DEAR JOURNAL...

What would I do without you? When asked why he wrote, one author replied, "Because my head would explode, if I weren't able to dump its contents out on paper periodically." I know exactly how he feels! I suppose that is why some people are incessant talkers. Perhaps that is just their way of dealing with information overload - processing it in a continuous conversation with themselves, never allowing anyone else to get a word in edgewise.

That does not work for me, I'm afraid. In fact, I have great difficulty holding up even a small portion of a conversation. The words just seem to get all tangled up, tripping and shoving one another aside in their rush to get out. Eventually they tire of the struggle and just give up, leaving me with nary a coherent sentence to offer up. No, 'tis only when I put pen to paper that intelligent thoughts appear, ideas come together, and solutions magically form, weaving themselves together from slender ribbons of ink.

GOTTA GET THOSE JUICES FLOWING

I've discovered over time that the best way to snap out of a funk is to go on a creative excursion, and for this, I am my own best company. No matter how "stuck" I am when I leave the house, I usually come back with all sorts of ideas and projects percolating in my head, and I am itching to get started on them. As if priming the creative pump weren't enough, there's the added bonus of wrenching my blogger's butt away from the computer.

I just about wore myself out on a recent date, starting off in Kyle, where they were hosting their once a month flea and farmers' market. I also checked out a panaderia that sold everything from breakfast tacos to first communion dresses. Next stop was the Sunset Valley Farmers' Market in Austin, then it was on to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. I hadn't been there in several years, and I was hoping to get some ideas on what to plant in the beds closest to the house. I was running out of time to decide, because fall is the best time to plant in most of Texas. Our summers are much more stressful on plants than our winters, and you want to give them as much time as possible to develop a strong root system, before they have to face their first one.

It was after 3:00 before I remembered to eat lunch, which turned out to be the luckiest happenstance of the day. As I was leaving Austin, I decided to stop at Mamma Fu's, and chose two favorites from their appetizer menu: sesame encrusted seared ahi tuna served on a bed of baby spinach with a soy vinaigrette, and a half-order of pot stickers. When both of those, plus my drink, came to only $6.50, I thought the cashier had made a mistake, but no, they have a happy hour! From 3 - 6 every day, everything on the appetizer menu is super cheap. Woohoo! Now I know the perfect place to go before or after our weekend movie dates at the nearby theatre. At these prices, we could even afford to top it off with some Amy's Ice Cream next door.

TO DO, OR NOT TO DO... ?

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FRIDAY FUN

What a hoot! I just discovered, over at redwhiteandgrewblog.com, that there is a dealio you can enter your blog address into, and it will analyze what kind of blogger you are. Here's what it had to say about me and my blog: http://www.typealyzer.com/index.php?lang=en/. Much as I hate to admit it, it hit fairly close to the mark. So, what's your blogging personality?

TOO MANY CHOICES & WHATEVER HAPPENED TO UNITS?

Have you ever found yourself staring at shelves full of so many shampoo or deodorant choices that you just can't decide what to get, so you end up leaving with nothing? I have come to the conclusion that too many choices can be almost as bad as having no choices at all. That might explain my recent recipe purge.

I was going nuts the other day, trying to find my praline icing recipe for Austin's birthday. It happens to be John's favorite in the world, and when I couldn't find it here, I sent a message asking him to check there in Houston for me. His reply? "Sure hope you manage to find it, else I just might have to re-think this whole marriage thing." Good thing I finally did.

During my hunt, it occurred to me that I should probably do the same 100 item purge on my recipes that I did on my wardrobe some years back. When I first read Simplify Your Life, by Elaine St. James, I made up my mind to rid myself of every clothes-shopping mistake I had ever made. What I ended up with was 100 pieces (including shoes and purses) that all mix and match, all fit comfortably, and all make me feel beautiful when I wear them. I can't tell you what a difference it made in my life. In fact, if I hadn't done it, we never would have bought this house in Wimberley. I would have taken one look at this teeny tiny closet and said, "Forget it. We're wasting our time here." Instead, I found myself thinking, "Woohoo, time for another purge!"

