As a Peasant Kid, you expect to spend holidays and summers doing things your school friends wouldn't be caught dead doing--it's all just part of the territory. Like the look on your friends' faces when they realize you've got dried meat curing next to a vat of homemade yogurt in your cellar (or basement, in non-peasant speak), none of it anywhere near a refrigerator. Refrigerators, as all peasants know, are for sissies.
But it's the family field trips that really set you apart. When your friends are doing things like camping or visiting the Grand Canyon, Peasant Families are driving out to farms the next state over, where they spend entire days picking bushel after bushel of red and green peppers. That's right. None of those Hallmark moments with kiddies giggling under the noonday sun, covered with strawberries they've spent all morning picking. True Peasant Families spend long, hot, serious days picking vegetables they can then take home and pickle.
It's quite a project, too. Because once you're finally home, aching to go play and return to your normal American life, out comes part two of this family project, where your Peasant Father spends the next weekend or two roasting the bejesus out of those newly-picked peppers. By this point, your neighbors are usually nowhere to be seen, having learned to stay away from such obvious-peasant madness. But every once in a while, someone will innocently wander up as you stand basking in roasting-pepper-smoke, to ask what you're doing.
Thus comes the final step of this wondrous triptych: just when you're about to go out of your mind with embarrassment, Peasant Mother has corralled you back into the kitchen, where you now spend hours if not days peeling the skin off said roasted peppers so that you mother can spend the following week canning them in oil and garlic.
And this isn't even the old country, where canned goodies like this are the only way you get any veggies with that stark winter diet. All this in the West, mind you, where grocery stores abound with year-round fruit and veggies. And don't even get me started on the Peasant Family tradition of roast lamb....