Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

What we started with

My mother always did plates of Christmas cookies as presents for neighbors; she had this down to a science the last couple of years. She would bake up a storm, about a dozen different kinds of cookies, and the last couple of years they were stashed as soon as they cooled in the freezer, until the day when Mom would assemble the plates, and whoever was handy would go around and deliver them. I think the only year that Mom skipped lately was in 2003, the year that the house burned to the ground in the Paradise Mountain fire. The twenty pounds of butter Mom had stashed in the freezer against the days of wholesale baking melted and and the butterfat grease burned for about a week after the rest of the fire was put out, or so Mom insisted later.

I did cookies myself for a good few years – little gift bags for fellow dorm residents, and a gargantuan box for the workplace – but eventually became rather bored of cookie-baking. Likely our neighbors were equally bored with it, because – well, everyone does cookies. I think that most of them have mercifully forgotten the gingerbread drop cookies from a good few years ago – those what were made from an uncharacteristically disastrous  Joy of Cooking recipe which looked (and likely tasted) like ginger-flavored dog turds. We may have been forgiven this disaster thanks to last year’s offering: another recipe for lemon-pecan-coconut bars, but still … one can only do cookies for so many years.

So, a couple of years ago, Blondie and I decided to change it up. We did home-made cheese and bread, herbal vinegars and oils – all kinds of good edible things, packaged in pretty tins from the Dollar Store, or in little paper bags with a gingham-checked napkin on top. This year, Blondie decided that we should do an assortment of home-made fudge. We got this notion from a lovely candy store in Fredericksburg which commits a regular assault on good taste by providing chocolate-coated dill pickles and jalapeno peppers, but also has an amazing variety of made-on-the-premises fudge. So it was my daughter’s brilliant Christmas notion to make fudge for this year’s seasonal affliction of the neighbors. Which we did, the first of this week, after researching a comprehensive collection of fudge recipes on-line, and laying out for white, milk, and semi-sweet cooking/confection chocolate and all the other ingredients at Sams’ Club or at the friendly neighborhood HEB.

Toasted pecan fudge, under contstruction

I swear, we did not skimp on the quality of ingredients; real butter, real cream, quality chocolate all the way. And so we spent two days stirring pans of butter-cream-sugar combinations over low heat, measuring out the additions on the kitchen scale, pouring them into every butter-greased pan in the house, taking up all the available space in the refrigerator (and some in the Coleman cooler, too) for slabs of fudge: straight chocolate drizzled with white chocolate, brown-sugar with pecans, two-colored and liqueur-flavored Brandy Alexander fudge, orange-white-chocolate crème flavored, white chocolate cocoanut and nut, dark chocolate peppermint topped with crushed peppermint-stick-candy, and dark chocolate Christmas-flavored with cranberries and nuts… yes, we gave that candy shop a run for their money, locally. We even doubled some recipes … an unnecessary precaution as it turned out, although it did use up just about every scrap of the ingredients purposeful-bought for this seasonal exercise. And the other thing – a good few packages of seasonal candy-papers; the tins and plates looked really good and almost professional-grade as we packed them. But we did have a lot, when all was said and done – enough to give a tin to practically every neighbor we have ever had several polite conversations with, and a good-sized platter of assorted fudges to the fire station on O’Connor, plus tins for the mailman and the guy driving the trash collection truck. (Mom always left the trashmen a six-pack with a bow and a Christmas card on it, sitting on top of the cans on the first collection day after Christmas.) For all of that, we still have a large Tupperware container of cut fudge, enough to package in another five or six tins. So far, it has proved enormously popular, and likely we will do it again – but not doubling any of the recipes.

