Herban Sprawl

Cinco de Mayo

I was wondering what to make for dinner tonight and realized I probably ought to make something Mexican. It is a little bit of a food holiday for those of us not intimately associated with the real reason for the celebration, after all. On the other hand, I am starting to obsess about tomorrow night’s Foodies class, so maybe I need to cook with herbs - lots of herbs.

Of course, then there is the matter of margaritas. It’s hard to pass up a holiday where margaritas are so liberally shared! However, I’ve only been gingerly reentering Margaritaville.

This story has to do with a dinner I made for BubbaWayne. He was working out an impending move to Reno and when I gave him the choice of possible dinners, he chose Mexican because he loves margaritas. Using a recipe from Ina Garten, I mixed us a batch of the lethal brew. As dinner drew to a close, Bubba wanted to know if there were any more of these, and held up his glass.

I bustled back to the kitchen, made another pitcher and made the mistake of pouring a second one for myself.  All I will say is that most people find it hard to believe that I got to be this old without topping off a night of carousing with my face in the porcelain convenience!

So my reentry into Margaritaville has been slow, starting with small sizes of the syrupy slushes at the Mexican restaurant, which I didn’t finish (Big Kitty didn’t let any of it go to waste).

To be sure, Auntie’s drink of choice is a shot of really fine bourbon over ice in a Waterford glass, topped with a splash of branch. And Auntie doesn’t imbibe that terribly often, preferring a glass of cheap Pino Grigio with dinner. But a summertime margarita on the screened in porch with the candles flickering - well, it’s just a fine thing.

Also, my sweet woodruff is fabulous this year and I should probably experiment with May wine, which is a matter of rhine wine and sweet woodruff.
And that reminds me…BGF purports to make the world’s finest juleps. Derby Day is over, but my Kentucky Colonel mint is gloriously fluffy. I think it’s time we engage in a little herb bartending!

4 May 2008

I opened up the Sunday paper today and the added shopping junk was fatter than usual. I might have known. It’s a week before the Hallmark Holiday of Mothers’ Day. There was even a question to Miss Manners regarding it. No offense, mothers, but y’all go on ahead without me. It is one of those days of the year where I’d rather disappear with a fishing pole and a bit of “light summer fiction.”

Maybe it’s my curmudgeonly edge glinting in the sunlight, but I think we’ve gotten carried away with something that was meant for small children to celebrate their mommies in their own little kid ways. The marigold seeds sown in paper cups at Sunday school, the handprint in plaster of Paris and painted and sprinkled with glitter, the homemade card handed over with the slobbery kisses of adorable tots – those are the time-honored and treasured artifacts that one sees in the ephemera of elderly ladies who have to scale down when they move to the home. But retailers count on this springtime rush for their seasonal bottom line. You can’t blame them, and they make it hard to ignore them.

I don’t buy any of this, but then I’ve been a motherless child for over 35 years. I used to send a card to my aunt Pep and my mom’s friend Meda. Grandma didn’t give a rip about it, actually. She once commented that the card was nice but what she really needed was a break from the old folks. My uncle had consigned her to the home at that point. It seems she had higher expectations of her granddaughter than of the male relatives.

Grandma was the center of my universe from Day 1. Look at a picture of her and see my eyes. Remember the things she grew and see my garden. Recall her groaning bookshelves and drawers packed with needlework projects and see my house. When she had the urge to make noodles, we “borrowed” her noodle machine from Uncle Tony. Standing at our kitchen table, cranking out a batch of skinny noodles, she commented, “You keep this. I never gave it to him and he’ll never use it. Your dad likes these for his soup.”  Uncle Tony never saw that machine again, and I made Dad a lot of noodles with it!

If the weather is nice, it might be a good day to pull the Studebaker out of the garage and give her a little Mothers’ Day pampering.

2 May 2008

It’s no secret. I’m from the hinterlands - the prairie - the place where they grow corn and soybeans. I sneer at the skinny white stuff they sell around here under the misapprehension that it is sweet corn. I know how itchy you can get from walking the beans. My dad’s blacksmith business was kept busy in late winter and early spring as he repaired and sharpened plows for the local farmers late into the night. My best friend in high school was a farm girl who could bale hay with the best of ‘em.
So it should come as no surprise that I have a soft place in my heart for farmers. However that does not include the stupidity of growing corn for vehicle fuel, as opposed to human fuel.

