Texas – The Arcadian Experience

Time is the secret ingredient to cooking great food

April 26, 2015April 26, 2015Leave a comment

I love to cook as much as I love growing vegetables and flowers in my garden. I’m probably one of the least patient people on the planet, so it’s ironic that the two things I enjoy most require time and patience to come out right.

I grew up watching my family members spend time and effort in the kitchen preparing the meals that we shared together. My grandmother was well known for her cooking. She even wrote a cookbook in 1975 published by Vantage Press. Cooking has been a constant theme in my life, and I can’t remember not being interested in it.

When I was in second grade, I wanted an Easy Bake Oven. My mom’s response was something like, “you don’t want that little thing, if you want to cook, you can cook for real.” And that started it all. She helped me learn to make chocolate chip cookies. She spent time teaching me how to measure ingredients and why cooking time was important.

When I was 12, I requested a copy of my grandmother’s cookbook. She thought I was too young for it, but I persisted. When I visited her I wanted to cook with her using recipes from her book. She took time and taught me her methods. The next thing I mastered was her chocolate cake, which is the standard for which all other chocolate cake is judged.

Fast forward to my life today and cooking is still a central theme. The kitchen is the heart and soul of our home—metaphorically speaking and literally. It’s the very center of our house’s design and it’s the soul of our home. The best parties end up in the kitchen and some of the best conversations happen there too.

Over the years, I’ve found that the best-tasting food is the easiest to cook, has fewest ingredients, and is the healthiest for you. But it also takes the longest to make because the best dishes include the magic ingredient of time.

The amount of time cooking is just one aspect of the ingredient. It’s also about the time spent and shared with those you hold dear.

My husband and I spend copious time in the kitchen, cooking up good eats, entertaining friends and family, and cleaning up the mess. We include our son in the process. When he expresses an interest, I encourage it and take a moment to help him, teach him and share with him. I hope he learns skills in the process, like self-reliance, resourcefulness, how to follow directions or knowing when to ignore them.

Like life, cooking can be messy, but I hope my son always loves to cook and wants to try his recipes in the kitchen and in life. Cooking is more than preparing the next meal and providing nourishment to the body. It’s the vehicle of sharing hearts, minds and souls. I never regretted cooking with those I love or sharing meals with those I want to know better. Cooking and sharing food with others is high-context expression. Mostly it’s investing in the most precious and scarce ingredient of all—time.

Winter Birds: Woodpeckers, Foggy Cranes and Cardinals

December 10, 2014December 10, 2014Leave a comment

Now that the leaves have dropped, I can see all the pretty winter birds that don’t migrate south for winter. I’m still learning how to use my telephoto lens and caught these woodpeckers and cardinals on a foggy day. Fog wasn’t my friend when taking these photos of the birds. Low light, fast-moving birds and low contrast makes it hard to get a good crisp shot of them. A more skilled photographer could use the fog to increase dramatic effect (plus they would probably have more sophisticated equipment with a faster shutter speed.)

There is a mating pair of cardinals that live somewhere in our alley. I try to keep my feeders full for them.

Cardinal male is on patrol. His mate is in the same tree but so very well hidden.

I saw the red bellied woodpecker again but today’s bonus sighting is this downy woodpecker.

Downy woodpecker enjoying a feast on the insects in my slow-dying tree.

Downy woodpeckers look just like hairy woodpeckers, except for their shorter bill.

It’s possibly a hairy woodpecker but the guidebook lists the size of the bill as the only difference between these two species. In this shot it looks like a short bill.

And then there was this death-defying squirrel. he navigated all throughout the cable and rural electric infrastructure.

Then there were honking cranes circling for a landing. I could hear them long before I could see them (it was really foggy).

When the sun came out in the afternoon I tried to photograph the woodpecker again, but he’s just so darn fast. When I looked closer, I think it’s a third species—a golden fronted woodpecker. This means that the tree in our yard, that is dying a slow death, is also full of insects, which is feeding all these woodpeckers.

PawPaw’s Barn

December 1, 2014December 1, 2014Leave a comment

Handy husband’s grandfather is a gardener and a retired owner of a vacuum and sewing machine repair shop. He’s practical and industrious and a bit sentimental about barns and tractors. On our recent Thanksgiving visit we walked the fallow fields, prepped and waiting for its next crop. Right next to PawPaw’s new, double-decker barn is his very old, rickety barn. The day I took these photos it was windy and I wasn’t entirely sure the barn wasn’t going to topple over (on top of me.)

One day this barn will collapse and I hope we can salvage some of the wood for frames and other decorative items. But for now, it’s a great photography subject.

All About Roses

November 30, 2014November 30, 20141 Comment

I’m studying up on roses. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my Canadian friend gave me a bunch of her books about roses. She instructed me on how to propagate roses from soft wood stems, which I’m attempting to do with the flowers from my grandmother’s funeral.

When I was 16 years old I planted a Peace Rose in my mother’s front flower bed for a project in my home economics class. It was my first attempt at flower gardening. That rose grew for nearly 20 years before a drought and grasshoppers got it. One fall it had such big, beautiful blossoms it could be seen from 100 yards away.

It’s amazing how many varieties, cultivars and classifications of roses there are. I’m just now reacquainting myself with the vast varieties of roses available.

