Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

My daughter and the Wonder Grandson, Wee Jamie, are off in California for three weeks, visiting family,  showing Wee Jamie to his living ancestors, cousins, great-aunt and uncles and assorted other kin, and giving my sister and her family a bit of a break, in looking after Mom, who is mostly paralyzed and bedridden, since a fall in her kitchen some years ago. This leaves me alone in the house, or as alone as one can be with a pair of dogs, three cats and two hyper-energetic kittens. (They all seem to be extra-clingy to me, in the absence of my daughter and Wee Jamie, though.) Is there a feline version of Ritalin for kittens… no particular reason for asking. Really. I am under strict orders from my daughter to check in with the next-door neighbor, Miss Eileen at least once a day, or else a welfare check from SAPD will be ordered up. No kidding. On an occasion in the early Oughties, when the Daughter Unit was still in the Marines, one of the cats knocked the bedroom telephone extension off the night table, and I didn’t notice. The Daughter Unit tried to call me for most of a day and only got a busy signal. A nice patrol officer from the local substation rang the doorbell early in the evening…

I’d rather not have that happen again.

Not having to work my day around Wee Jamie’s naptime, activities, exercise and appointments allowed me to get an enormous lot of stuff done, over the last several days – laundry without worrying if the noise from the washer and dryer would disturb his nap, time at the computer without little hands grabbing for my phone, keyboard or mouse, or keeping an ear on rotating alert for dangerous noise or even more dangerous silence … and time in the garden without worrying.

The range of potted herbs and veggies by the front door

The Greenhouse, with one of the newly-paved sitting areas

Yes, the garden. The greenhouse is done, and altogether splendid, although I made some mistakes in installing the eave panels, mistakes that I can’t go back and remedy, not without tearing it half apart again. Better just to adjust and move on … move on to covering more of the side garden with pavers to permit sitting areas and clusters of potted plants; the soil here is so dense and clay-like that I have long given up trying to grow anything in it. Better to pave with ornamental pavers and pea gravel and containers on top, or larger metal-sided raised beds full of purchased garden soil … the container garden is burgeoning with green, after a number of days of rain. We’ve already had several side dishes of fresh beans and peas. Last night I had two small red potatoes from the raised bed, and they were delicious and creamy. I’ve depended for weeks, nay, months! on the blessings of fresh basil, parsley, oregano, fennel, cilantro, sage, and dill from the pots by the front door. The container garden holds a tempting promise of tomatoes of all sorts, okra, squash and peppers of all kinds, from Bell to various exotic hot peppers. I’ve managed to fill an extended raised bed with topsoil, leaf mulch from the mulch pile, and maybe I’ll be able to plant some more beans, corn and pumpkins in it by the end of the week.

Of other projects – besides finishing the Civil War novel – three of them concern items that the Daughter Unit snagged at yard savings, or from a pile of discards from a neighbor who is moving to Hawaii and ditching every shred of excess to needs items; an oak child’s armchair and a pair of small steamer trunks. One is to be fitted out as a toy trunk for Wee Jamie, the other to be an all-in-one traveling display and storage for Miss Matilda. I’m hoping to finish all three by the time that my near family returns from California.

When my daughter was small, we were living in Greece, in an airy, second-floor apartment in suburban Athens, a suburb called Ano Glyphada with a view of the Saronic Gulf from the long windows. I shopped almost every week in the local street market, where vendors from little farms and orchards out in the country set up on one day a week. By custom, the municipality blocked off a two or three block-long stretch of street, and the vendors came with their little tables and awnings, to sell produce fresh from the country, although the farmer who came with ancient deuce-and-a-half truck full of potatoes just dumped the potatoes in a pile on the street, and weighed them out with a battered old-fashioned shop scale, which likely had been around since the Ottoman Empire. Everything for sale in the weekly market was fresh off the vine, the tree, stalk or in the case of the potatoes, just out of the dirt, with crumbled fresh earth still clinging to them. In fact, the vegetables and eggs available from the weekly market were so superior and augmented by feta cheese and yoghurt from the local supermarket and bread from a nearby bakery, that we went vegetarian for days and weeks on end. Therefore, one of my most-used cookbooks was Nava Atlas’ Vegetariana – which I think I must have bought from the Quality Paperback Book Club. (I belonged to a lot of book clubs then, and received book catalogs galore, as I was most often stationed in places without English-language bookstores – and this, Oh Best Beloved, was way before the advent of Amazon, et cetera.)

One of our favorite dishes from Vegetariana was this one – Rotelle Pasta with Tomatoes, Artichokes and Basil, especially with fresh basil from my balcony garden, and with blissfully fresh tomatoes.

Simmer until al dente – ½ lb rotelle pasta, and when done, drain and set aside.

Sautee in 1 TBsp olive oil – until softened, not browned

1-2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 medium sweet red bell pepper sliced in julienne strips

Add and stir until they just lose their raw quality

1 lb ripe tomatoes, diced

Stir in

½ cup firmly packed chopped fresh basil leaves

¾ pound marinated artichoke hearts, drained

1 TBsp red wine vinegar

1 tsp dried oregano

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Combine the sauteed vegetables with the cooked pasta and 1 ½ diced mozzarella or gruyere cheese. Serve at once, with toasted French bread slices on the side.

I totally wore out my original copy of Vegetariana sometime in the 1990s and had to replace it with a newer edition.

