Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

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.

We were always able, even at the height of the lock-down covidiocy, to walk the dogs and later Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson, in our neighborhood. Which is a small and working-to-middle-class homeowners, a great many of whom are military retirees. We were always grateful that our city and state administration didn’t go all “self-isolate at home” safety-Nazi on us and pursue with crushing law-enforcement authority anyone daring to go for a walk in a quite park or a swim in the ocean. In two more years, I will have paid off the mortgage, which should indicate how long I have lived here.

We saw, in the real estate/banking debacle of 2008, a lot of vacant homes in the neighborhood go on the market for months – some interesting foreclosures and abandoned houses as well. There was a house gutted by a fire set by teenagers which went through at least two flippers trying to make bank, and another which was painted dark gray, fitted out with bars on all the windows and an amazing spread of monitoring cameras. Yes, we all knew that the current residents of that place were processing drugs, at the very least. If they were hoping to go unnoticed in a quiet suburb, no, they didn’t. Everyone started calling it “Cellblock C on ‘street name’” and halfway expecting the place to explode one day, sending the roof in several different directions; we all within range hoped that our homeowner’s insurance would cover repairs. Another rental property was a drug and party house. Everyone within the radius of about three blocks knew this – and watched with appreciative interest when half the local SAPD substation busted them in a mass raid which had some of the cops asking for the use of a neighbor’s hose to wash the human feces off of their shoes. I had already researched the name and address of the absentee owner, who lived in Palo Alto, California. I was on the verge of writing a strongly-worded letter to him and his management company, when the police dropped in for a quiet visit and chat with the then-tenant. (The current tenants are nice and responsible people, although I reserve some doubts about the rainbow flag on the back porch.)

Presently, there is one house up the road where a tenant with extreme hoarder tendencies was evicted last month – the mountains of junk that the tenant didn’t take with him was dumped on the lawn, and eventually taken away in several trailer-loads to the dump, but not after there were crowds going through the piles – even a conflict between two men, which resulted in a stabbing and the police being called! That eviction was the talk of the neighborhood for at least a week.

The one thing that I have noticed is that many neighbors have spruced up the exterior – new siding, new paint, replacing windows and roofs. At least three houses have gone for metal, instead of asphalt shingles, even though the metal roof will cost about three times as much. The prospect of not having to replace a shingle roof every ten or twelve years, does have appeal, since Texas weather is very hard on shingle roofing. The sequence of developers who filled out the neighborhood had a repertoire of about twenty basic designs – from single story narrow cottages of about 1,000 square feet, all the way up to two-story units of 2.000+, a kind of generic brick

Later – the house itself, with the new paint job all but complete

and stick-built early 20^th century suburban/neo-Palladian/simple Victorian style. There were about thirty different colors of brick, a few the traditional rose or dark red, most of them in shades of beige, brown or grey. This resulted in those houses which weren’t entirely sided with brick, being painted in complimentary colors; colors which explored the whole vibrant palette of pale beige, medium beige, light brown, grey-brown, beige brown and off-white. Lately, some owners have rebelled – and painted over the brick, and explored such colors as leaf-green, Caribbean blue, sage-green, or stark white over all the brick and siding, with black trim and shutters – which, along with a very dark gray roof, gives a kind of Elizabethan look to the place. And just this week, another neighbor, having gone for all new hardiplank siding, took a color scheme from a camo-style Santa hat, that was sent to the husband when he was deployed – they’ve painted over the bricks with sandy-yellow, the siding in dark O.D. green, and the trim – the facia boards and window surrounds – in black. It looks better than it sounds, actually.

Anyway, this is the week that the city comes around with the enormous trash trucks, to collect up bulk trash, like furniture and used fence panels. Sometimes there is good pickings, in what is put out – the metal recyclers usually get to all the clapped out appliances and rusty BBQ sets. In the past, I scored a lot of good-sized garden pots, and a big chiminea, and we have brought home two end tables (of different design and on different occasions) an arm chair and a tuffet – both of which got reupholstered and have done very well for us, ever since. No really good finds this year, though – I think people are holding on to the usable stuff, and posting it for sale on Next Door or Ebay, rather than just putting it out for the trash.

And that was my week – yours?