dream ranch

I do it almost every time. I know better, but the temptations come. I get it in my head that something extra should be added to my pot of pinto beans. I think a little onion. A little garlic. A little bacon. The truth is none are needed.

I love the pinto bean’s earthiness. It’s plumpness when cooked. It’s toothsomeness. I am fairly liberal about preparations, including cooking them in the water in which they have soaked. I believe the overnight water contributes flavor. I learned late in life from the New York Times and other sources that adding salt at the start of cooking does not, as pinto bean theory often holds, actually toughen the beans.

But I sometimes succumb to the temptation of overpowering additives like garlic or onion. Those I always regret. Oh, maybe a little bacon, but far less than you might think.

In my bean book, good water and a little salt are all you need to prepare and preserve the earthy glory of the noble pinto. Spooning them into my mouth, pot liquor under my nose, I could be lying in the loam of Dove Creek, Colorado, “Pinto Bean Capital of the World,” nutrients tingling in my roots, sun warming my dappled hide.

Shorts in the synapses

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November 9, 2014

It takes a long time to clear your head of election-year crud. You’re like a hard-pushed car engine with fouled plugs, oil change long overdue.

I awoke twice last night with nightmares about imagined newspaper mistakes. But I am hoping my mind can return to it’s briefly euphoric state just before nodding off on Nov. 6.

I was watching a cooking show with yet another chef discovering the venerable Frito Pie, whose ancient origin we in the Santa Fe vicinity attribute as a matter of faith to Teresa Hernández at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on the Plaza.

And, like all Santa Fe faithful, I believe everything in the city is the oldest.

So, I am sure the answer to the question that popped into my head the moment before sleep on Nov. 6 is almost certainly, “Of course.”

I had tweeted: After checking into the Palace of the Governor’s in 1692, I wonder if Don Diego de Vargas crossed the Plaza to Woolworth’s for a Frito pie?

By the way, Woolworth’s on the Plaza is now the Five and Dime. But it is still in the same location, I believe, as it was at the time of the Entrada. And the lunch counter still serves the classic Frito Pie. Vouching for its venerability, the store also still sells film.

P.S. While I humorously perpetuate the story of the Frito Pie, I respectfully do not buy the history of 1692 that refers to “bloodless reconquest.”

Meanwhile, I expect to informed that Texans did not start coming to New Mexico to ski until well after the Entrada, bringing the original Fritos with them. I am still reviewing this conundrum of Frito Pie history. Or I may just get out before the hole gets deeper..

The joy of Mom

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October 19, 2014

A Twitter exchange involving tamale pie and “The Joy of Cooking” led me to investigate this photograph of my mother and youngest brother, both now deceased, during our residence in a trailer house on blocks somewhere near Iowa City, Iowa, in 1954 or ’55. Dad was was working on his master’s at the Writers’ Workshop; Mom was caring for three boys. Retrieving the photograph, I initially dwelled on my mother’s beauty and happiness, despite the low-rent surroundings, but I really was checking out the cookbook on the far end of the shelf. I had been prepared to fire off a tweet showing my “Joy of Cooking” credentials, but close examination revealed that this cookbook actually is the Better Homes and Gardens guide to post-war cuisine. An ironic selection, maybe, given my mother’s environment. But the greater reminder here is that she had a halo about her regardless of what concoction — no doubt involving a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup — she might have been preparing for supper. Here’s the tweet and a wonderfully written essay that propelled this runaway train of thought:

‏@CiaoSamin

Every year around this time I get a hankering for Tamale Pie because of @jestei and @TheJoyofCooking http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/magazine/15food.html …

“A serpent who had to sing…”

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October 11, 2014

I hope it’s okay to reprint here an entire poem from Theodore Roethke. It’s silly, but often so am I. I can’t find the copyright. I suspect it was written in the 1940’s. This comes from my 1958 Doubleday edition of “Words for the Wind.”

Carolyn Kizer’s obituary in the New York Times set me off on a poetry reading binge, including her teacher and one of my family’s favorites, Theodore Roethke. .

I think I see his influence in her fine work. My father read Roethke to me as a child and I still hear his voice rolling through Roethke’s words, both in the kid’s poems he read to me before I started school and in the more serious Roethke poems I read as I grew up.

“Dirty Dinky” was a childhood standby, but “The Serpent” has grown on me over the years. It’s one of my favorites today, even if cataloged as a childhood poem. Maybe I am still growing up — or wanting, as I near retirement, to be a reformed singing serpent.

If you want an immediate contrast with this poem, I would recommend reading Roethke’s “In a Dark Time.” It begins: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see…”

The Serpent

There was a Serpent who had to sing.
There was. There was.
He simply gave up Serpenting.
Because. Because.
He didn’t like his Kind of Life;
He couldn’t find a proper Wife;
He was a Serpent with a soul;
He got no Pleasure down his Hole.
And so, of course, he had to Sing,
And Sing he did, like Anything!
The Birds, they were, they were Astounded;
And various Measures Propounded
To stop the Serpent’s Awful Racket:
They bought a Drum. He wouldn’t Whack it.
They sent, —you always send, —to Cuba
And got a Most Commodious Tuba;
They got a Horn, they got a Flute,
But Nothing would suit.
He said, “Look, Birds, all this is futile:
I do not like to Bang or Tootle.”
And then he cut loose with a Horrible Note
That practically split the Top of his Throat.
“You see,” he said, with a Serpent’s Leer,
“I’m Serious about my Singing Career!”
And the Woods Resounded with many a Shriek
As the Birds flew off to the end of Next Week.

Primary colors

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October 5, 2014

Home. Six thousand feet. North-central New Mexico. Stillness in October, the mellowest month.

Our glowdeo

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October 4, 2014

Balloon Glow in Albuquerque tonight. Coop and I stuck to the hills 20 miles north and witnessed another glow in the view west from dreamranch, although Cabezon and the mesas are diminished by the lense of my iPhone4.

Hope from Montana

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September 28, 2014

Just when I was feeling a little down, a birthday box with a jar of fruit and a CD from sister Hope arrive from Montana.

Writers grovel for goodie bags?

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September 21, 2014

Bezos’ Campfire envy

I’m sure it’s nice to be wanted — as in being invited to Bishop’s Lodge by Jeff Bezos — but shedding some unflattering light on the ways of the modern publishing world are three newspaper reports this weekend on the Amazon CEO’s secretive retreat on the edge of Santa Fe.

— The New York Times

— The Albuquerque Journal

— The Santa Fe New Mexican

Election vortex

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September 19, 2014

Election-year vortex hovering over dreamranch, interfering with imagination and disrupting communications.

Afternoon encounter

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September 14, 2014

This youngster, one of the Placitas free-roaming bunch, wasn’t looking for a handout: She just came over to check out Cooper.

They touched noses and the foal went back to her parents. The foal seemed to sense that Cooper was not a horse. And Cooper was satisfied that she was not a dog. Two of a kind otherwise: Interested in playmates.