Recipe for longhorn stew

One of these days, I’ll write about why I am a meat eater, at least occasionally, but for now I’ll give you a delicious, easy recipe for longhorn stew. I suppose it could be made with regular beef, but longhorn is delicious. If you make it from longhorns that once wandered the Double Helix Ranch, Fly Gap section, then you can imagine the very molecules of that magic place are becoming a part of you.

2 lb. longhorn (I used a mixture of round, hamburger and ribs)

4 fist-sized onions, two chopped, two quartered

5 carrots, cut into 1 inch sections

5 unpeeled potatoes cut into rough 1 inch cubes

6 oz. tomato paste (one small can)

1 tablespoon ground cumin

chili peppers to taste

.25 cup olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

water

Brown longhorn in olive oil in a deep pot that will hold all the ingredients with room to spare. Yes, this is more oil than most Americans are comfortable using, but this is lean longhorn. Add chopped onions and cumin and continue cooking until onions are translucent and beginning to color. Add remaining ingredients to the pot and cover with water. Stir to mix in the tomato paste. Cook covered on a low flame for an hour or two. I used whole thai peppers that were too hot if you bit into them. I bet it would be good with dried or canned chipotle peppers (smoked jalapeños).

We ate it from bowls. I bet it would also be good over rice. It served 7 with leftovers and was entirely delicious.

Why I won’t be shaking your hand

Olaya Rendueles Garcia shaking hands with Zachary Adam

I feel bad, literally and figuratively, about shaking hands. I like greetings. I like the joy of meeting people new and old. I like giggling over whether we are in France with two cheek kisses, actually air kisses as you touch cheeks, or Switzerland where three is common. But I am done with shaking hands.

I will bow, namaste, curtsey, look you in the eye, say hello, fist bump, or hug. But I will not let you hurt me. I will not be shaking hands any more. I know you probably don’t intend to hurt me or anyone else. I couldn’t tell you which enthusiastic handshake in the last couple of months caused the injury. In fact, I don’t even know what exactly it is that causes a shooting pain down my index finger, but I do know that it began right after a knuckle crunching handshake below a beaming smile. At first I decided to just grit my teeth and endure subsequent handshakes, such an important part of greetings.

But then I thought no, why should I? Why should I fear every new person I meet? At first I put a brace on my hand which was irrelevant to the injury but gave a visual signal  of the problem. But that is inconvenient. So I’ll protect my hand and I hope you think about who you might be inadvertently hurting with your handshake. Just keep your hand flat and firm and touch but don’t squeeze. Don’t forget to make eye contact. Then enjoy your new friend!

Don’t be afraid of the Houston summer

Houston, summer is nearly upon us. It will last until mid October. It will be hot, humid, embracing, and soft.    You will walk from icy cold department stores and offices into a warm, woolly, almost overpowering and stifling stillness. Evening provides little relief. Breezes are rare. So move a little more slowly. Put on a hat and a long-sleeved white shirt along with some baggy trousers. Get outside as much as possible at the Hobbit Cafe, Miller Outdoor Theater, or the zoo so your body can remember to sweat. Go to Brazos Bend State Park and walk around Elm Lake. Go to Galveston and ride the ferry to Bolivar for a breeze and the dolphins. I once feared the heat, but now I simply move more slowly and seek grapefruit juice.

Dawn in the Texas Hill Country

The last morning at Double Helix Ranch Writer’s Retreat, I arose before the first bird called, around 4 AM. The Big Dipper had rotated over the house, still pointing to the North Star. It was clear, though by first light the clouds had seeped in. I heard the black-chinned hummingbirds buzz the feeders. The bob white called its two note call. I surprised female and pursuing male at the pond the day before, causing them to scuttle off, half flying, half running through the underbrush. I also scared two ducks that I might have said were black-bellied whistling ducks for their dark bellies, but they were silent, not a strong characteristic of the breed, and they were gone before I could be sure. Just as it is important to relinquish an unsupported hypothesis, it is important to leave some birds forever unidentified.

I walked down towards the pasture and watched a mockingbird sing from the top of a dead post oak. He sang and sang, trying ever new notes. Every 20 or so seconds, he flew up into the air, then pounced back down. Were those flights interruptions in the song? I’ll have to listen to the short video I took to tell.

Here in St. Louis, I also awoke to sound. It was the soft sound of tires on wet pavement. I also heard robins and white-throated sparrows. I heard a cowbird. I did not hear the Carolina wrens, so I suppose they have babies, though not in the homes I provided. To my bird list on the walk in I added starlings and a downy woodpecker only.

My morning walk at Double Helix Ranch I saw and heard rufous-crowned, black-chinned, white-crowned, and chipping sparrows, missing only the lark sparrow. I found again the nest of the blue-gray gnat-catcher. Black vultures soared as did a red-tailed hawk.

My walk home from Washington University added chimney swifts, pipping high above, first time this year. I also heard a night hawk uncommonly early. But the houses seem so close. There is no view, no perspective. When will I get out of town, here or in Texas?

Texas: a sense of place, a sense of time, a sense of history

David Hillis, on right, with writers.

Before the cold front blew in last night, three ravens flew over the house, identified before I saw them by their hoarse voices. If ever there is an omen, three calling ravens should qualify. I might view them as warning of a weather change, or that something is going to happen, good or bad, depending on how I feel about the large birds. But couldn’t I just as well attribute meaning to the lone turkey vulture that today soared and twisted low and close? After all, this didn’t happen yesterday. But then today I did not hear the bobwhite quail. I did not hear the turkeys. Eight of the longhorns had moved onto the path out of the ravine. They included the short-horned red one and the dappled one that sees the future.