Stud-Muffin Approved

So, my own books and the Teeny Publishing Bidness are doing rather well in these last few months – to the point where I have enough money on hand to consider spiffing up the little suburban cottage that has been our home for practically longer than anywhere else that I have ever lived. No kidding – in the military, the longest stretch I was ever in one place and one home was six years. Growing up, the longest period of time in one house was only a couple of years longer than that – in the Redwood House, which was taken by freeway construction when I was in high school. Anyway, the last round of heavy redecorating – painting the walls, new curtains, and slipcovers and all … that was in 2003, when my daughter was in Iraq for the start of the second Gulf war … and there’s been a lot of wear and tear and dogs and cats on certain items since then. Now we are researching the costs of new kitchen cabinets and countertops, having reached peak exasperation with what was originally installed by the contractor who build the house. In the meantime, as we try to find out the real cost involved in doing the kitchen, we are messing around with the small stuff.

Like the window coverings. The house came with a set of extraordinarily cheap and cheap-looking plastic venetian blinds, which lasted only as long as it took me – after buying the place, courtesy of the GI Bill – to rip them down and put in home-made white and blue striped fabric curtains with an insulating liner. Alas, those curtains reached their own limit – and window by window, we’ve been replacing them with those 2-inch wooden blinds available from Home Depot … or as my daughter calls it, Home Despot. A bit on the pricy side, as Home Despot goes, especially since all of our windows are odd sizes, but they let a greater amount of light into the rooms, block the outside heat/cold … and look amazing … clean and less fussy than my curtains. The profits from a couple of projects let us complete installing the last blind in the biggest window this last weekend. And – it looks amazing.

This last weekend, we also trekked up into the Hill Country, to Spring Branch/Kendalia, to where one of my daughter’s good friends has a weekend job at another animal-charity oriented shop; The Goose is Loose Antiques and Collectables. Kaz ran a wonderful resale shop in Boerne, where we first met her until it closed because of having the lease on the building increasted, and then another one in that same city, which had the bad taste and bad judgement to fire her, but The Goose is Loose has the excellent good taste to hire her on a part-time basis. Kaz works social media like a pro, and my daughter had spotted a charming small table with folding leaves which would fit in the dining area admirably – but we would have to take a look at it, before I would commit to spending on it. Fortunately, the table was even more appealing in person, and a good fit for the dining area, which is even smaller and more cramped than the kitchen itself. We lined up the chairs, and put a beaten copper bowl shaped like a lotus flower in the middle … no, nothing breakable anywhere that the cats are likely to lounge in the sunshine, after clearing away anything that will take up space better used (to their way of thinking) for a cat’s many leisure hours.

As it stands now – a black hole of clutter

The first definitive day of fall/winter has finally gotten here , and never been more welcome than here in South Texas. It has actually been cool to chill … and even more welcome … rain. It’s been raining more or less constantly since about 9 PM last night; from sprinkles to drips, to heavy downpours and back to sprinkles and drips again. I presume that the plants in my garden are reveling in the abundant moisture, after a good few weeks – or maybe it has been months – of a little grudging moisture alternating with day after day of bone-dry. The arrival of this happy moisture and chill coincides with a good few days of us not having to go anywhere, after a solid week of long-distance trips to Killeen in one direction and Brownsville in another. And I have a book project to work on for a Watercress client, another (a reprint of an existing book) to shove out the door as soon as possible, a third waiting for the client to review and for me to request the art-work for – all so that I can clear the decks for yet another client, the one with an extensive autobiography with lots and lots of pictures to incorporate … Alice would have been so happy to know of this project, and of the other potentially big one, coming up. (Also involving a lot of pictures and a complicated lay-out and a generous budget.) All the better that I have this week and most of next week to concentrate on it all.

