Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

A couple of weeks ago, I started a sourdough starter, thinking that experimenting with home-baked sourdough bread would be another nice way to ensure good bread at a more bearable price than from the HEB bakery. The starter has developed a very rich, sour flavor on a rate of being fed every other day with half a cup of water and half a cup of flour and kept on the kitchen counter. But I haven’t baked a loaf of bread with it yet … and that was because I found another recipe for home-baked crackers made with sourdough discard starter. Unless you constantly bake with the starter, a certain amount has to be routinely discarded, otherwise it would take over. I ran across the recipe for crackers, tinkered with it … and we like the resulting crackers to much that I haven’t yet done a loaf of bread!

Preheat the oven to 320°. Cover the bottom of a 10×15 sheet pan with a piece of parchment paper and lightly spritz with oil. The parchment paper is absolutely key.

Melt ¼ cup butter and mix with 1 ½ cup of starter discard. The starter should be about the consistency of heavy cream or thin cake batter. The butter and starter mixture will cover the bottom of the sheet pan/oiled parchment in a thin layer. Sprinkle evenly with ¼ to 1/3 of a cup of Everything But the Bagel seasoning mixture. (The original recipe called for Italian seasoning, or Herbs de Provence, and a sprinkle of salt, but we liked the Everything But the Bagel season the absolute best.)

Bake for 10-15 minutes, remove from oven and lightly score with a knife into equal squares. The top of the cracker mixture should look a bit dry and not be liquid. Bake for another 15-20 minutes until lightly browned and beginning to separate along the scored divisions. Turn off the oven and allow to cool and dry-crisp the crackers. Absolutely yummy.

We were finally able to replace the big side-by side GE refrigerator-freezer; an appliance which turned out after half a dozen years of use to be a crashing disappointment. The various plastic bins and drawers inside began disintegrating at a rapidly increasing rate, to the point where one was barely held together with epoxy glue and strips of duct tape. The outside finish on the top was scratched heavily and was so thin that the metal underneath began to rust. Then the ice maker stopped working – followed by the door water dispenser. It wasn’t the top of the line appliance, just one of the more budget-friendly models, but I honestly expected it to function for much longer than it did, and have the plastic drawers and all last at least a decade. Anyway, we went straight to Lowes’ and added a new dishwasher to the shopping list. Both were delivered and installed in recent days, although after seeing the mess underneath and behind the old refrigerator, I am only grateful that I don’t know the installers socially. (My daughter says that they probably see worse … much, much worse.) The dishwasher and refrigerator are both stainless steel finish, and a modest upgrade to what they replaced. The refrigerator is a Frigidaire countertop depth, which gives back a little more space in the kitchen – French doors with the freezer below in a deep drawer. I rather like it, because I can reach inside without bending over or moving a few steps, while cooking at the stove. The dishwasher operates near silently and plays few bars of a pretty little chime when it finishes cycling through. I wish it were possible to program it to play something like the Flower Song from Lakme – likely, the top-of-the-line version offers that version. Anyway, that’s my week on the home front – how was yours?

There was a point a couple of years ago, where I got tired of looking up a recipe in one of my vast collections of cookery books and magazines for something we enjoyed and therefore prepared frequently. I made one large book of the most regularly-used and favorite dishes; printed out pages and xerox copies of various pages in plastic protector sheets, all tidied up in a three ring binder. Some of the recipes were culled from various cooking websites and printed directly from their pages, some were ones that I copied, pasted, adjusted the print size, deleting unnecessary text, and saved them to a file on my own computer.

It all made a pretty thick binder, all told – and at some point, the pages wicked up a large quantity of water from off of the countertop. Because most of the pages were inside plastic protector sheets, they stayed damp and began to get moldy, disgustingly smelly, as well as blurring the lettering on many pages. Anyway, this week I started revamping the binder. Because as it is, the single binder had become so large and unwieldy, I plan breaking it into a pair of slightly more wieldy binders. The chicken, beef and soup recipes are all packed into in one, and the fish, vegetarian, salad and miscellaneous side dishes in the second. The desserts, preserves and sauces are already in a third binder of their own.

This necessitates calling up and reprinting those pages, finding the websites or the issues of various magazines and scanning them afresh: a bit of a chore, but it also gives me an opportunity to consider deleting some recipes entirely; something that we made once, and really didn’t like enough to fix again.  And that’s my housekeeping chore for the week … anything to put off working up the income tax return for 2024…

So, my daughter and I are diverting ourselves on a winter evening by watching yet another reality TV series. This one is a real-estate flip-cum-interior decoration series; it can be construed as a kind of professional education for my daughter, the ambitious real estate agent, and amusement for myself. The series is focused on houses in various bedroom communities in the Seattle area, so the prices are somewhat elevated, in comparison to urban South Texas. There are other differences as well, but the houses themselves are an agreeable mix of older cottages and ten- to fifteen-year-old new-builds. They have also been on the market without selling for weeks and months – to the despair of sellers. The hosts of Unsellable Houses are twin sisters and successful real estate agents in their own right, so the focus of each episode is diagnosing what is wrong with the house which is sending potential purchasers away determined to look at something else and remedying those failings. (Conventional wisdom is that there are only two reasons for a house on the market   not selling: either the condition of the house or the asking price.) In the case of these featured unsellable houses, it’s condition. The solution which the twin sister agents offer is an investment deal to the house owners. They will invest a certain amount in renovations, put the house on the market again for a fairly realistic bid – and they appear to be experienced enough in the local market to accomplish this. When it sells, they get back their investment and split the profit evenly. More profit, if the house sells above asking price, which has happened quite frequently. I would guess that the sisters pick the properties to offer this deal very carefully; the location must be attractive, the house itself structurally sound, and the necessary fixes cosmetic. No tear-downs or junk houses in a bad part of town need apply.