So, I am trying again with an expanded garden of herbs and vegetables this year, since I have a simply staggering number of good-sized pots and six medium-sized raised beds, of which I can only afford currently to fill three of them with that good growing soil … If I had known when I first moved into this house, what I now know, I’d have had the nasty clay-like topsoil stripped down to the caliche (about eighteen inches) and brought in a truckload of prime growing soil. Alas, I couldn’t afford something that drastic then, so I have made do ever since by growing the delicate stuff in the huge array of containers and planting tough natives or native-adapted in the ground. Honestly, I could make bricks very readily out of most of the dirt in my yard.

This last week Costco had bags of container soil available for a very reasonable price, so I’ll go back and get two more. I have a huge collection of garden seeds, and many of them are coming along very nicely. Some years I have had better results or better luck than others – this year, I hope that everything is aligning in my favor. The usual herbs – parsley, fennel, basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano and cilantro are doing pretty well, since I could shelter them during the very worst weather earlier in the year. With the teeny yard that I have, I hope to have enough fresh vegetables to have something fresh every day from the garden, for as long as the vegetables bear – I managed that feat the year that we were in Utah and had a large garden plot. And Texas is milder, weatherwise, than Utah…

As for vegetables in my current garden – one raised bed is full of various bean plants, and the other of potatoes, which won’t be ready to harvest until the green tops wither and die. I have a large pot with climbing pea plants in it, and last night we had some of the first fresh peas from it. Okra, tomatoes, various squash, cucumber, and peppers fill out the rest of the containers. But this week, since a client paid in full for a project, I took the plunge and bought a bigger, sturdier greenhouse to replace the small plastic one, which had disintegrated after a couple of years use. That greenhouse was a cheapie from Amazon; not only was the plastic cover shredded, but half the connectors had splintered as well. I looked around and found a suitable aluminum and polycarbonate panel greenhouse on Wayfair. It came today, in two boxes, and on two different trucks, since somehow the two got separated. The instructions, of course, were in the second box, which arrived about two hours after the first. The second driver was ransacking his truck, looking for the other box – was quite happy to hear that it had arrived already. So, that’s the project this week – putting it together will be like assembling a full-size Erector set – aluminum beams, polycarbonate panels, and about a kajillion nuts and bolts.  And I’ll have to re-site the paved path that leads to the back yard gate, as the greenhouse sticks out about six inches too far, and fit out the inside with paver blocks and gravel…

It’s not just that I need a greenhouse to propagate seedlings in a sheltered space so much, as I need it for those days and weeks when I have to move plants into shelter against the cold. With this greenhouse, I can run an extension cord from the house to power a small space heater, on those periods when it gets very, very cold, and skate through periods of bad weather without losing half of my plants. And that’s the project for this week and next.

One of the cooking magazines that I follow now and again, had a recipe last week for boxed mac and cheese – and making it better, by adding extra cheese, cream, garlic and some other ingredients, and topping it all with toasted breadcrumbs or crumbled crackers. There are all kinds of other schemes for improving things like boxed cake mixes; substituting butter for oil, milk for water, an additional egg … for myself, I have worked out a means of improving jello pudding mixes, of the sort where you just add milk and whisk until it solidifies. My daughter bought some of these chocolate or vanilla pudding mixes from the marked-down shelf a couple of weeks ago, and I improved them by substituting whipping cream for half of the milk, and adding a splash of vanilla extract. It makes a very rich, mousse-like dessert, especially when dusted with a bit of sweetened cocoa powder, chocolate syrup, or really – any other adornment.

My next-door neighbor and I were talking about food needs a day or so ago – neighbor, who is actually the niece of a long-time neighbor come to Texas to take care of her aunt, a lovely woman who is slowly devolving into age-related dementia – and I were talking about cheap eats. Neighbor-niece thinks the world of us, as we have shared many dishes with her. I talked for a bit about the Boston Baked Beans recipe that I did a couple of days ago and recalled this favorite from my mother’s repertoire. I think that it must be a genuine Depression-era recipe, as Mom said that it had been a feature on Granny Jessie’s table in the 1930s and 1940s, when money was short and main dishes were preferred to be simple, wholesome, and tempting to the appetites of working men and hungry teenagers, especially Grandpa Jim who was the most unadventurous man in the West of the world when it came to culinary experimentation – and above all, filling. We ate it when Dad was in grad school on the GI Bill, and long afterwards, because Mom had a house of hungry teenagers.

Ingredients:

1 larghish potato, peeled and thinly sliced

1 similarly largish onion, also thinly sliced.

1 cup white rice, rinsed and drained (although brown would likely work as well.)

1 lb lean ground hamburger, crumbled (or really, any ground meat. I think chicken or turkey would work well for this; pork might be too fatty.)

1 14-oz can tomato sauce.

Salt and pepper. Really daring – maybe thyme and oregano; a light sprinkle over each finished layer.

Layer potato, rice, onions, crumbled meat in a casserole; two or three layers of each – Mom used a enameled 2 or 3 quart enameled number, porcelain-covered cast iron, with a cover.

Pour tomato sauce over all. Fill up can with water – hey, beef broth for extra punch – pour over top of the casserole. Cover and bake until potato layer is tender, and beef is cooked.

And that’s it. Simple, filling and inexpensive – although ground beef may verge on the pricy these days.