But I am not a superstitious person, so I attribute a different kind of meaning to these singular events. What they mean to me is that I do not yet have a sense of this place. I see it, I love it, but I do not understand it. When I told David Hillis about the ravens, he said yes, they nest on his ranch. No doubt he has seen them many times. I did not know ravens nested here, but I see that little wedge into central Texas for their nesting distribution in the bird book. David Hillis would not need the book. He knows who nests here and when, who is common, and who is rare. He has pressed onto herbarium sheets the plant life of this ranch. Having a sense of a place takes time. For some, decades would not be enough.

Each day you spend at a place increases your connection to it, but only if you pay attention. You might learn the birds, but ignore the dragonflies or butterflies. You might remember South America as I do, as a quilt of social wasp distributions, most stunning in Brazil with Agalaia vicina and its refrigerator-sized nests, or most diverse in Ecuador where Jatun Sacha positively glowed with wasps for me. The point is that you cannot gain a sense of a place without knowing the organisms that inhabit it. This takes time, for they do not reveal themselves all at once.

Human history is also part of a place, so my patient husband stopped for me at every historical marker on the 23 miles between here and Llano on 71. There were four. The first commemorates a battle at Packsaddle Mountain, which we could see on the horizon 2.5 miles east. The conflict was on 4 August 1873 when seven men, including three with the last name of Moss, chased off a group of people that actually owned the land, apparently three times the number of the invaders. It was the last such conflict. I had a private moment of silence for the human natives of this land. The second marker is for the lack of silver, from an exploration by Bernardo de Miranda in 1756. At the confluence of the Llano and Colorado rivers, they got 10 ounces of silver from 100 pounds of ore, too little even for them. The third and forth metal markers note the community of Valley Spring, settled in 1853, and the Pontotoc and San Fernando Academy, used as a school from 1883 to 1927, now a ruin. Who is paying for all these signs in a state that won’t even treat its state parks right? But they do add to the history side of a sense of place.

I can get a head start on a sense of this place, for I can walk the 600 acres without fear, ignoring the trails so long as I avoid the nopal and walk respectfully around the watchful longhorns. I can see the stars at night, big and bright, deep in this Texas heart. I can learn well, for I have a wall of books on Texas natural history right behind me. If I focused, in my remaining time I might get through a tenth of a field guide and a narrative or two. For now, I’ll go back to Larry McMurtry‘s Comanche Moon.

written from the Double Helix Ranch Writer’s Retreat.

Will I be a Texas longhorn in a future life?

If I had but one animal life to live, would I choose to live it as a Texas longhorn? Could I birth my babies between the mesquite and the stony stream? Would I know where the best grass is to eat? Would I get tired of eating and re-eating, chewing and re-chewing? Would I have to think about which stomach to swallow to?

Perhaps not many of us humans have thought much about coming back to earth as a cow in another existence. It might be too stolid. The bulls might be rough. I see that I can imagine more coming back as a cow than as a bull, perhaps claiming my sexual identity more strongly than my species identity. Or maybe this is not a line of thinking worth pursuing.

But if it were ordained that I must return to life as a bovine, then I would want to be a female on the Double Helix Ranch, on the northwestern edge of the Texas Hill Country. I would be one of the reddish heavily spotted ones, since I have freckles in my human form and once had identifiably ginger hair. I would have hundreds of acres to wander. I could stick to the red hollows, or climb for the view. I would hear the ravens and the hummingbirds. I would flush the bobwhite. With my huge horns, I would keep the cougars and coyotes from my wet calves. I would keep those babies just about as long as I wanted to, seeing them wander out of sight only long after another one arrived, when I was tired of their vigorous udder butting. I would recognize the song of the lark sparrow and the black-crested titmouse. I might shelter under the large live oak along with the shy Eastern towhee. I would not be bothered by rattlesnakes, or by the scorpions sheltering under my droppings.

I would not remember the glorious and confused history of my breed. I would not know exactly how much Indian blood pumped through my large arteries. I would not even know I was in Texas. But I would not have to think twice about that sense of place the foolish humans long for. I would be in my place. I would feel the soft wind. I would shelter from the heat and the sleet. I would pass each day in the same open air, happy as a Texas longhorn.

written at the Double Helix Ranch Writer’s Retreat

Discover the Texas Hill Country

The way people talk, you might think the entire Texas Hill Country has been divided up into 5-acre ranchettes, with towns like Fredericksburg selling faux Texana and cotton candy to Houston tourists in plaid shorts.

Perhaps if you want to dream across the wide expanses and shallow valleys, you need to go to the western or northern edges of these magic hills.

I’m on the Llano uplift now, past the ancient granite domes of Enchanted Rock and onto the twice-cooked gneiss west of Pontotoc. Here I see none of the oppressive ash juniper. Post oaks and mesquite are more common, scattered across the landscape. I can’t yet tell which of the trees have been killed by the drought of 2011. Many, but perhaps fewer than in normally wet Houston.

The soft April wind blows into the seventies, warming from near freezing nights just a few days ago. The bluebonnets are blooming, more casually than along the Lady Bird highways. Other wildflowers are not yet out. The mesquite looks tender, green frills on the thorny branches. Some of the prickly pears have fat new pads with fleshy imitations of spines.

I hear field sparrows that remind me of Missouri. A vermillion flycatcher, improbably brilliant, reminds me of swampy Elm Lake at Brazos Bend State Park. The black-chinned hummingbirds remind me of nowhere else but here.

Soon my youngest son will turn the dials of the padlock and drive up the crushed rock road, past the cattle tank and windmill and into view. Then we’ll have longhorn hamburgers and apple tart and wait for the big Texas stars to come out.

written at the Double Helix Ranch writer’s retreat.