An Ant or a Grasshopper?

a new tray of radish seeds planted for green next month 

As I was starting a new set of radishes to grow under lights for greens to eat this October and November, I was thinking about the timeless fable The Ant and the Grasshopper. As you probably remember, the ant works all summer to store up food for the winter while the grasshopper enjoys the sunshine and plays. When winter inevitably comes, the ant has plenty to eat, but the grasshopper has nothing. The grasshopper comes begging for food, wanting some of what the ant worked to store away. For modern media consumers, the movie A Bug's Life is this traditional fable retold.

The fable is intended to be a cautionary tale instructing us to be hard workers (ants) and prepare for the winter that we know will soon come. Winter isn't necessarily a literal season. Winter can be a metaphor for any bad time to come or period of setback. The idle and carefree (grasshoppers) among us might just find ourselves lacking when "winter" arrives. 

I think I'm an ant. I literally prepare for the season of winter, putting up food, preparing the fireplace and stacking wood, ensuring we have some candles, working flashlights and matches, and having our furnace serviced. I don't take this as occupying some moral high ground, but I simply don't like the prospect of having to ask for assistance. I also prepare for figurative winters. We live beneath our means and invest the excess. And, we make plans for our future support when our income will be decreased. We can't see what specifically we will face, but we do know that no one is exempt from life's difficulties. We just prepare as broadly as possible.

An interesting thing about the ant -- he's not a lone wolf. He works and lives in a colony. I suppose frugal living blogs, websites, books and magazine articles help create our "ant group". Sharing information and experiences is our way to work together for better individual futures.

2 jumbo bags and 2 extra large bags filled with frozen blackberries

Here's a part of my "ant work" for this past month. Our family has foraged so many blackberries. We are now out of freezer room, so I've moved on to making blackberry jam, blackberry pancake syrup, and blackberry juice for our winter consumption. And in the meantime, while we still have lots of fresh berries to harvest, we're also eating fresh blackberries, blackberry pies and cobblers several times per week.

Just thoughts I was mulling over today.

Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for the End of August Through the First Day of September

Friday

Friday
sausage, mushroom, basil pizza
garden green beans
garden salad
blackberry pie

Our standard homemade pizza for pizza and movie night. We watched My Fair Lady, checked out from the local library.

Saturday

Saturday

garden vegetable and bean soup

homemade tortillas

leftover blackberry pie

My husband made dinner this night. He makes pretty good tortillas, so does them often as a starchy side. The soup used some chicken stock from the freezer, garden vegetables and garlic, canned tomatoes, and a store-purchased onion. It looks like a small dinner, but the slices of pie were huge.

Sunday

Sunday

TVP and garden vegetable teriyaki

tempura celery, zucchini, and green beans

rice

My husband cooked again this night. He loves fried food and I very rarely make anything fried. So he went with tempura. It tasted pretty good and wasn't too greasy.

Monday

Monday

blackberry-cheesecake French toast with blackberry syrup and fresh berries

Have you noticed all of the blackberries in our meals in recent weeks? I made a batch of blackberry syrup this afternoon. I had been thinking about making some French toast for a while as an easy supper dish. I added some freshly picked blackberries and the homemade syrup. Very, very yummy. I could eat this a couple of times a week!

Tuesday

Tuesday

grilled chicken legs

rosemary potatoes

sautéed garden kale

fresh blackberries

One of my daughters made dinner this night. She marinated the chicken legs in a homemade teriyaki sauce, then grilled them. Very delicious! The potatoes are instant mashed with garlic and fresh rosemary mixed in. More kale and blackberries.

Wednesday

Wednesday

scratch refried beans with cheese and salsa

garden green beans

fresh figs

mac and corn

My other daughter cooked fro us on Wednesday. She's very busy these days, so I suggested something on the easy side. I had the cooked pinto beans and corn in the freezer, She had a small container of cooked pasta she wanted to use up. And I picked and rinsed the fig and green beans for her. She added some of our fresh cilantro to the beans and that made them especially tasty.

Thursday

Thursday

meatloaf and gravy

rice

more sautéed garden kale and onions

fresh blackberries

One of my go-to's for using ground beef -- meatloaf. I made the gravy with the drippings from the meatloaf, but it tasted flat. I added salt, pepper, thyme, and chopped canned tomatoes to add some zip to it.

I've been marveling at all of the beautiful colors in the vegetable garden. This is the basket with Thursday's lunch soup ingredients as I rinsed them. There's bright green sorrel on the bottom, orangey-yellow pumpkin and squash blossoms in the middle, and topped with lavender-colored chive blossoms. I made a cream of sorrel soup with these. 

We're making plans for a cook-out on Labor Day. For us, cook-outs mean doing hotdogs over a fire ring in the backyard. I'll make buns, a couple of salads using garden ingredients (one garlicky with tomatoes, cucumbers, and basil, the other sweet and tangy with kale, apples, celery, and pecans with a mayo, lemon juice and jam dressing), a potato dish and s'mores for dessert.

Do you have plans for this upcoming weekend? Any last-of-summer BBQs or cook-outs? Or will this be a low-key weekend?

Wishing you a lovely weekend, whatever is in your plans.