I want to share with you a recipe that is different and a good last-minute one for the holidays. It goes with everything from turkey to barbecue, it is quick and easy to make, cheap, and sticks to your ribs without too big a caloric hit. Everywhere I take it, including a party we went to last night, people love it.
I wish it was my recipe. But it's not. It is "Jessica's Favorite Green Chile Hominy Casserole," from Tom Perini's cookbook, "Texas Cowboy Cooking," available at the Perini Ranch Steakhouse website. Tom and I were high school classmates in Abilene, and he is now nationally famous for his "Cowboy Cooking" catering business.
I just call it "Hominy Casserole." This is the recipe in the cookbook, with a couple of local wrinkles thrown in (all recipes are only a starting place for what you do with it). It serves 10 ordinary people, and six who have had Hominy Casserole before.
1 cup chopped onion
four 15-ounce cans hominy (two yellow, two white)
½ cup hominy liquid
1 tablespoon liquid from a jar of pickled jalapenos
1/4 pound cheddar cheese, grated
10 slices bacon
1 cup diced green chiles (such as Ortega)
Fry the bacon until crisp and drain on paper towels.
In a little of the bacon fat, sauté the onion until soft.
Drain the hominy, saving half a cup of liquid. Dump the hominy in with the onions and heat, stirring regularly, until the hominy is heated through.
Add the hominy liquid and the jalapeno liquid. Stir over medium heat to reduce the liquids. Add the cheese and stir until it melts. Add the green chiles. Crumble the crisp bacon into the mix. Stir until blended.
It is ready to serve at this point. Or you can make it in advance and refrigerate it, even freeze it. This is what makes it so easy at holiday season. When you're ready to eat, you can sprinkle more cheese and bacon over the top, or not. (I only use ¼-pound of cheese, and the recipe calls for half a cup.) Bake it in a 325 oven for 15 minutes, or 40 minutes if it has been refrigerated.
Hominy Casserole is the kind of thing, if there are any leftovers, that you will wake up in the middle of the night and take out of the icebox and eat cold. In fact it is better to make sure you prepare a bigger batch than the people at your table can possibly eat, no matter how hard they try.
December 22, 2008
December 21, 2008
Sun of Tut comes through again
At 4:04 this morning, Pacific Standard Time, a perfectly vertical ray of sunlight touched, just for an instant, a point on the Earth 23.5 degrees of latitude south of the Equator. This was the Winter Solstice. In the next instant, the tilted Earth continued on its rotation around the Sun. The Sun's falling rays left 23.5 South Latitude and started to track north.
In the primitive world, this was cause for whooping and hollering. This great big hot ball in the sky that you couldn't look at was all that made the Earth tolerably warm from time to time. If that big hot ball went out for whatever reason, like what we now call nightfall, then on Earth it was freezerville. Even worse, in the Cradle of Civilization, there came a stretch of days when it looked like the Sun was leaving the Earth altogether, tired of warming this rock and drifting way down in the sky – what we would call south – as if it just might leave altogether.
It never did. Just when the days were starting to get really cold, even in the middle of the day, a day arrived when the Sun looked like it had decided not to leave after all, and started back toward the huddled primitives in time to make the days reasonably bearable again by what we call April. But then maybe the primitives celebrated too much, enjoyed the green, stopped praying to the Sun, prayed to the Rain instead, to the point that the Sun became dissed and said, "I'm out of here," and started wandering off again. Who knows what kind of horror stories the primitive brain could launch, about an object as important as the Sun?
So the Sun, in its fickle winter fancy, developed a nice pagan crowd of celebrants on that crucial day when it decided not to leave, tens of thousands of years before more scientific minds came along and decided that the Earth didn't orbit the Sun at all, but just the other way around.
Thousands of years more passed, and one day at Alta Mira I noticed that at the dawn of the day of the Winter Solstice, the Sun rose out of King Tut's eye. I thought that was very cool. Within me rose an ancient, visceral sigh of relief and a voice whispered, "You and me, Tut." I showed you Tut a few blogs ago. Here he is this morning with the Sun rising out of his eye. Tomorrow, it will rise to the left, a sliver closer to his nose. Then in a week, his mouth, then his chin, his throat, his folded hands, after which April is not far behind. Makes me feel good, I'll tell you.
In the primitive world, this was cause for whooping and hollering. This great big hot ball in the sky that you couldn't look at was all that made the Earth tolerably warm from time to time. If that big hot ball went out for whatever reason, like what we now call nightfall, then on Earth it was freezerville. Even worse, in the Cradle of Civilization, there came a stretch of days when it looked like the Sun was leaving the Earth altogether, tired of warming this rock and drifting way down in the sky – what we would call south – as if it just might leave altogether.