But I’m excited to start learning more about roses and experimenting with them in my garden. More to come…

Backyard Birds: Red-Bellied Woodpecker

November 24, 2014November 24, 2014Leave a comment

This morning when I went out to feed and tend to my backyard flock, I heard the telltale sound of a woodpecker tapping the tree in our backyard.

Now that the trees mostly have dropped their leaves, you can clearly see the birds in them. The name of this woodpecker is curious to me, considering his head is red and not his belly.

Woodpecker looking for insects in the trees.

Thanks to my trusty telephoto lense, I was able to capture this guy. A few days ago the wide angle was the winner, today it’s the telephoto.

Red-bellied woodpeckers do not migrate south for the winter.

This little guy kept eyeing me. He was very chirpy to the other birds in the area that were singing their own songs. It was almost like there was an inter-species conversation going on.

Big-Girl Camera: The Sky and the Lens

November 20, 2014November 20, 20142 Comments

Today the sky was beautiful. The high, wispy clouds and bright sun and blue, blue sky, made everything seem to drip in light. I’m a hobby photographer, with a very good friend who loaned me her lovely [and expensive] lenses.

Occasionally I can make my images represent what my eyeball actually sees. And sometimes, I can frame an image that I couldn’t have seen without the camera.

Today I experimented with wide angel and telephoto lenses.

I’m standing in basically the same spot; I did adjust and position my body to frame the photo. I started by trying to capture agriculture in action with the beef cattle in the foreground and the tractor planting wheat in the background.

But I ended up going to school in the difference between the two lenses, which is remarkable. Can you see it, too?

These next four photographs are not cropped or edited other than adding text labels for a visual point of reference. (they are also saved down into smaller files for web publishing).

Telephoto: I can’t get all the cattle in the shot. And look at how “flat” the sky appears.

Wide angle: amazingly all the cattle fit in the shot– all I did was change the lens. And you can see both tractors. Notice how “curved” the image looks. Much closer to the way our eyeballs see the world.

Telephoto: I repositioned to catch the tractor as he made another pass, and to frame out the parked tractor and hay bale.

Wide angle: The tractor is farther away (he was moving the whole time I was shooting). Notice the difference in the color saturation the wide angel captures v. the telephoto– how blue, blue the sky is.

And the sun flare – I would have been marked down at least 10 points in Ashton’s photo journalism class at Texas Tech. I personally love the sun flare in photos like this one.

My favorite sky images from the day: the wide angle wins for today and does the best job at capturing the glorious sky.

A Good Egg

November 19, 2014November 19, 2014Leave a comment

“And a big white hen standing on one leg. And under the hen was a quiet egg,” a line from one of our most treasured board books, The Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown.

Today was a momentous day for our little backyard flock of four hens. It was a day we’ve been waiting for… for 21 weeks since they hatched.

Someone laid the first egg, ever!

It was a small, perfectly shaped, light brown egg. I’m fairly certain it came from Dexter since she is the only one squatting and singing a clucking, egg-laying song. But there were both red and black feathers in the nesting box, so it could be Tollie, our one red chicken.

Backyard Opossum, Oh No!

November 18, 2014November 18, 20141 Comment

Tonight I got quite a fright when I went to check on my backyard flock of hens. There he was looking at me with his eyes flashing back like highway reflectors—a opossum! He just stood there frozen still with his mouth open. That saying, “playing possum,” is true. He didn’t even flinch when we moved suddenly in his close proximity.

Playin’ Possum is an involuntary response, like fainting. What would happen if you had both fainting goats and opossums?

I saw this devil-animal incarnate a week ago when I heard his scratchy paws on the tree bark, thinking it sounded strange for a neighborhood cat. (we have tons of alley cats around us). When I located the critter he was high in the backyard tree.

The opossum is often misspelled as “possum,” and is so common, that it’s an accepted way to spell it. Opossums are marsupials, not rodents. Like kangaroos, opossums give birth to offspring early in the gestation cycle. The baby opossum crawls into the mother’s pouch, attaches to a teat and nurses through the last stages of its gestation.

As for our backyard opossum, as soon as he had a chance, he ambled along and climbed the tree. I’m sure he’ll be back, so we’ll have to set a trap soon, because opossums and chickens are not simpatico.

Cooking with Kids: Apple Love Pie & Garlic Toast

November 17, 2014November 17, 2014Leave a comment

When I was a girl I wanted an Easy Bake Oven so badly. My mother just said, “here, you can cook with a real oven.” And then she helped me make cookies. That began my love of baking and it lit my sweet tooth on fire. So when my son wanted an Easy Bake Oven, I guided him to cook for real.

We cook a lot in our household. And it’s natural that our son wants to cook too. I’ve always included him when he was interested, letting him peel carrots, helping him make “stew,” and just letting him create “concoctions” with our amply stocked spice cabinet. I’ve even used a box cake (dare I say it out loud) so that he can say he did it all by himself.

Today he really wanted to cook and create. He announced his after school snack should be garlic toast. So we made garlic toast.

He wanted to cook more, and I had several apples that needed to be used. He wanted to make a pie, but halfway through, he said he wanted to make cut-out cookies.

We came up with the best of both worlds by making a pastry top with cut-out heart shapes. We called it our Apple Love Pie. (Complete with the pie bird.)