Alternate Holiday Meals

The trouble that I have always had with the traditional turkey and all the side dishes - the mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, bread stuffing of any ilk, the gravy and the cranberry relish, and the eternal pearl onions in cheese sauce peculiar to my own family table at Thanksgiving and Christmas - is that all of them are, to put it plainly, very heavy. Very starchy; a veritable carbohydrate orgy. That my mother also leavened our traditional meal with green peas and carrots, and that others add that version of green beans melded with a can of cream-o-mushroom soup, sprinkle with crunchy fried onions out of another can . . . well it just doesn't help much. Especially the green-bean casserole doesn't help much; by the time you are done with it, it's as carb-laden as anything else.

Second trouble: making it all in abundance means a certain quantity of leftovers. Even baking the smallest turkey possible and being careful about calculating how many servings that the side dishes will yield - still means at least three or four nights of leftovers, if you have shared the bounty of the season and your table with just a few other people. Quite honestly, I'm pretty tired of it all by the weekend after Thanksgiving anyway. The traditional Thanksgiving dishes do not warm over very well - there I said it. Heretical, I know, but it's the plain truth. By the third pass through the microwave, even my own rye-bread stuffing has lost considerable appeal. In some years I was so tired of eternal turkey that for Christmas dinner we had practically anything else; roast duck or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I've even flirted with trying out roast goose. Now, that's the proper, Dickensian holiday roast bird for you - and at least, it would be a different flavor of leftover.

Some years, when I have celebrated the holiday alone, (I just didn't want to go to someone elses' house, ‘kay?) I have made Thanksgiving dinner into a solitary feast. In San Antonio, I'd go to the Sun Harvest Grocery, HEB Central Market, or to Whole Foods in the Quarry, and splurge on buying something exotic, just enough for one or two servings; fingering potatoes from France, a single Rock Cornish game hen, a quarter of a pound of baby squashes, every one the size of a quarter, a tiny pecan or pumpkin tart from the bakery counter; always something tempting that I had never tasted before, something expensive and special. That and a bottle of nice exotic white wine that I had never tasted before . . . a blissful solitary Thanksgiving dinner of your own beats the heck out of an uncomfortable time at the house of someone you hardly know. Trust me - been there, done both. Solitary is better.

This year, I hit on another interesting culinary option for Thanksgiving dinner, which split the difference - so to speak, by drawing on our favorite recipe for roast chicken, which involves making a butterfied chicken baked on a bed of sautéed onions layered on top of slices of sturdy sourdough bread. I did a half-batch of my rye-bread stuffing - which came out to about three cups of finished stuffing - and mounded it in the middle of the roasting pan. Then I butterflied two Rock Cornish game hens. Snip out the backbones with heavy kitchen shears, open the bird and press it more or less flat with the palm of your hand, and use the reserved backbones to make the gravy stock. Rub the top and bottom of the flattened game hen with olive oil, salt and pepper, and drape them skin-side up over the mound of stuffing. Pour about two tablespoons of lemon juice over the birds and bake at 350° for about an hour and twenty minutes. The juices from the baking hens will trickle down and moisten the stuffing, and any extra juice standing in the pan can be poured off into the gravy. It was magnificent - and the leftovers from this only lasted a day or so.

Comanche Lookout Park - San Antonio

My daughter and I noticed the tower which crowned a wooded hill off of the Nacogdoches Road, almost as soon as we moved into a San Antonio neighborhood - mostly because to our eyes it seemed quite normal, natural . . . expected, even. We had lived for almost twelve years in Europe, where any particularly tall and defensible height had been fortified - in some places for thousands of years.

Of course there would be a tower, or some crumbling stone ruins on a ridgeline, the crumbling arches of an aqueduct or an ancient bridge, or maybe even a range of stone wall. After a decade and more, ones' eyes become accustomed to this. It's becomes so much a part of the normal landscape that fades into the background, and one only notices it in the acute absence.

Which may have been what happened to a retired Army officer, Colonel Edward Coppock, in the early 1920s; he had been stationed in Europe for quite some time - and being a history nut and no doubt liking the looks of a castellated height, bought a tract of land which included Comanche Lookout Hill, and set to work building his own. It seems to have been more of a hobby and labor of love; assisted by his sons and a local stone-worker, Colonel Coppock built - or caused to be built - the four-story gothic-style tower which still stands, possibly another which either disintegrated or was later torn down, a range of stone and concrete garage and storage buildings, and a set of foundations and cellars for his fantasy castle.