Anyway, back to recipes. When I first discovered Food Network, I went kind of crazy. I'd go online and print off everything Giada cooked. Then I was buying all of her, Ina's and Jamie's cookbooks. Now I can't resist the latest copies of Gourmet and Bon Appetit, and am always tearing out pages to save. Things are getting way out of control. So, I did exactly what I'd done to my wardrobe - culling out all but my very favorites, which these days are the simple, basic, flexible recipes where fresh, local ingredients are the stars, and I can substitute whatever is in season. I imposed an 100-item limit on myself, and each time I am tempted to tear out a new recipe, I must be willing to pull out and toss another.

Writing about my closet purge somehow dug up a long-buried and all-but-forgotten memory. Do any of you recall a clothing line from back in the 80's, called Units? Or maybe you came across its later incarnation, Multiples. It started as young Sandra Garrett's design school project, blossomed into many small boutiques in high end malls, then faded after it was sold to J.C. Penney. But, while they lasted, they were my ideal wardrobe. It was a modular concept, with only 10 or 12 pieces in the entire line, all made of a comfy, carefree, cotton knit. If you had all these pieces, in a few mix & match colors, you could easily come up with 100 different combinations, which you would then accessorize to make them uniquely yours. I was a happy girl in the 80's.

The most surprising outcome of my various purges was the same, startling discovery that Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch wrote about in their appendix to Ferenc Mate's book A Reasonable Life, titled A Reasonable Garden: "Just as it's easier to write a sonnet than free verse, it's easier to cook well with seasonal limitations: they are a spur to creativity."

I'm reading an interesting book now called The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey Into Terroir, by Amy B. Trubek. In it, I came across something amazing: "Perhaps ironically, given the story of its origin, but certainly inevitably, in light of our global food system, the taste of place has become a transnational mode of discernment. Increasingly, the taste of place is an intervention into the vast array of placeless and faceless foods and beverages now available to people everywhere." In other words, this whole grassroots locavore movement has come about because we're all sick and tired to too damn many inferior choices!

P.S. Many thanks to inthe80s.com for the image of a Units jumpsuit.

"PLANT ONE TINY THING THAT PLEASES YOU...

and enjoy that tiny thing for all it's worth." (from Joie de Vivre, by Robert Arbor)

My tiny thing? Romano beans! I planted a few seeds (Seeds of Change's Italian Pole Bean) at the foot of my fountain trellis this fall, and only managed to get two meals off of them so far, but couldn't be any happier if you gave me a diamond ring - and if you knew me, you'd realize I'm dead serious about that! Last night for dinner I blanched a handful, shocked them in ice water, then tossed them in a pan with a bit of chopped garlic and breadcrumbs that had been sauteed in olive oil. Orgasmic.

MASTERS OF NOTHING

We humans like to believe that we have supremacy in this world. What a joke. We may be able to tame Mother Nature here and there, for short periods of time, but the minute we relax or turn our backs for even a second, she just goes right back to her old shenanigans.

Take our driveway, for instance. About a year after we bought this place, we paved the part that climbs straight up-hill. The remaining section - a fork that branches off in front of the house and leads to the guest room parking area - was left graveled. Once Lex moved away and was no longer driving on it daily, it made up its mind to revert back to native grasses and salt cedar shrubs. I knew we were in trouble the day John started to turn onto it, but had to hesitate because he could no longer see clearly where the edges fell off into ditches. He went out with his weed-whacker later, and spent an entire weekend attacking the grasses, but I do believe that by the time he reached the end, they were already creeping up behind him. What it really needs is to be re-graded and topped up with fresh gravel, but that would take a wad of cash that we just don't have right now, and will have to get in line with the landscaping plans, water catchment system, garage enclosure, and everything else.

In a way, it reminds me of the compound where we lived in Indonesia. It was absolutely gorgeous, with olympic-sized pool, golf course, club house, school, and streets full of neat little houses with tidy lawns. It was the Club Med version of a master-planned community, with palm trees everywhere. After the unrest broke out, and the last of the expatriates were sent home, their section of the compound was left sitting idle. Now, if you look it up on Google Earth, you can see it quickly being swallowed up by the surrounding jungle. Soon, it will be impossible to tell that we were ever even there.

P.S. Many thanks to bigbuckaroo.com for the image above.