It never did. Just when the days were starting to get really cold, even in the middle of the day, a day arrived when the Sun looked like it had decided not to leave after all, and started back toward the huddled primitives in time to make the days reasonably bearable again by what we call April. But then maybe the primitives celebrated too much, enjoyed the green, stopped praying to the Sun, prayed to the Rain instead, to the point that the Sun became dissed and said, "I'm out of here," and started wandering off again. Who knows what kind of horror stories the primitive brain could launch, about an object as important as the Sun?
So the Sun, in its fickle winter fancy, developed a nice pagan crowd of celebrants on that crucial day when it decided not to leave, tens of thousands of years before more scientific minds came along and decided that the Earth didn't orbit the Sun at all, but just the other way around.
Thousands of years more passed, and one day at Alta Mira I noticed that at the dawn of the day of the Winter Solstice, the Sun rose out of King Tut's eye. I thought that was very cool. Within me rose an ancient, visceral sigh of relief and a voice whispered, "You and me, Tut." I showed you Tut a few blogs ago. Here he is this morning with the Sun rising out of his eye. Tomorrow, it will rise to the left, a sliver closer to his nose. Then in a week, his mouth, then his chin, his throat, his folded hands, after which April is not far behind. Makes me feel good, I'll tell you.
December 20, 2008
He says control your attention, I say unhook your buttons
David Brooks wrote this earlier in the week in The New York Times:
"Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains. Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them."
He was not writing about Christmas, but he may as well have been. Christmas is the ultimate stimuli crucible and thus the ultimate power battlefield, in a peace-on-earth kind of way. Actually, it's always about peace. People are born with a war room in their brains where "keeping the peace" is the only mission. I don't know about you, but I knew where the war room was, and what the mission was, by the time I was four years old.
During the year, the time spent on keeping the peace is inversely proportional to the distance between you and anyone who likes to push your buttons. At Christmas time, when the universal wish is peace on earth, the war room is humming 24/7 with plans and strategies to keep the peace. I love the "peace on earth" Christmas cards. How are we going to have peace on earth when we can't keep the peace at the dinner table?
Actually, peace at the dinner table is very doable, as long as you settle for peace inside your own head. I don't know exactly what David Brooks meant by "successful people," and I couldn't say how you judge or measure your own success, but I say without hesitation that there is no success quite like getting up from the Christmas dinner table with a mind as peaceful as when you sat down, when everyone else is bleeding from bullets fired by moms and dads and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles who have been thinking for months of ways to control your attention. They only have to hit one button. And they know where the button is.
But what if you have disconnected the button? When someone tries to push it, it no longer works. You will still hear what was said, but it doesn't hit you. It passes through as if you were invisible. The effect on you is astonishing. It is not only a feeling of freedom, it IS freedom, and power. One way to say it is, "Control of attention is the ultimate personal power." Another way to say it is, "Pushing my buttons doesn't work any more, Mother." Getting up from the table with a mind as peaceful as when you sat down is so powerful that you want to go outside and fly. It is a feeling of liberation that most people only realize in their dreams. A popular term for it is "taking back power." I call it flying sideways.
"Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains. Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them."
He was not writing about Christmas, but he may as well have been. Christmas is the ultimate stimuli crucible and thus the ultimate power battlefield, in a peace-on-earth kind of way. Actually, it's always about peace. People are born with a war room in their brains where "keeping the peace" is the only mission. I don't know about you, but I knew where the war room was, and what the mission was, by the time I was four years old.
During the year, the time spent on keeping the peace is inversely proportional to the distance between you and anyone who likes to push your buttons. At Christmas time, when the universal wish is peace on earth, the war room is humming 24/7 with plans and strategies to keep the peace. I love the "peace on earth" Christmas cards. How are we going to have peace on earth when we can't keep the peace at the dinner table?
Actually, peace at the dinner table is very doable, as long as you settle for peace inside your own head. I don't know exactly what David Brooks meant by "successful people," and I couldn't say how you judge or measure your own success, but I say without hesitation that there is no success quite like getting up from the Christmas dinner table with a mind as peaceful as when you sat down, when everyone else is bleeding from bullets fired by moms and dads and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles who have been thinking for months of ways to control your attention. They only have to hit one button. And they know where the button is.
But what if you have disconnected the button? When someone tries to push it, it no longer works. You will still hear what was said, but it doesn't hit you. It passes through as if you were invisible. The effect on you is astonishing. It is not only a feeling of freedom, it IS freedom, and power. One way to say it is, "Control of attention is the ultimate personal power." Another way to say it is, "Pushing my buttons doesn't work any more, Mother." Getting up from the table with a mind as peaceful as when you sat down is so powerful that you want to go outside and fly. It is a feeling of liberation that most people only realize in their dreams. A popular term for it is "taking back power." I call it flying sideways.