Alas, the good Colonel took his time, instead of going balls to the wall in an all-out effort to finish his project - which would have had an incredible view, and been a scenic wonderment in all of Bexar County. Alas, the Depression 30's caught up with him, then the wartime 40's, and both he and his stone-mason died. None of his heirs had the interest, or the funds to finish the castle, and so it stood empty and appropriately ruinous for another four decades. It was a popular hang-out at night for teenagers to steal away and stage illicit parties, to build bonfires in the incomplete cellars and do what teenagers have always done out from under parental observation. At the same time, stories developed that the tower was the last remains of a frontier fort, and was haunted by the ghosts of soldiers who died there.

Of course, the name Comanche Lookout Hill should be a dead giveaway to it's proper place in frontier Texas history; it stood right by the Nacogdoches Road - the long royal highway across Spanish Texas to Nacogdoches. And of course, Apache and Comanche, as well as other hunting and war parties - would have found it an excellent vantage-point to scout out traffic on the Camino Real, and elsewhere, as far as the eye can see. San Antonio then would have been a huddle of red-tile roofs and the stump of San Fernando Cathedral, almost on the horizon. Traffic along the road would have been clearly visible, first as a cloud of dust kicked up by wagon wheels and the passage of team animals. Views from the top of Comanche Lookout are still incomparable; and what would it have been like, if Colonel Coppock had finished his castle; with terraces, towers and gardens - one can only wonder.

Today it is a city park, with several circuits of paved and gravel hiking trails winding their way through meadow and thickets of cedar, hackberry, mesquite and huisache, all the way to the top. It is popular for people walking dogs; and a good brisk walk for anyone looking for exercise - even the sound of traffic on Nacogdoches Road is never very far away. There is a parking lot and entrance to the trail system on Nacogdoches road, and another in back of the Semmes Branch Library; a nice little pocket wilderness, practically in our back yard.

Thanksgiving Sides

By Julia Hayden aka Sgt Mom at The Daily Brief

Yea on many (well, not actually that many) years ago when I was living in the female enlisted dorm at an Air Force base in Japan, another resident and friend had been gifted by a relative with a years' subscription to Gourmet Magazine. Possibly this relative hoped that my friend would come to appreciate fine up-scale dining, complicated recipes for exotic cuts of meat and rare vintages . . . or possibly even learn to cook. I can't with confidence say that this ever happened - we were twenty-somethings, living in a military dorm with a small basic kitchen overrun with cockroaches; nuking a Stouffers' frozen dinner of lobster Newburg and opening a bottle of Riunite was about as upscale as most of us were inclined to get.

Anyway, my friend, upon departing at the end of her tour, gifted me with all of the back issues of Gourmet, and I took up a subscription myself . . . and never threw away an issue. From one of the holiday issues came three recipes which I served as a side dish at Thanksgiving or Christmas. I can't find the original issue, or even recall what it looked like - probably had a roast turkey on the cover - but I had copied them out into my own little collection of favorite recipes. The cranberry chutney is complex and tasty, and the corn relish is a wonderful counterpoint to all the heavy baked or boiled root vegetables. The honey-pear conserve is just plain wonderful.

#1: Cranberry Chutney:

Combine in a large saucepan: ½ cup cider vinegar, 2 ¼ cup brown sugar, ¾ tsp curry powder, ½ tsp ginger, ¼ tsp cloves, ¼ tsp allspice, ¼ tsp ginger, ¼ tsp cinnamon, and 1 ½ cups water.

Bring to a boil, then while stirring simmering mixture, add: 2 lemons, rind grated finely, pith discarded and lemon sectioned and chopped, 2 oranges, (ditto), 1 apple finely chopped, 3 cups cranberries, ½ cup golden raisins, and ½ cup chopped dried apricots. Simmer gently for 40 minutes, until mixture is thickened.

Add: 2 additional cups cranberries and simmer for 10 minutes.

Add: 1 cup cranberries and ½ cup chopped walnuts, stirring until the last cup of cranberries are just cooked. The variously cooked cranberries give it a lot of cranberry texture, and a very fresh flavor.