From watching the first season of this series (from 2020) and noting the various renovations performed for the various houses I can make a handful of deductions about current market trends and what buyers were and continue to favor:

A kitchen and dining area combination – an almost guaranteed part of renovation is demolishing any wall between the two, often in favor of an island with bar seating instead.

New kitchen cabinets go all the way to the ceiling.

White subway tile for a kitchen backsplash seems to be a constant design element these days. I can favor that, as it’s an element that doesn’t date. Sometimes jazzy floor tile in kitchens.

If not already-existing hardwood floors (and some of the homes are old enough to have them)  – then high-grade vinyl flooring is installed in areas elsewhere than bathrooms and sometimes kitchens. I rather like the best-grade vinyl flooring, myself.

Tile in bathrooms, sometimes rather nicely pattered. Carpet in bathroom areas is an abomination and was the first thing to be ripped out in my own house. For some reason in the 1980s, builders did this, for which they ought to be sentenced to an eternal afterlife of cleaning commodes. With their tongues.

The same for popcorn ceiling texture: an abomination, which I consider to be the Devil’s solidified sperm.

The on-trend for master bathroom vanities is to put in double sinks, where one had been sufficient before, if the bathroom is large enough.

The one aspect of putting the renovated houses on the  market which the sisters employ for good effect is staging – that is, filling them up with furniture, rugs, and decorative elements, even down to elaborate place settings on the dining tables. I had always preferred that a place that I looked at with the intention of renting or purchase be empty, as I could better visualize it with my own possessions in it. I had read that this was what most house-hunters also preferred, or that staging be minimal, more of a hint at possibilities rather than the full-on set dressing. But perhaps this kind of staging is now the preferred strategy and expected fashion, especially for top-dollar properties.

Ah, yes – that time of year, again: time to assess what has been done, and what has been left undone, and to consider plans for the coming year.

Ah, the items left undone – wrapping up the Luna City series, with book 12. Alas, it’s about half completed, and the creative dry spell late this year appears to have lifted. It will be an e-book only, but available in print as part of Luna City Compendium #4.

I may yet continue with Luna City stories as a YA series, with the adventures of Stephen, Douglas, Letty and their friends as children in the 1920s and 1930s. I am very fond of Luna City as a setting – the most perfect small town in South Texas. I am increasingly convinced that YA  teen and tween readers need  books which are not studies in grey goo dysfunction and misery. I did manage to complete and launch the pioneer trail YA adventure, West Towards the Sunet, start to finish, including review by beta readers in slightly less than a year. I also have been struck by enough ideas about how to go about continuing it as a series, so there may be a second volume of the Kettering family saga in time for next Christmas.

As for the household – I did manage to purchase the pet door insert for the slider door into the back porch, but the two male cats are still prone to pee on stuff – so I might as well not have bothered. As for chickens again – when Wee Jamie is a little older. Maybe this spring, we’ll try again with them. The back fence has been replaced totally, so  any chickens kept there  ought to be safe enough during the day, as long as they are locked up after dark.

As of the end of April, 2025, the mortgage on my personal little patch of Paradise will be paid off, and I will have gotten through another year of paying for that replaced siding and exterior paint, new windows and the HVAC system, all installed late in 2020 or early 2021. As noted previously, the siding and the specialty hot-climate paint with which it was covered have worn beautifully well – it still looks as if it had just been done. I am bound and determined to replace the refrigerator freezer the very instant the mortgage is paid in full, though. The one we have now has been a massive disappointment to us both – all the various plastic bins and drawers have been cracking and breaking off bits, beginning when it was barely a couple of years old. It wasn’t a cheap model, but it wasn’t rock-bottom cheap, either. The ice maker and dispenser stopped working entirely and repairing it all isn’t worth the trouble and the parts.

Not having a monthly mortgage payment will free up a not inconsiderable sum of money; I plan to frivolously spend it paying down the existing accounts for siding, windows and HVAC, thereby bringing the day when I am free to begin on paying for a completely fresh round of necessary fixes for the house – like new flooring throughout and a renovated kitchen. This may be made easier when my daughter, the real estate agent still working towards a point were a couple of thousand here and a couple of thousand there is just small change rattling around in the bottom of her expensive handbag, will have her own house. I will finally have that empty nest, with all of her stuff moved out of the garage.

And that’s what I’m looking forward to in the next year! In any case, the writing and story-telling will continue.