Category: growing up

The Taste of Home

I could write about the obvious today, the topic every news source is chattering about, but I’ve made a conscious decision not to. I’m going to go with the blog topic I’d already decided for today.

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When you ask people “what is your comfort food” you’ll find that the answers are surprisingly simple. What give us comfort is usually food we recall from childhood. Mom’s biscuits, maybe. Mashed potatoes like gramma made. A rhubarb pie.

These aren’t high falootin’ foods. There is peace in starchy simplicity.

Over the weekend, I cooked up some of my own brand of comfort food by making a pot of pinto beans. This isn’t so unusual, really. I like to keep a pot of beans in the house for tasty quick eats. For me, beans are a staple food. But it’s more than that.

When I pour the bag of beans onto the counter and start sorting through them, I’m repeating an ancient process. It’s a part of me. It’s a part of my family. It’s burned into the DNA of New Mexico. It’s so right, so peace filled, and so intuitive to me, it doesn’t require much thinking.

I go to the happy place while I separate handfuls of beans, spread them out on the counter, look ’em over, throw the rocks and chunks of mud off to one side, sweep them into the pot, and repeat.

When done, I fill the pot with water and let beans soak. It’s the soaking that makes them magic. That pot sits on my counter smiling, humming to itself while the beans slowly begin to engorge with water and emerge as something quite perfect.

Then after plenty of soak time, I dump that water, rinse the waterlogged beans, fill the pot with water again (about an inch above the bean line) add a nice bit of fatty salted pork then put them on the stove to cook.

Burble, burble, the house fills with a wonderful aroma. That cooking pot is a sensory experience. I can hear the beans slowly simmering. I can smell the fatback cooking down. I peer in every now and again to see how we’re doing, give a sample bean a taste and feel the steam on my face.

And when they are done cooking, I feel satisfied. I made something good. Something tasty. Nutritious. Satisfying.

I made something like home.

Just by eating a simple bowl of warm steaming beans, I’m myself again.





Image by Karen Fayeth using the Camera+ app on an iPhone4


Epiphany On Aisle Seven

So there I am, standing in my local Target store looking at something called Lactaid because evidently God has a sense of humor and I’m pretty sure I’ve become lactose intolerant.

I’ll spare you the details, but I’ve had a bowl of cereal for dinner this evening and I’m bloated up bigger than Airabelle, the Creamland Dairy hot air balloon (last seen at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta).

Pride goeth before a burp, and the thought of taking something to stop this feeling seems real, real appealing. I’m comparing and contrasting the relative merits of the store brand “dairy digestive aid” versus the name brand “dairy digestive aid” when in my peripheral vision, I note a man walk by behind me. I can tell it’s a man by the gait and by what he’s wearing as he shops the aisles.

I hardly notice my fellow shopper, but moments later, I get a whiff of cologne.

Oh my.

It’s that scent, that same deep musk and leather tinged scent that reminds me of someone I used to know. Suddenly I’m not in a Target store but I’m in the cab of an early model step side red Ford pickup truck sitting next to that memory and I’m mainlining that scent like a addict huffs paint.

The one I knew wasn’t especially tall but he was broad in the shoulders, owing to many long hours spent practicing his team roping skills. He was a dusky hued fellow of Native American extraction with ice blue eyes that made me go weak in the knees when he’d walk past me on campus.

We only went out on two dates because he was as squirrely as a rabid woodchuck, but oh my heavens was he handsome. Just those two dates were enough to make me smile wickedly to myself some twenty years later.

So I throw into my cart whichever box of digestive aid was in hand as I sensed the sweet smelling gent shopping in the next aisle. I look at the sign on the end cap containing the Target version of the Dewey Decimal system announcing, “dental hygiene,” and think to myself, “why, yes, I could go for something in a minty fresh breath.”

I fix my casual smile, not too wide, not too meager, just Mona Lisa enough, and sashay toward the mouthwash shelves. Memories of slow two stepping dances to the sounds of something like Alabama or George Straight or Merle Haggard fill my mind. I lean casually next to the Listerine and glance up at the object of my olfactory desire.

There stands a mid-fiftyish man with a boiler hanging over a belt holding up a pair of unflattering pants that evidently contain no butt a’tall. His unkempt hair graying rapidly from the top of his ratty hairdo to the bottom of his scruffy beard. What appears to be a remnant of dinner still lingers there on his, oh my is that really a knockoff Members Only jacket he’s wearing?

