Tag: compound

What day is it?

I’ll be confused about what day it is all week, not only because I was out of town for several days, but because of the Labor Day holiday. I trust you all had a good one–if you weren’t fighting floods and fires. No one can say August swept into September without drama.

I have a squash casserole bubbling in the oven. Tim won’t touch it, so I’m steaming asparagus for him. And there’s CORNBREAD, no sugar. Also part of my meal of pork chops will be this wonderful Lebanese salad I learned to make in the Mesozoic age from my college roommates. We call it sof-sof, but you may have seen it as tabbouleh. I don’t know why I don’t make it more often; it’s refreshing. I guess I prefer to keep it as a treat.

Today brought an exciting mail call! Not only does Rolling Stone have my Fab Four fave George Harrison on the cover, but Steve B sent a surprise all the way from the Sunshine State. Thanks, Steve! Haven’t seen any of these for a while.

In the background of the photo, you can see a set of magnetic words laid out on a baking sheet. As you know, I draw words randomly for the daily poems, but this is a very special set sent by Marika, even somewhat personalized for me, so I wanted to see all the words. You’ll probably start seeing poems made from them along about November, which is the month something sparkly our way comes.

In the last week: lots of good family, good friends, good food, good life. Thanks to all of you who make it that way.

A very green Thursday

After six years of use including countless dog naps and even serving as a dog playground–I’m looking at you, Pixie and Sugar–the quilt on our bed is in need of a bit of mending. It’s one of those projects I won’t get around to quickly enough to keep the threadbare places from proving irresistible to at least a couple of Compound canines who are into the, shall we say, fiber arts. So while Tim and I were out and about on Thursday, he spied a REALLY good deal on a quilt and shams that I liked, and presto!

Guinness and Margot think it’ll be okay once it gets some dog stink on it.

And a certain Miss Penny already bit it, so it’s officially part of The Compound now.

Tim was also helpful in directing Tom to exactly the rain barrel we wanted. It was at Whole Foods and was no more costly than the ones that weren’t quite right at Home Depot. Made by Epoch Solutions, it’s been repurposed and reconditioned from a container once used for olives. It has all the features we were looking for and is larger than even I’d hoped at 55 gallons. We’ve already begun putting our gray water in it, and it’s poised to begin collecting rain water from our roof when it rains again. And it WILL RAIN AGAIN. Dammit.

Cool, clear water

Tim brought his dogs over earlier, and Pixie got worked up when she looked out the front door. A squirrel was lying, legs splayed, on the front porch, which is stone and usually a little cooler than everywhere else. I also keep a bucket of water there for the dogs to get a quick drink when they’re running around outside. Margot and Penny, in particular, like this, as do Lynne’s dogs when they’re visiting. Apparently since Houston now has a mandatory watering ban, Mr. Squirrel can’t find his usual sources and wanted a drink from the bucket, which is fine by me. One of the reasons I like watering the yard is that it makes the birds and squirrels happy.

This year in particular, we have spent a lot of money on our yard: getting professionals to remove and prune trees; covering areas of the yard with landscaping options other than water-greedy grass or plantings; keeping more plants and flowers in pots because I can better control and limit the amount of water they need. There was no way of knowing when we had new sod put in that this kind of crazy heat and drought would hit. We have had a lot of success with the sod in some parts of the yard, and I’m hoping those sections are well enough established to survive with the two waterings a week we’re allowed. If not, eventually maybe the entire Compound grounds will use creative alternatives to grass.

I’m well aware that there are parts of the world where drought is leading to hunger and disease. I know I’m fortunate to live in this country. When I articulate my frustration over the state of things, it isn’t just because of the money I’ve spent that will probably all burn up. It isn’t because I selfishly want a lush yard. It’s because I know that for all of us, flowering and healthy lawns and beds can help maintain nature’s delicate balance, from insects to rodents to lizards. Even when our moisture brings mosquitoes, which I loathe, I recognize that mosquitoes are a food source for frogs and bats, which have their place in the system, too. I’m not just bitching; I’m concerned about the bigger picture.

Some of the things suggested by the city to conserve water during the ban include taking shorter showers (and showers, in general, use less water than baths; we are all shower people at The Compound); not leaving the water running while brushing teeth (I don’t); doing only full loads of laundry and dishes (we already do that with laundry, and we don’t have a dishwasher, so we always use a lot less water in the kitchen than dishwashers require); and watering only between the hours of eight p.m. and ten a.m. on our permitted days. Suggestions that don’t apply to us are not washing personal vehicles, not washing down sidewalks, driveways, or other hard-surfaced areas, and not refilling outdoor swimming pools, spas, or whirlpools.

At The Compound, we are looking for even more long-term solutions to manage water wisely. As I said, we have less ground surface now that needs water. In addition, something Tim has long wanted to do is buy a rain barrel to collect rain for helping water the yard. Of course, we’re not getting rain now, but we will again, so it’s a good idea. There’s also another advantage to getting a rain barrel now. We’ve just implemented a new gray-water practice, putting containers in our bathtubs to catch spray from our showers. This water can then be used to water some of our flowerbeds and potted plants in the evenings when more water will be absorbed than will evaporate. Until the watering ban is lifted, that water and a lot of my dishwater could be saved in the rain barrel. Since our soaps and shampoos are environmentally friendly, this gray water will be a good source for our plants even when the heat wave breaks and the rains return. Finally, another good use for a rain barrel is if city water is ever off (as it has been sometimes after a hurricane), gray water can be used to flush toilets.

