Football and turnip greens
By Clif Knight
Fresh-picked cooked greens and a big win from your favorite football team are a good combination for a kitchen tabletop meal to savor and a fingernail-chewing football game to watch being played out simultaneously on the monitor of a big screen television.
To fully enjoy a meal of fresh greens, you’ll want to add some sides, namely a big slice of sweet onion, a hunk of Texas cornbread, a baked sweet potato, a dash of hot pepper sauce and a 12-ounce glass of sweet tea.
A high school game worthy of a viewer’s hand-wringing nervousness from start to finish was the Hartselle vs. Muscle Shoals away battle on September 30. The score rocked back and forth and the outcome had the appearance of an overtime finish. Hartselle would have something to say about that that happening. The Tigers drove 80 yards and scored the go-ahead TD in the final minute of the game. Their 3-point margin held up when a last second Muscle Shoals field goal fell short in front of the cross bar.
The Alabama vs. Arkansas game on Saturday night had Crimson Tide fans wondering is their team’s undefeated season was about to reach an end when they lost their starting quarterback to an injury early in the third quarter. With a backup freshman leading the team, the crimson tide gave up 17 points in the third period and led by only five points going into the fourth quarter. However, Alabama responded by scoring 21 three touchdowns and winning by a score of 49-26.
The growing of turnip greens on our farm far exceeded the quantity needed to feed our family. I remember when we rented an acre of bottomland from a neighbor to grow irrigated turnip greens for house-to-house sale in Anniston. Our mom and dad picked and bundled the greens one day and my siblings and me washed them in a waist deep pond of impounded water the next morning before the arrival of our school bus. This project meant we got wet and cold from the bottoms of our feet to the top of our heads. We were stuck in the water for about an hour and by the time we were finished we washed and loaded a pickup bed with sideboards.