I beat a hasty retreat and three rows down, I huddle at the end of the hand sanitizer aisle. I need to regroup.

That was, as they say in the vernacular, a buzz kill. Suddenly visions of New Mexico State Ag Week dances under a clear high-desert starry sky vanish and I find myself once again an almost forty-two year old woman in a Target store. I take inventory of my own raggedy outfit, with frowsy hair escaping a hasty pony tail, glasses framing my weakening eyes and a hand cart full of things like GasX and Lactaid announcing that not only was that guy not the guy that I once knew, but I am in no way that girl I wish I was any longer.

The girl I am now needs to buy some Ziploc bags so she can pack her non-dairy, non-wheat, low-fat lunch to take to my “is this really what I wanted to be when I grew up” job and slog my way through another day, as my tummy churns and my hair grays and I no longer ride in red pickup trucks and wonder what it will be like when I’m all grown up.

This is what it will be like. This is what it is. Just me and my rumbly tumbly and enough freedom and disposable income to make it interesting. When I’m done daydreaming and remembering and purchasing my products of middle aged despair, I get to go home to The Good Man who smells of soap and cute boy and is a pretty gosh darn fine reason for going home.

For some reason, even with my frowsy ponytail and corrective lenses and an occasional bout of lactose intolerance, he still thinks I’m pretty cool. And pretty.

Crazy ol’ fool. (Me, not The Good Man)


Awesomest Street in Chicago



Photo from coolead‘s Flickr photostream.


Theme Thursday: Television

Ah but she was a beauty. With a light gray case, she sat upon a wobbly stand, gold tone painted spindly legs that ended in little plastic wheels. The early definition of “portable.”

The dial to change the channels was made of actual metal. It had saw tooth ridges on it. All the better for gripping and turning, I suppose.

The on-off button was also the volume knob. Tug that knob, and give ‘er a few minutes while the tube warmed up.

Soon a clear bright black and white picture emerged from a small dot in the middle of the screen. All three channels plus PBS!

“Karen! Change the channel!” Click, click, click. Turning the channel knob was a tactile experience.

That black and white Zenith was a purchase from the early years of my parent’s marriage. We’re talking 1950’s here. As a child in the seventies, it became a fixture in our living room.

One of my very, very early memories is from being toddler age. I would stand right in front of that television and grip its gray plastic bezel for balance. I didn’t grip too hard, because it would slide off, but just tight enough to keep gravity from winning.

I remember Walter Cronkite. He was giving a news update and showed a fairly clear film clip of soldiers carrying guns. This wasn’t a movie, it was the news.

I didn’t know what it was then, but it seemed bad. Walter’s face was serious. I stared at those men with guns rather intently. This image is still fresh in my memory. It took until adulthood to think back on it, on the timeframe that this must have occurred, to realize it was a news update on the war in Vietnam. I would have been three or so.

That Zenith with the stylized logo, the Z like a lightening flash, electricity zooming through the letters bring pictures to my screen, was where I stood too close to the screen and watched Dick Knipfing present the news of Albuquerque and New Mexico.

It was where I watched Sesame Street and soap operas and the Not Ready For Primetime Players on the first seasons of Saturday Night Live.

In the early 1980’s, my mom made a bold decision. It was time to invest in a color TV. This was long after most of our friends and neighbors had long since brought color screens into their lives.

Mom shopped and compared and finally she and Dad decided on a model from Sears. It had this fancy way of changing channels, you simply touched this little metal nub by the number of the channel you wanted! No turning a knob, simply a quick touch.

It was splendiferous!

And with the incoming color TV, the old Zenith black and white had to find a new home. So we carted it to our “Lake House,” really a single-wide trailer on a permanent concrete pad on a patch of land in Logan, New Mexico.

Logan is on the east side of the state, so the antenna on top of that trailer picked up the stations out of Amarillo. The Zenith black and white now reported ranch stock futures and the market price for pork and sides of beef. It entertained us after a day out swimming in the lake.

In fact, when my folks sold the place in Logan, that Zenith TV went with it. It still worked, by the way, though it took a heck of a long time for that tube to warm up.

They sure don’t make ’em like they used to.





Today’s Theme Thursday is: Television

How Did I Get Here?

This is not my beautiful spice cabinet:



Ok, well, it’s my spice cabinet now. See, I prefer a generally chaotic method of organizing spices. Roughly, the flavors I use a lot are toward the front. The spices I use less frequently are toward the back.