December 18, 2008
Getting around to answering comments
I have made an executive decision about my blog. I will always read all of the comments to any specific blog, but I won't reply to them via another comment to that specific blog.
There are three reasons for this. One, the blog software won't let me post my comment without a username and password, and I refuse those terms for posting a comment to my OWN BLOG.
Second, the software refuses my password when I attempt to post the comment, and it is the same password with which I log in to Blogger. Long short stories, novels, movies, sitcoms and docudramas are written about this level of insanity.
Third, a blog starts to age the instant it is posted. I don't know why a reader should be asked to check an old blog for new comments. Part of this is my newspaper background, in which all news shortly after dawn becomes fishwrap, and part is my aversion to asking readers to go into the stacks to find responses to their comments.
There is a fourth factor. Blogger sends copies of comments to my personal email, but WON'T LET ME RESPOND TO THE EMAIL. Do you see a pattern here? If you do, please let me know what it is.
These things being so, I have decided to respond to comments in new posts. Like this one. Ray, I don't know how many draws we ate to at Lavender's, but every one was competitive, fair, cheap, filling, and fulfilling. I wish we could do it again, give you one last chance to win, but I know I would be full after one chicken-fried steak, a few potatoes, some green beans, and one roll. Hell yes, I have all the Elvis 45s. I do remember nearly ripping a stitch at the Paramount, and I still play the guitar, sort of, and sing, REALLY sort of, but if you want to hear a Grant play the guitar, listen to Tyler, as you already know. He is arriving tonight for the holidays, and I imagine in the next day or two he will bring his guitar over and we will play the same songs I was playing in 1959. Did I already mention he is the 2008 National Flatpicking Guitar Champion of the United States of America? I did?
Jen, you said you were still interested in the sunset story. I would like to tell you more. What are you interested in? Jessie, my daughter, will be here next week for Christmas, and she promises to show me how to insert photos into stories where they should go, and not where Blogger puts them by default. Just for the heck of it, at the top of this blog, is a photo of the dawn after all the rain we had. There is in that photo, and in many others, evidence of living suspended between earth and space, which is a big part of the ongoing sunset story. I'll be blogging soon about the business of living between earth and space. It has been my address since 1992.
There are three reasons for this. One, the blog software won't let me post my comment without a username and password, and I refuse those terms for posting a comment to my OWN BLOG.
Second, the software refuses my password when I attempt to post the comment, and it is the same password with which I log in to Blogger. Long short stories, novels, movies, sitcoms and docudramas are written about this level of insanity.
Third, a blog starts to age the instant it is posted. I don't know why a reader should be asked to check an old blog for new comments. Part of this is my newspaper background, in which all news shortly after dawn becomes fishwrap, and part is my aversion to asking readers to go into the stacks to find responses to their comments.
There is a fourth factor. Blogger sends copies of comments to my personal email, but WON'T LET ME RESPOND TO THE EMAIL. Do you see a pattern here? If you do, please let me know what it is.
These things being so, I have decided to respond to comments in new posts. Like this one. Ray, I don't know how many draws we ate to at Lavender's, but every one was competitive, fair, cheap, filling, and fulfilling. I wish we could do it again, give you one last chance to win, but I know I would be full after one chicken-fried steak, a few potatoes, some green beans, and one roll. Hell yes, I have all the Elvis 45s. I do remember nearly ripping a stitch at the Paramount, and I still play the guitar, sort of, and sing, REALLY sort of, but if you want to hear a Grant play the guitar, listen to Tyler, as you already know. He is arriving tonight for the holidays, and I imagine in the next day or two he will bring his guitar over and we will play the same songs I was playing in 1959. Did I already mention he is the 2008 National Flatpicking Guitar Champion of the United States of America? I did?
Jen, you said you were still interested in the sunset story. I would like to tell you more. What are you interested in? Jessie, my daughter, will be here next week for Christmas, and she promises to show me how to insert photos into stories where they should go, and not where Blogger puts them by default. Just for the heck of it, at the top of this blog, is a photo of the dawn after all the rain we had. There is in that photo, and in many others, evidence of living suspended between earth and space, which is a big part of the ongoing sunset story. I'll be blogging soon about the business of living between earth and space. It has been my address since 1992.
December 16, 2008
One-car family
Karen was driving me to school this morning when she said, “I can’t pick you up this afternoon at 4; Oprah comes on at 4.”