In the first place, the mileage you get when your gasoline is spiked with ethanol is poor so you wind up using even more gas. Last summer I filled the tank and got something like nearly half the mileage with ethanol laced fuel. I was furious. The Uncles, who agreed that the watered down gas was bad news, directed me to the one and only gas station that had pure gasoline. Mo’ better.
When you consider how much petroleum is used in the production of ethanol, from the fuel for the tractors to the pesticides and herbicides, it really makes no sense at all. It’s penny-wise, pound-foolish and it’s an ecological nightmare.

Meanwhile, there is a worldwide conference in which learned people are sounding the alarm that the corn being diverted for fuel is needed desperately to feed humankind.

Somebody needs to explain to me why that blockhead who lives rent-free in government housing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue keeps pushing for farmers to grow corn for vehicle fuel, while poor people are starving to death.  Maybe it’s that Italian genetic material that drives me to share food, but whatever it is, it disgusts me to see corn wasted on a Navigator or a Cherokee.

If Willie Nelson can run his tour bus on used french fry oil, then maybe that’s where the focus needs to be. Willie has never struck me as anyone’s fool, except for when he got sloppy with his taxes and the IRS objected. He’s got a lot of common sense information on the subject and I’d believe him before I’d believe Dumb-Dumb and the Old Fart from the west wing.

In any case, it makes me mad when I pull up to the pumps and the ethanol information isn’t visible without a magnifying glass. It makes me mad that we are waging a war over petroleum and yet the worldwide costs are escalating while the economy is sliding into the cellar. The corn that should be used to feed people is being diverted to feed that row of Tahoes and Excursions and Navigators and Escalades that are parked alongside the soccer field.

And yet, I do not hear one single mayoral or council candidate saying anything about working regionally to expand public transportation so we can economize on fuel and give our citizens a cheaper and reliable way to get to work. I don’t hear any of them saying how it would be good to have more smaller buses with more routes round the clock for the third shift workers who need the help. And I sure don’t hear anyone suggesting that Valley Metro should add the biofuel converters to their diesel buses. When there are no Green Giant ears in the freezer section come winter I hope the grasshoppers remember this.

1 May 2008

Through one of those crazy twists of fate, I wound up as the instructor for a series on cooking with herbs at Foodies, the local school for the lay-cook. I met with Emily earlier this spring, and I’ve been mulling and thumbing through recipes and generally keeping the project moving along, albeit slowly. Yesterday was my big push, though, because the class starts next week and I wanted to have the recipes and information sheets ready ahead of time. It didn’t happen a week in advance, like I had planned, but that’s how it goes around here.

Anyway, the menu has been carefully constructed to offer the participants the opportunity to prepare meals that run from lunch to dinner. But you can’t teach people to cook with herbs if they don’t know anything about the plants themselves.

So session “101″ is the one where I haul in a flat of the primo culinary herbs and let the class caress, sniff and taste. Thanks to a wonderful arrangement with Walters’ Greenhouse, they can also buy the plants if they’d like. That part had me catching up on some paperwork with my garden journal, and that led to some interesting research on herbs.

My garden journal project began this year as I eyeballed the mess on the hill and decided I really couldn’t stand it any longer. My herb garden still had the basics, but I realized my unusual mints had petered out and since my bay tree died over the winter (too much drought stress last August), I had an opportunity. In the midst of this, not being able to find the notes I’d taken in various workshops and Herb Society of Southwestern Virginia programs motivated me to get it all together in one place.

Following a plant sheet sample I found on the internet, I began the task of researching each new plant I was introducing to the garden. The members of the mint family are legion, as it turns out. I kind of knew that, but I really was astonished at the herbs it included - the oreganos, the lavenders, the sages… the list goes on! Anyway, all this really helped me understand why the locations for some of my herbs really hadn’t done much for them.

I get kidded a lot about my herb growing, but the addition of a few herbs to an otherwise plain-jane dish can make the difference between good and downright yummy. Growing them is not an exercise in frustration, like so many other garden pursuits. (If I could master tomatoes with the same ease of basil, I’d be thrilled.) And besides, with my sideways sense of humor, my garden can take on a few twists that offer me a creative outlet that keeps me off the streets. As Big Kitty settles into his chair for supper on the screened in porch in the summer, he has absolutely no complaints about that garden, either.

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