Sweet Corn

We were able to spend the first week of September with my family in Wisconsin. Labor day morning we put up 95 quarts of sweet corn! My dad has been growing and selling sweet corn since he was 16 so, as you can imagine, I have lots and lots of summer memories of sweet corn! Here's a quick run down on how to put up corn. 

First, you pick it! My dad had to pick about 400 dozen for stores on this particular night and the girls lasted the first truckload. Not bad! It was Ryan's first time in the field, but I think he picked about 700 ears! My dad always paid us a penny an ear, and let me tell you that I earned quite a bit of money every summer picking thousands of ears of corn! 

Then you husk it and cook it for a few minutes at a hard boil. Lots of hands make light work! It only took us about an hour to husk this pile, 30 dozen. My mom uses this gas grill to cook 2 pots of corn outside and keep the temperature down in the house. 

Then we transferred the steaming hot corn into a sink full of ice water to stop the corn from cooking. Once the ears had cooled down we cut the kernels off with an electric knife. My sisters did a great job! Gotta love the use of the bundt cake pans to keep the cob from moving and catching all the kernels as they fall. ( I forgot to take a picture of the floors....we covered the entire kitchen floor with layers of newspaper before starting. That made clean up easy!)

Then we dumped the kernels into grandma's pan and she measured out 4 cups and packaged them into quart size freezer bags. After that they were labeled and stacked onto trays in the freezer so that they were able to freeze flat. Whew! I still can't believe that we put up 95 quarts in a little less than four hours!

Another prominent summer memory is delivering sweet corn with my dad. We would head out early to the grocery stores and unload into carts or pallet bins and wheel the corn into a large cooler. After that dad always let us pick out a donut for the ride home. Ryan and Chloe helped my sister Danielle deliver this truckload to 2 different stores (and brought back donuts for us all!). Good times, good memories.