Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

I’ve spent time in the kitchen  this week – time that I should have spent on finishing the last chapters of the W-I-P, but this writer does not live on bread alone … but regular meals of relatively healthy, and home-cooked foods. One of the projects in the kitchen was the disposition of half a bushel of carrots. A friend of my daughters is another single parent, and one in a sufficient state of want to be the object of a gift of foods from a church pantry … to be precise, an enormous number of enormous carrots. Very fresh carrots, and not a bit woody and flavorless because of their gargantuan size. But carrots … the friend gave half to my daughter, and I spent a morning peeling, slicing, and brewing up brine to make pickled carrots. Yes, I have a large stock pot, and a collection of canning jars … and so, pickled carrots. Eight quarts of pickled carrots. And then, another eight quarts of mixed vegetable pickles from the Ball canning cookbook – giardiniera, which is wicked expensive when bought in smallish jars from the specialty foreign foods selection at the grocery store. It’s not so pricy when made from fresh, and even though the costs for fresh vegetables in season is a bit more  than they were three or four years ago … scratch made giardiniera is still cheaper. Even though I couldn’t find the teeny pearl onions that some recipes call for; I didn’t mind; those specialty tiny onions have always been pricy and are a major pain to peel  and prep.

The other project in the kitchen came about because we tried out a pulled pork spice mix, which turned out to be a bit lacking, even in the slow-cooker with a boneless pork shoulder at $1.99 a pound. (Which is excellent for that cut of meat.) I thought of using it as a filling for tamales. My mother, being a cook with four or five hungry teenagers in the household was a master of cheap eats. In the town where I grew up, there were maybe four or five elderly Hispanic ladies who made tamales from scratch, and Mom was the only Anglo. Back in her early married life, Mom learned Mexican cooking from the couple living next door in GI grad student housing at UC Santa Barbara. Traditional Mexican food has the benefit of relying on inexpensive ingredients, and being tasty and filling. So – I refreshed my memory of making tamales, found a recipe on line for what looked to a pretty good version … and oh, my – they were better than good. Light, fluffy, flavorful. I think the trick to this one was creaming the lard or Crisco, and then mixing in alternate thirds of the masa and  broth. I made up another full batch for the rest of the pulled  pork and packaged them in sets of four with the vacuum sealer for the freezer. I don’t believe we’ll buy prepared tamales again – this recipe was so good, using the Mi Tienda masa from HEB.

And now, back to finishing off the last two chapters of West Towards the Sunset.

Forgive me for stealing the title of one of the drop-dead funniest satirical take-downs of 1970s-era American interior decorating trends, as expressed in then-contemporary decorating magazines and such of that ilk. I giggled myself nearly sick reading the book back then, because I recognized so very many of the once-popular trends. Like the mad pash for avocado green and harvest gold. No, I thought they were vomitus then, and when the minor gods of home-goods retail marketing tried to bring them back by calling them lime green and lemon yellow, they were still vomitus.

This train of thought departed the station because I have been watching a lot of Toob of Yew channels about furniture and house restoration, construction or design lately. The house renovation videos largely in the time-lapse versions, just to get a sense of what a wreck the various owners/designers started with and what they finished with, and to skip over the tedious bits of breaking up concrete and tearing down sagging roofs. A lot of these are European, English, or Russian, even – renovating and renewing old farmhouses, barns, châteaux of ages antique to near-modern, or even just half a century … which by the European scale of time is modern. There is something vicariously satisfying about watching a tumbledown old barn, farmhouse, an ordinary residence or a ruinous but once-grand mansion, long abandoned to weeds, junk and general decay being cleaned up, cleared out and repurposed into a fresh and functional dwelling with all the modern bells and whistles. Floor heating systems, ultra-modern plumbing, efficient insulation and windows. Some of these projects are being done piecemeal by families as a long-term project, and some by commercial concerns, as nearly as I can tell. (A dead giveaway that it’s a long-term project undertaken by a family is the presence of a large RV or single-wide trailer lurking in the background. My parents and a lot of their nearest neighbors did that very thing – living quarters in an RV or trailer, while completing the main house project.)

