Mother would make cottage cheese, called Dutch cheese until World War One, and at times she would make cheese which she prepared in a cooper boiler on the stove, pressing it in the hoops with an improvised press with the wagon jack to supply the pressure. There was milk and other milk products not to exclude milk gravy known today as white sauce, but it was gravy in our day and we ate it by the gallon with potatoes or bread. Baked potatoes with cream or rich milk was a favorite. Living on a cattle ranch with a few pigs should have supplied a diet more than adequate in meat, but mother had a hang-up from somewhere on the use of meat. She must hav been indoctrinated by the song "...but a very little meat," and she had an exaggerated interpretation of the phrase "very little." We always had a hen house with chickens which supplied us with eggs and meat; usually we had a few turkeys. A luxury we enjoyed, in the summer especially, was ice cream. We stored ice in the winter and in the summer mother would put together an ice cream mix which we whipped up in a freezer until it was frozen. She and the rest of us would take turns at the turning.

She was a willing participant in the yearly trip to Soda Springs from where we returned with crates full of bottled carbonated water, right out of the ground. These bottles of soda water were kept on the ice in the ice-bin ready for a cold soda pop on a hot summer day. One can understand why I associate a luxurious table with mother's home in spite of the lack of luxuries we consider necessities today.

In addition to the garden mentioned above, there was the clump of horse radish which was harvested once a year. Some of the roots were dug, then cleaned and scraped, and ground. If you have never helped with a horse radish grind, you have never really shed tears. This grated horse radish, seasoned with vinegar and what have you, was a relish for kings. Also on the ditch bank was the patches of peppermint and spearmint which, when steeped and served with cream and sugar, made a variety in our diet. 

On the health side mother had her preventatives and her curatives. Come Spring we needed a tonic to purify the blood after a long hard winter so in "good health" or "not so spry" there was the sage brush tea. Just what the blood was to be purified from I'm quite uncertain, but it was bitter enough to cure anything you can think of. If one were listless, constipation was suspected and down came the castor oil bottle, or the Epson Salts. Neither should have been given to a horse, but we were soon well.

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