My daughter is adamant about using some of the profits from the big projects to renovate the kitchen. Not in any way complicated, or involving extensive rebuilding, but incorporating more efficient cabinets and a nicer countertop. The kitchen in the house is relatively tiny – about 9 feet by 9 and U-shaped – and it has always annoyed us that the two corners on either side of the stove are wasted space. The original builder just whanged in some relatively narrow rectangular cabinets at right angles to each other, slapped some cheap laminate countertop over the null space in the corners and called it a day. Everything in the kitchen was basic contractor grade stuff, and brought into the development by the box-car load, and now it is more than twenty years old. I repainted the doors, and the fronts of the cabinets more than ten years ago, which made it look at least OK, but it didn’t help the basic bad layout any. So – researching means of upgrading to something more useful and visually attractive, and for a fairly reasonable price, as these things go. I am working on that as well, running out to the kitchen with the tape measure every now and again, to see exactly how far (to the half-inch) the windows, the pantry door and the plumbing stack are from everything else.

We are tending towards some elements from Ikea – like an archaic looking range hood, and a country sink – and maybe some of their cabinets or countertops. I think that assembling such cabinets is within our abilities, and hiring some local handymen who have redone kitchens in the neighborhood is within the realm of possibility. Or buying some quality cabinets already assembled from an outfit like Kitchen Resources Direct may also be doable. It’s not like we’ll be needing a whole lot of them anyway. Get the knobs and drawer pulls from a local place we know, organize the countertops from one of the big-box stores which has a nice selection. We did consider going to them for the whole thing, because of the veteran discount, but we made the mistake of showing up and asking for a consult after walking the dogs and working a bit in the garden, and I think the consultant took one look at us and figured that we weren’t a good prospect at all. The lack of enthusiasm and interest was thick enough to cut into slabs, even though we had a whole raft of necessary measurements. Ah well – cut-rate place here we come.

This one not as long as the trip to Brownsville on Monday/Tuesday, which was more in the interests of Watercress business rather than a book event – but anyway, it was long enough; to the main library in Harker Heights, which seems to be a bedroom slipper to Killeen. We zipped up there in the wee hours of Saturday morning, with a tub of books and some freshly-printed postcards, on the promise of about eighteen other authors, and a very popular local event – a book sale to benefit friends of the library.  Alas for us – the event was one of those which ask $1 for hardback books, .50 for paperback, and no one staggering away from the main event with a bulging bag of books and change from a $20 bill seemed inclined to pay full price for any of ours. But I handed out a lot of postcards about my books, and talked to other authors, and on the way back … we decided that we would stop in Round Rock and enjoy the Ikea experience.

The fabled Swedish meatballs of Ikea

Well, not enjoy as one thoroughly enjoys something like a clever Disneyland ride … This was more like a Teutonically-organized forced march through an endless household goods warehouse, following the arrows on the grey linoleum pathway which took you through precisely every department, even the ones you weren’t interested in. Ve Haf Vays Of Making You Shop!

There are shortcuts available – but they are not obvious, and seem to be a secret held only by the employees on the floor. They will cheerfully point them out to you, upon asking … but still, this is not a store where you can run in and pick up just one or two small things and run out again in fifteen minutes. No, this is an expedition which requires a significant degree of planning, most of an afternoon … and a certain amount of money. Not terribly that much of that though; to be absolutely fair, even if someone setting up a whole house of Ikea-sourced stuff must be prepared to write a large check. This must be where the yuppies who turn up their nose at Walmart but haven’t very much change to spare come to shop. To be honest, the goods on offer were of good quality, attractively designed and priced very fairly. They were the sort of thing that my daughter and I remembered very well, from seeing them in Europe when we were stationed there. But by the time we had staggered three-quarters of the way through the store – after looking at kitchen cabinet options and stuffing ourselves on a most-welcome lunch in the Ikea cafeteria – we were moaning, “I’ll buy anything, I promise – just let us out!”

We did escape, eventually – discovering the cash stands at the end of the long trail winding – and a small deli-grocery store on the other side of them, where they stocked all kinds of Swedish delicacies – including the lovely small Swedish meatballs featured in the cafeteria. And they were scrumptious. We came away with a family-sized bag of them, frozen for later use … for when we don’t feel like driving up to Round Rock …