Greek Easter

by Celia Hayes

My daughter and I lived in Greece for nearly three years, in the early 1980s. This meant that we were there for three Greek Easter celebrations, which were wholly unlike an American Easter, although there was a festive meal involved, and colored eggs.

In Greece, the great Easter feast was served on Sunday afternoon. Traditionally it calls for a whole roasted lamb as the main course – and roasted for most of the morning over a grill built outside in the garden. Even in the cities, this was carried out: the cover of one of the English-language magazines featured a line drawing on the cover one year, of a happy little knot of people on the top of a downtown tower block, roasting their lamb over a fire-pit on the…

One-Pan Wurst Supper

by Celia Hayes

One of my oldest and most favorite cookbooks – and the tattered and spotted condition of my copy certainly proves the age and status – is Barbara Swain's Cookery for 1 or 2. I may have bought it before I moved out of the women's barracks as a young Air Force sergeant. I was always cooking my own meals then, since the hours I worked were not compatible with the dining hall, and the barracks did have a primitive but functional kitchen.  I definitely possessed this copy by the time I settled into a teeny studio apartment, as I clearly recall cooking many of the entrees and brunch dishes on the propane gas stove there. The marvelous thing about this particular cookbook is that every recipe in it was scaled…

Texas AgriLife Extension Service offers Wellness Training

The Texas AgriLife Extension Service in Bexar County will present its 2012 Master Wellness program volunteer training March 8-April 19 in Suite 208 of its San Antonio offices in the Conroy Square business complex, 3355 Cherry Ridge Dr.

Training will be 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. on March 8, March 15, April 5 and April 19. The deadline for registration is March 2.

“Participants in Master Wellness program training receive 40 hours of health and wellness education,” said Dr. Connie Sheppard, AgriLife Extension agent for family and consumer sciences and Bexar County training coordinator. “Once they graduate, they’re required to give at least 40 hours of volunteer service back to the…

Cold-Weather Supper – Chili and Cornbread

On those few days in South Texas when the weather is cold, dank and rainy, our thoughts for what to have for supper turn to something solid and warming: chili, which goes with cornbread like chocolate and peanut butter, like popcorn with the movies, and like salsa and corn chips. Over the years, we've experimented with various chili recipes – there was one from the Sunset Favorite Recipe books which called for angostura bitters and beer, another rather good but strictly vegetarian one which featured kidney beans, fresh corn and zucchini squash – but the absolute best chili recipe we have discovered was taken from Ree Drummond's Pioneer Woman, which…

Christmas Eve With Tapas

by Celia Hayes

Our family was long in the habit of having pizza on Christmas Eve; it’s easy to organize for a crazy, mixed-up and chaotic evening, with about three generations present. Either take-out or deliverer - even a selection of frozen or ready-made grocery store pizza would do. There’s a variety to suit every taste, everyone can have as much or as little as they like, eat it off paper plates, and clean-up is a snap.

This year, we varied the program, mostly because my mother sent us a massive gift basket from La Tienda, which specializes in the classic foods of Spain, where my daughter and I lived for six years. We fell upon it with cries of happy delight,  reminded of certain foods that we loved. There was a…

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…

 Lead On, Oh Turkey Eternal

by Celia Hayes

So, Thanksgiving – what about it all just inspires a hostess or hostesses to just pile on the mass quantities of food? Is it the inspiration of the turkey, which just makes everyone suddenly prone to super-size quantities of everything else? Vats of stuffing, the biggest pot in the kitchen full of mashed potatoes and a small ocean of gravy – it's all there, and a magnificent sight it is, the buffet table fairly groaning with the weight of it all – but in the whole of my life I have only once not had to deal with the resulting acre and a half of leftovers after hosting or organizing a Thanksgiving dinner. That one time was the year that I was assigned to Yongson Army Infantry Garrison Korea, as…

Reviving the Garden: Tomato Victory

 by Celia Hayes

The curse on growing tomatoes in my garden has definitely been lifted: we have ripe red tomatoes on the vine, and promising clusters of green ones – and although they are not all very large, they are tasty. So the Topsy-Turvys do the trick as promised; even if they haven't resulted in simply bushel-baskets of tomatoes, they have indeed tomatoes, which is about three steps farther than I have ever been able to go before. Next spring we will try out some of those heirloom varieties, and if my daughter, the queen of all garage sales, manages to score a few more Topsys at marked-down rates, we'll soon have so many suspended from the tree in the back yard that it will be more than your life is…

Italian Feast at Christopher Columbus Italian Society Hall in San Antonio

This years festival and Italian dinner is over, but if you missed it, the Ladies Auxillary holds quarterly Italian dinners ...

So, who would have guessed that there is a thriving little Italian community tucked away in San Antonio  ... well, if you have passed by at speed on the IH-35 North, just where the highway passes Navarro and Santa Rosa, you would have caught a glimpse of a tiny, ornate brick church – the Church of San Francisco de Paoli, with the Columbus Hall right next to it and the beginnings of an ornate public square and gardens out in front. The church and the hall were built by a social and self-help society formed of Italian immigrants at the turn of the…

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…