The trouble is, though – I have usually been deeply disappointed by the final reveal, especially when the original building is pre-20^th century, and old enough to be considered historic. There a handful of exceptions in Brits or Australians renovating the occasional chateau, and bringing back something of a period appearance to a historical building … but the remainder are just … ugh. Usually stark, sleek, chic and very, very ultra-to-the-minute modern. A greater incongruity to the outside structure can hardly be imagined. It’s most often strikes me as appearing like an Ikea display room wedged into an 18^th or 19^th century exterior, and that is just … wrong. In my opinion, the inside of a building should have some kind of aesthetic relationship to the outside, even if only a remote one. If you’re living in a late 18^th century farmhouse, with authentic exposed beams, half-timbering and rustic natural stone fireplaces … oughtn’t the interior reflect that a little more, without going all whole-hog in recreating the original dim, cramped and drafty original.  It’s perfectly OK for someone to want all the domestic convenience and comfort that modern technology and development can bring to bear, but if that’s what you want, why not build all new while you’re going through all the trouble.

So many of the final results of these renovations just did not appeal. It did seem to be a trend among the European renovators. I suppose that if you have lived all your life in and among old buildings, you might be completely blasé about fitting one out with all mod cons, but the final reveals on so many of these projects were … dispiriting. As Dolly Parton remarked, in a completely different context, “You have to spend a lot of money to look this cheap!” And aluminum-framed thermal windows, vinyl plank flooring and ultra-modern hanging light fixtures … expensive as they probably are, do look cheap, installed in a two-hundred year old cottage in the Loire, or the Rhineland.

You know, all the way to California and back last month, in the back of my mind was a niggling worry about having an accident on the highway or byway between California and Texas with Thing the Versa – this is likely why I keep the AAA membership paid up. When we reached home safely by the first of June, I breathed a quiet sigh of relief … never expecting that our poor little Thing would get basically T-boned a month later, barely three blocks from home by a driver in a SUV bombing out of a parking lot and swinging wi-i-i-de into the far lane of a major boulevard. The exact same lane and at the exact time as I was innocently tootling along, returning from the local HEB, having picked up a couple of items with the intent of spending the Glorious 4^th of July at Canyon Lake, looking at how low the water level was THIS year, because of the lack of rain.

Anyway, dear readers, there I was, one minute thinking about the left turn into the neighborhood and how I should get another couple of hours work done on one of the current projects for the Teeny Publishing Bidness, and in the space of another – after an awful crunching noise, as  if a baseball bat the size of a telephone pole walloped a tin can the approximate dimension of a full-sized trash dumpster – in the boulevard median with the steering wheel airbag exploded all over me in a cloud of whatever it is they are filled with, the windshield instantly cracked all over.

What the hell – I was thinking – where did THAT come from??!!

Yes, I have been in traffic accidents before. That last collision with another larger vehicle, I saw coming, and almost dodged out of the way. (Other driver found at fault, as it turned out. Yes, witness coming the other way.) I was not nearly as shaken up on that occasion as I was with this one, coming as it did out of the clear blue. The bruises resulting from the seatbelt suddenly clamping are freaking spectacular and quite painful. It also turned out there was also an airbag underneath the steering column, which accounts for the mystery bruise on my left shin.  I have not been this comprehensively battered since falling off and over practically every obstacle in Air Force basic training. Which occurred almost half a century ago. I have racked up considerable milage on the original-issue bod since then, and while in pretty good nick for being 70 on my last birthday … I am no spring chicken. So I am deeply bruised in an interesting pattern, my daughter is murmuring fearful things about traumatic brain injuries – although I didn’t actually strike my head at any point. Some cracked ribs are a distinct possibility, though.

I wasn’t bleeding, or concussed, and I did get out of the car on my own, so the attending EMTs were fairly unconcerned. The  other driver, luckily for me, is insured and did stick around for the PD officer to fill out the accident report, although he couldn’t be arsed to come and see if I was all right. It was a kid from the automotive garage around the corner who did see me to a place in the shade where I could sit down – shaking like a leaf in a gale, and probably would have fainted at one point, save that the sidewalk and the ground were pretty disgusting. A neighbor came and got me, at my daughter’s request, and drove me home, after retrieving my keys and the groceries from Thing.

Everything retrieved from the ex-Thing stinks of exploded airbag, and my daughter was infuriated yet again at seeing how the back seat compartment air bag exploded next to where Wee Jamie’s car set is. If he had been in the car with me at the time, he would have been at the least, badly frightened. And my daughter would, in an insane fury, have ripped the other driver a new bodily orifice.

The accident happened the afternoon before a holiday and a weekend that most places are treating as a holiday, so I don’t expect to hear from the insurance company for another few days. But I’m OK, for now, and back at work, although mourning the loss of Thing the Versa.