Eating on the Go

by Celia Hayes

Well, there is fast food, and then there is fast food – fast food that comes to the customer. When I was stationed in Korea such a convenience was called the 'chogi' truck, or as the local national employees called it 'roooch-coachie'. It came around mid-morning to the building where I worked, dispensing hot sandwiches, snacks, candy bars, ice cream and bags of salted or sugared snack foods. But the chogi truck is to a food truck today as a Model T is to a Jeep Cherokee. They're gasoline-powered motor vehicles, and they dispense food to the hungry ... but the 21st century food truck tends to be a specialty gourmet kitchen on wheels. Certainly in a large and

Comfort Food – Mac & Cheese

by Celia Hayes

When my younger brother and sister and I were in elementary school, my father was a grad-student in hot pursuit of a doctorate in zoology, and my mother was – in the tradition of the time – a full-time stay-at-home mom. This was in the late 1950s to early 60s, and it was the commonly accepted practice. As there were three of us (later to be four) it was really the only practical option – and one of the reasons that it worked was that Mom was a fair to middling cook, very much into the traditional D-I-Y household arts (including sewing childrens' clothes and decorating our home with cast-off and inexpensive furniture. I would hasten to add that it was usually quality stuff; ages later, when Mom and Dad were

When Cotton Was King

by Celia Hayes

Amazingly enough, cotton once was king in this part of Texas, even though one thinks more of cattle ranches rather than large-scale cotton production. By the mid 1700s, the Spanish missions established at the headwaters of the San Antonio River produced several thousand pounds of cotton fiber annually, which was spun and woven into cloth for local consumption. The climate was just right to grow cotton, all through the Rio Grande Valley and other more or less temperate regions. Once the threat of Indian raids diminished after the Civil War, and railways opened up access to distant markets, cotton agriculture thrived all across Texas – mostly on a share-cropped basis, where a landowner contracted with an otherwise

Road Trip: Fredericksburg by Bulverde, Sisterdale and Luckenbach

by Celia Hayes

Some time ago, my daughter and I discovered the back road route from our North-East San Antonio home, to Boerne; basically, going up 281 to Route 46 and then west to Boerne. This last weekend, we went a step farther, by going north up Bulverde Road and bypassing the horrendous 1604-281 nexus entirely. Really, as they get closer and closer to completing the interchange, traffic just gets worse and worse. And once we got to Boerne, we decided to take Ranch Road 1376, or the Sisterdale Road north to the Pedernales Valley – this turned out to be a fantastic way to get to Fredericksburg; scenic, little traffic and just about as rapidly as by the highway ... except for

The Fabled White Elephant Mansion of Karnes City

Written By Randy Watson

The famous, fabulous, and fantastic Veladi mansion sits on a hill, among acres of mown green pasture, along Route 181, as it passes by Karnes City. This classical southern-style mansion – for which the word ‘palatial’ is perhaps a bit of an understatement – was built in 1994, reportedly at a cost of 8 million dollars. It was modeled after an even larger historic – and now long-gone Southern mansion, Windsor Castle, in Port Gibson, Mississippi. The original model for the Veladi mansion served as a Union hospital during the Civil War, and burned to the ground at the end of the 19th century, leaving only the trademark ground-to-roofline columns remain.

In recreating an

Land of the Lotus - Eaters

By Julia Hayden

I've been back for three or four days in the place which - if you bend down and squint sideways at it - is the place that I came from. That is, back-country Southern California; not the glitzy, glittery and glam 90210/Hollywierd/Sunset Boulevard So-Cal, but the other part of it. This is the hills and horse-country part, of steep hills and seasonal creeks, of black sage, monkey-flower, and shaggy-barked eucalyptus, of citrus and avocado groves, where granite out-croppings stick out of the thin soil like half-buried bones, and hawks wheel overhead.

The people who live there have horses, goats and cows the way ordinary suburbanites have cats, dogs and parakeets. In a