She had a point. If I had to choose between watching Oprah and going to pick somebody up from work, I know which it would be, every time, even if I did love the person at work and slept with her every night. And I don’t even like watching Oprah near as much as she does.
“You make a good point,” I said, “but I am afraid I must insist.”
Karen was driving me to school because going into 10 months now, we have had only one car. The lease on my old ride expired last February and we figured no second-car expenses – lease, gas, insurance, maintenance – would add up to at least a grand a month, which was pretty good, and that was BEFORE the economy collapsed and we started considering keeping our cash in pillowcases. If in these difficult times you are looking for a bang-for-the-buck to cut expenses, getting rid of the second car is a pretty good way to go, even if it is the guy giving up the car and he has to deal with the emasculated crater where his manhood used to be.
“But hey,” I said to her, having an idea, “I bet Oprah would give us a car. You email her and say you love to watch her so much, but you have to go pick up your husband at work. And he says he insists. And then Oprah would invite us on the show and say, here is your brand-new Mercedes ML350. And free gas for a year.”
Actually I think I would hold out for a Toyota RAV4, with leather and bells and whistles but still a small engine that burns regular. I had an ML350 and it was a great ride with a German turning radius, but I burned out on $50 tabs for a tank of premium and in fact one day LONG before gas went over $4 vowed that when I got rid of this vehicle, I was going to get a Prius.
But then I went down to the Toyota lot and sat in a Prius. Cute car. Then the helpful salesperson reached over and pushed a button. Gauges and instruments and dash lights popped to life. “What did you do?” I said to the salesperson. “Turned it on,” she said. “It’s running.” “The engine isn’t running,” I suggested. “Yes it is,” she said. “Right now, it’s electric. Step on the accelerator and you’ll go.”
That was it for me and the Prius. I am too steeped in GTO geezerhood, and I think it probably has something to do with manhood as well, to feel comfortable in a car whose engine may or may not be running when you are seeing if she will get rubber in third gear. So I shifted my vision to a RAV4. I would consider a Pontiac. I have seen Oprah give away Pontiacs.
But it grows on you, this business of being up a grand a month and buying stuff other than gas and insurance. Our schedules have been more or less compatible, with a little coordination, and it was just a quirk in my schedule today that made me available to go home at 4. I imagine we will keep the arrangement this way for awhile, possibly even if Oprah insists.
She had a point. If I had to choose between watching Oprah and going to pick somebody up from work, I know which it would be, every time, even if I did love the person at work and slept with her every night. And I don’t even like watching Oprah near as much as she does.
“You make a good point,” I said, “but I am afraid I must insist.”
Karen was driving me to school because going into 10 months now, we have had only one car. The lease on my old ride expired last February and we figured no second-car expenses – lease, gas, insurance, maintenance – would add up to at least a grand a month, which was pretty good, and that was BEFORE the economy collapsed and we started considering keeping our cash in pillowcases. If in these difficult times you are looking for a bang-for-the-buck to cut expenses, getting rid of the second car is a pretty good way to go, even if it is the guy giving up the car and he has to deal with the emasculated crater where his manhood used to be.
“But hey,” I said to her, having an idea, “I bet Oprah would give us a car. You email her and say you love to watch her so much, but you have to go pick up your husband at work. And he says he insists. And then Oprah would invite us on the show and say, here is your brand-new Mercedes ML350. And free gas for a year.”
Actually I think I would hold out for a Toyota RAV4, with leather and bells and whistles but still a small engine that burns regular. I had an ML350 and it was a great ride with a German turning radius, but I burned out on $50 tabs for a tank of premium and in fact one day LONG before gas went over $4 vowed that when I got rid of this vehicle, I was going to get a Prius.
But then I went down to the Toyota lot and sat in a Prius. Cute car. Then the helpful salesperson reached over and pushed a button. Gauges and instruments and dash lights popped to life. “What did you do?” I said to the salesperson. “Turned it on,” she said. “It’s running.” “The engine isn’t running,” I suggested. “Yes it is,” she said. “Right now, it’s electric. Step on the accelerator and you’ll go.”
That was it for me and the Prius. I am too steeped in GTO geezerhood, and I think it probably has something to do with manhood as well, to feel comfortable in a car whose engine may or may not be running when you are seeing if she will get rubber in third gear. So I shifted my vision to a RAV4. I would consider a Pontiac. I have seen Oprah give away Pontiacs.
But it grows on you, this business of being up a grand a month and buying stuff other than gas and insurance. Our schedules have been more or less compatible, with a little coordination, and it was just a quirk in my schedule today that made me available to go home at 4. I imagine we will keep the arrangement this way for awhile, possibly even if Oprah insists.
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