Fine Figs Grow Well in San Antonio

by Celia Hayes

For the last month we have been having a harvest season. Not of our own garden bounty, although the tomato plants produce generously enough that we can have fresh tomatoes in a salad every other night or so; rather, we have been harvesting figs. They are ripe just now in our San Antonio neighborhood, where two of our neighbors have bearing fig trees and have given us permission to pick.

The trouble with bearing fruit trees is that very soon, the owners of it get sick and tired of the output, so cheerfully welcome anyone who will come and take some of it away. I know this: I have been there, in Utah, where my rented house had fifteen bearing apricot trees in the back yard. Eventually couldn't even

Paint Your Own Clay Pottery

by Celia Hayes

In our never-ending search for interesting things to write about in, and around San Antonio, serendipity took a hand last week. We were actually heading for WingStop in Embassy Oaks for our monthly Red Hat gathering, but we were early. With some time to kill, we wandered into the nearby Clay Casa, a paint-it-yourself pottery studio – just to see what was on hand. I understand that the popularity of this as a hobby has never really gone out of style; in Victorian times it was called china painting, and was considered a suitable hobby for genteel young ladies, the kind of thing taught in finishing schools. From there, the urge to ornament pottery and china segued into the hands of professional artists and

10 Home Staging Tips for a Quicker Sale

by Joe Eitel

When it comes to selling your home fast, staging it correctly is probably the most effective strategy. In fact, studies conducted by the staging experts at StagedHomes.com showed that 94-percent of staged homes sold in 29 days or less compared to 145 days for homes that weren't staged.

So, what exactly is staging? In short, staging is preparing your home to be sold by cleaning, arranging and optimizing the space. According to published national surveys, real estate professionals rank cleaning/decluttering, lighting and electrical/plumbing as the top three most important areas to address when staging a home. There are several other important staging tips to consider as well. Here are 10 of the

Sing We Now of Christmas

by Celia Hayes

And of Christmas presents, and decorations on the tree and mailing out the cards and all ... we really don't have to go shopping actually, since we do that throughout the year. What we do at this time of the year is to turn out the contents of the 'gift closet' – where we had stashed all the things purchased throughout the year with an eye towards this season, wrap them suitably and send them on their merry way. That done, we turn to the entrancing question of 'what to give the neighbors' for Christmas, or more particularly, those neighbors who are also friends. Something to eat is the standard, but fruitcake is ... well, does anyone actually eat fruitcake? Cookies are ... well, everybody does cookies, and I

A Simple Bread Recipe for a Bread Machine

Written by Randy Watson

It is not really winter here in San Antonio, yet. We have not really had any days that have stayed below 50 yet for the whole day. Yea, we did have some really cold days the other day when it got down to 31 overnight. It is 51 degrees at 4:00 this cloudy Sunday afternoon. It was less than a month ago, we were still hitting the century mark on the thermometer, so no, my blood has not thickened up yet.

Although, we are not always known for arctic cold winter snaps in South Texas, sometimes we do get into the twenties or rarely into the teens overnight. Anyway, ever since I was a kid, one of the things my mom started us doing to keep us out of trouble was bake bread when we could not

Waxing the Cheese

by Celia Hayes

That is something which sounds vaguely like something which only ought to be done by consenting adults, in private and behind closed doors, but  . . .  well, it's really rather prosaic, in the process of making cheese. It's the final thing done, before stashing the wheel of cheese in the lower shelf of the refrigerator to age for the required number of months. Well, to all but the parmesan; that variety ages, dries and hardens bare and un-waxed for a year, before getting a slathering of olive oil. It will be another ten months before we can even sample it and know if it is any good, but it already is looking dry and waxy, rather like the less expensive supermarket parmesans.

This months' cheese-making expeditions

Fun with Fruit Brewing Wine

Like many of these things that I am reluctant to do at first, but get talked into and eventually start having fun – getting into the home-brewing and cheese-making was my daughter's idea. Many months ago, I had noticed that storefront location in a local strip mall was now taken up by an enterprise called Home Brew Party. I was unwary enough to mention this to my daughter. At the next opportunity, she dragged me inside  . . .  and was promptly carried away by the possibilities of making home-brewed beer and wine.

A portion of one of her intermittently ginormous but infrequent paychecks went towards buying two equipment kits – one for wine, one for beer: a couple of food-grade

The Home-Brew Gateway Element

by Celia Hayes

So, my daughter and I have been experimenting with a lot of do-it-yourself food, lately;  Breads and cheese, beer and wine, mostly. It's part of our family culture, or it might be in our DNA, an ancestral proclivity to have a go at something, since it really can't be all that hard. Well, some things are a bit tricky, and require a lot of instruction and experience: fine cabinet-making, for instance. And installing HVAC systems. And automobile maintenance – just not interested in that. But we have found that we have had pretty good results with many of our own D-I-Y projects, especially the food-based ones. What's so complicated about following a recipe, and making a food-product for the household just as

The Cheese Stands Alone

Ours doesn't – in fact, the pile of home-made and ageing cheeses currently takes up about half of the bottom of the refrigerator: half a dozen waxed roundels, awaiting their time to be consumed. No, there's quite a chummy little gathering, of farmhouse cheddar, of jack and Leicester, and one or two others, plus the gouda which still has another two weeks to air-dry, and a wheel of caraway cheddar which will come out of the cheese press this very afternoon, and join the gouda. Dunno what I am going to do about the furry little patches of mold growing on the surface of the gouda, though – probably scrape them off very carefully, baste with salt and wax  . . .  waxing the cheese sounds kind of suggestive, doesn't it? My daughter

Bottled Easter Basket

Having as we do a monthly Red Hat Ladies in San Antonio event where we are expected to razzle-dazzle the other members with our skill and creativity when it comes to doing a token gift, my daughter and I have gotten very, very good at creating something out of nothing . . . well, almost nothing. Last month, though - we did get a little carried away with the Texas-themed basket, so we vowed this month to keep it simple and fairly inexpensive.

The theme of the gift this month is Easter . . . and my daughter thought up a new and interesting variation on an Easter basket. Last month at the New Braunfels Saturday farmer's market, she sampled pickled