I always know, without having to think, where each spice is located. I open the door, reach in, grab what I need, shake enough into the pan on the stove, then put it back.

Top shelf, randomly speaking, is for baking stuff like vanilla and almond extract. Lower shelf front holds the salt, cumin, garlic, etc. The everyday stuff. The nutmeg is tucked over in the back right corner. Dill is in the middle right. Cocoa powder is top shelf, to the left.

See what I’m saying? Bing, bang, boom, I know where everything is.

That was all well and good until I married The Man Who Checks Expiration Dates. Or, perhaps more aptly named: Food Safety Man.

My darling one is quite diligent about checking the “use by” dates on all food in the house. When he moved in with me, he was horrified to go through my cabinets. He would bring a can or container of something to me and say, “do you realize that this expired in 1996? That means you brought it from New Mexico when it was already expired!” When he said that to me, the year was 2007. Heh.

Yeah. Well. Ok. I *might* be guilty of a teeny bit of hanging on to stuff too long. My beloved sister has had many talks with me over the course of my adult life about “just let it go.” Blame being raised by parents who remember the Great Depression, I suppose. I’d like to consider myself to be…frugal. Really, if I’m to be honest, I’m just too freaking lazy.

And so, when my sweetest went through my cabinets and threw out, oh, about 60% of what was in there…I was mildly annoyed, but I got over it. I’ve become better accustomed to his weekly (if not more frequent) going through and rearranging the fridge, throwing things out and front facing all the remaining contents. So much for my grab and go approach there, too.

And now this…my spice rack. The spices that are the heart and soul of my cooking! He did this yesterday while he was making something for dinner, so I guess I can’t really complain that loudly. But still…I heard him rustling around in there and had to sit, take several deep breaths, rake a Zen garden, chant a mantra, and play a sitar.

I gotta say, it looks pretty good now. I can’t find anything, but I’ll learn. And just as soon as I have the new organization system down, he’ll organize it again.

The spice rack was pretty tough to take, but there was something worse. I almost packed my bags when he organized….(I can hardly even say it)….my toolbox. This was a violation most egregious. My toolbox! And let me just tell you this…I have more and better tools than he does! Now that we’re married, a comingling of the tools has occurred and I may never be the same again.

Oh the horrors of community property!

Marriage is weird. Maybe this is why people usually get hitched so young. It’s easier to manage when they haven’t gotten all old and set in their ways.

Really, all this organizing and changing up my routine is probably good for me.

Just don’t tell The Good Man I said so.



I realized, belatedly, that this might just be the perfect follow up to the previous post about variety being the spice of life. Unintentional, I assure you. One of those happy coincidence type of a deals.


Variety is the Spice of Life

The origins of the phrase is a William Cowper poem called “The Task” (1785):

“Variety is the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavor.”

And I think the original expression of this idea by Cowper was lovely. The lyrical thoughts of adding flavor and spice to one’s own life through change, through keeping it interesting and staying on your toes.

It would seem that Ralph Waldo Emerson agreed with Cowper. In his essay titled Self-Reliance, Emerson says:

“…consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds… With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.”

Hmph.

It would seem that some of the most notable minds agree that keeping it all mixed up and different is recommended.

So does this mean that my life is notably unspicy because I actually like a little reliability in my days?

I mean, I do like changing things up now and again…but I also thrive on setting a rhythm to my world and sticking with it. I find that by having “the little things” working like clockwork, my mind can take on the bigger things, the beautiful things, the creative things.

By knowing where my nest is, I am able to stretch my wings and fly.

Does that make me boring, sedate and tedious? Maybe, but I don’t think so.

When my world changes too much or too fast, I become lost, overwhelmed and fearful. I start to worry over the day to day tasks and The Muse that wants to soar is forced to sit quietly and wait while I sort out the details. That seems dreary to me.

Perhaps it isn’t variety that lends spice to my life, but my own discipline that allows me to add a pinch of this and a shake of that to create something savory and fulfilling and quite fantastic.

So for me, I need both. A little variety, sure, but a little consistency too. It’s a balancing act.

Or, to paraphrase a cartoon I found….if variety is the spice of life, then my own comforting patterns and routines are the meat and potatoes.

Add it all together and I devour a creative feast!





Today’s Theme Thursday is: spice


Image found here.