  it takes to get food to the table. I don't think that most people when they buy a bag of frozen sweet corn in the grocery store, truly know the amount of time it takes to get it there. I already looking forward to thawing a bag of corn in the middle of winter and enjoying of moment where summer dances across my taste buds and reminds me that with great work comes great pay off.