Smart water use is something we can practice all the time at The Compound, and I’m sharing this information in case it might help anyone else.

In the kitchen: a lot of someones

I’m a good cook. That isn’t bragging, because what I mean by it is that I have a few dishes I’ve learned to do well over the years. I can follow the directions of a recipe. I rarely attempt anything that’s too complicated, because it doesn’t usually end well. I’m a good cook of simple Southern fare, and fortunately that’s okay, because most of the people who come to The Compound table want simple Southern fare.

I found myself thinking this morning that today, I cooked much like the generations of Southern women who taught me. I slow-cooked a roast overnight and put it in the refrigerator when I woke up, then added potatoes and carrots to its juices also to cook slowly. My sides of black-eyed peas and salad were done before the worst heat of the day set in and made the kitchen intolerable.

I’d planned to bake brownies anyway, so since I had an overripe banana, I also put a loaf of banana bread in the oven to bake.

Now it’s all done and I just need to do a bit of light housekeeping before I can shower and read or write or pester the dogs in some way (brushing–only Rex truly loves the Furminator–or singing to them, or withholding treats because they think they’re entitled to those 24/7).

While I was cooking, I thought of my first husband’s grandmother, Granny. I’ve said before that I was lucky both times I married to acquire grandmothers, since my own died either before I was born or when I was very young. Though I remember sitting outside my grandmother Miss Mary Jane’s kitchen door while she cooked, I wasn’t old enough to be of any help. But as an adult, I visited Granny at her house in the country and learned all kinds of helpful kitchen tips. Every single Sunday she laid out a feast for her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, including at least a couple of meats (roast, ham, chicken, game), endless bowls of vegetables, biscuits, cornbread, rolls, and an entire table just for cakes, cobblers, and pies. Granny did it all by hand and from scratch–yes, including her cakes. I would watch and marvel and assure her there was no way I’d attempt a cake without a mixer, and she’d hold up her wooden spoon with her strong right arm and say, “I’m stout.” What she taught me has become so ingrained that I’d have a hard time differentiating between what I learned from her, my mother, my sister and sister-in-law, my friend Debbie, and Lynne and her mother, aunts, and sisters. A couple of things I do remember about Granny: She would make a yellow cake layer in a skillet just like cornbread and leave it unfrosted. Her grandson called it “corn cake” and would eat the entire thing if she’d let him. I also remember that the secret to her mashed potatoes was replacing milk with mayonnaise.

My father could not cook–he burned everything–but I think there was a method to his madness, because he’d much rather have eaten his wife’s or daughters’ meals. In his defense, he was a masterful maker of sandwiches, and no cole slaw I’ve ever had has been as good as his. Tom can cook but would rather not, so he mostly just gets stuck with steaks, checking fish for doneness, and cooking stroganoff. I dated one guy who had what I think are true culinary skills–he was inventive and intuitive. I still have one of his recipes for crab au gratin, but mine never turns out like his and has at times even been a spectacular failure, so I don’t cook it anymore.

I would not trade all those times in kitchens with the women in my life for anything. I often wonder if young people now are so into cooking classes because they were raised in families where both parents worked, grandparents lived far away, and dinner was likely to be something that was picked up or taken from the grocer’s frozen prepared foods section to the oven. I think reality shows have helped encourage people to see cooking as something more than drudgery. I see lots of magazine kitchens with a computer handy for looking up and saving recipes online. Smart and efficient, but the other thing I wouldn’t trade are my recipe boxes. Whenever I open them, it’s like opening a door to wonderful memories. There is Mrs. Lang’s delicious sour cream chocolate cake recipe, way too ambitious for me to bake, but written in her beautiful cursive writing over several index cards that she ingeniously taped together to unfold like a little book. Cards for Toota’s cheese straws, Uncle Austin’s brownies, Aunt Audrey’s hushpuppies, Katie’s chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, Lynne’s rum balls, Vicki’s fruit pizza, Mary’s pumpkin pie, Mother’s pecan pie, summon up endless scenes of baking and laughing and arguing about ingredients and taste testing.


The yellow box is my mother’s and contains a completely unorganized batch of her recipes. I leave them the way she had them because then they’re like clues to a life–what she cooked most, which ones got shuffled to the back in cooking exile. The green box is the one she bought me when I took Home Ec in ninth grade, and it got so full over the years that I had to separate some categories into that bright cardboard box. I could easily thin them out, because they include all the recipe cards I had to fill out by hand in all the categories assigned to us by Mrs. Woods, but that would feel like saying goodbye to a young girl who still lives inside my skin. I remember my mother rolling her eyes at some of the recipes I copied from her cookbooks–who, after all, is going to make chocolate pudding from scratch when there’s Jell-O?–but I was just doing my homework, not planning future menus (the point of the assignment, I’m sure). When I look at my recipe for chocolate pound cake, I remember that’s what I was making for a class assignment at home on the night I got my first migraine ever–the whole event including aura, numbness over half my body, unbearable headache, trembling hands, disorientation, and nausea. I don’t think the two events were connected, it was just chance. I was certain I was having a stroke or brain aneurysm or something soap-opera fatal, and my mother ordered me out of the kitchen to bed and finished the cake for me. It wasn’t deliberate on my part, but it was a move I’m sure my father would have applauded.