#2: Honey Pear Conserve:

Combine in a large saucepan: 4 lbs Anjou pears, peeled, cored and cut unto chunks, ¾ cup lemon juice, 1 cup honey, ½ tsp cloves, 2 tsp cinnamon and ½ cup dried currents.
Simmer until thickened and pears are cooked through.

#3: Pepper-Corn Relish

Combine and simmer in a large saucepan until vegetables are tender-crisp: 5 ½ cups fresh or frozen corn kernels, 1 finely chopped green pepper, 1 finely chopped red pepper, 1 medium-sized finely chopped onion, 2 whole carrots, finely chopped, 1 ½ cups sugar, 1 tsp dry mustard, ½ tsp celery seeds, ¼ tsp turmeric and 1 ½ cup cider vinegar.

Enjoy! And don't eat too much - next week I will have a lovely recipe for turkey-pot pie made with leftovers.

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Christmas Time Pretty Crafty

Shop local San Antonio and reinvest your money locally

Shopping locally fuels the economy and is the best return on investment in local businesses. For every dollar you spend in a local business, estimates are that 3-5 times as much money will be reinvested in the community than if you spent the same dollar at a faceless big box national chain store.

Getting to be that time of year again - time to start looking around for Christmas presents for friends and family alike. Being that I am a working freelance writer, my income stream is sufficient but erratic. Jobs and paychecks arrive without much warning, so finding that perfect gift is a little more complicated for me than just popping down to the mall on the Friday after Thanksgiving and giving the credit card a work-out. Even duplicating the process at Walmart or Target isn't much of a satisfactory solution because I'm not all that keen on loading up the family and loved ones with cheap Chinese-manufactured junk.

Americans need jobs too - and this year I'd especially like to support local micro-businesses, hobbyists and artists, who make neat, tasteful, pleasingly-designed stuff and retail their wares at shows, fairs, market-days and craft shows. Starting about this time of year, there'll be any number of week-end Christmas markets and fairs in and around San Antonio. Who needs to get up in the wee hours of the day after Thanksgiving and shuffle off to the ginormous Big Box store in your sweat-pants and slippers just to stand in line with a couple of dozen other early risers, waiting for the doors to open. Instead, check out some of the local market days and Christmas fairs scheduled over the next four or five weekends.

New Braunfels starts off the shopping season with their Weihnachtsmarkt, or German Christmas Market at the New Braunfels Civic Center, over the weekend of November 19-21. This extravaganza benefits the Sophienburg Museum. Advanced admission tickets for one day or for the duration of the Christmas Market are available at the museum itself and a handful of other locations.

Fredericksburg also has a Christmas fair, the St. Nikolausmarkt, which runs for two days; this year it will be December 3-4, on the Market Square around the reconstructed Vereinskirche: food, shopping, Christmas lights and gluhwein - spiced hot wine to take the chill off. Admission is charged for the St. Nicolausmarkt. St. Nikolausmarkt - A Traditional German Christmas Market at the Marktplatz in Fredericksburg Texas. Friday, December 3, 2010 2:00pm-9:00pm & Saturday, December 4, 2010 10:00am-7:00pm

Even tiny Gruene gets into the act: it may be mellowing gently since the last century, but they have a Christmas Market also: again, the first weekend in December. Gruene is sweet at any time of the year - but Christmas is something special.

Check out Christmas on the Square, in Goliad: it's also set for the first Saturday in December, December 4th. The square around the old courthouse is filled with booths and tables, with regional crafters selling everything from jewelry to BBQ tools with hand-turned antler handles. We were there last year, in time for the doggie costume contest, and Santa arriving, proudly mounted in the saddle of a "rein-steer."

Boerne does it one better than Fredericksburg, Gruene and Goliad - out there, they will have two weekends of Christmas shopping, December 10th to the 12th - that's the Holiday Christmas Market, and then the Cowboy Christmas Market on the following weekend, the 17th to the 19th. Boerne's market is held on the town square - an open space anchored by a bandstand and edged with tall pecan trees.

And if driving out of town on weekends is just not your cuppa gluhwein - there's plenty going on over the holidays in San Antonio!

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Give the big box places a rest: support your local San Antonio businesses and artists!

Christmas Shopping for a San Antonio Home?

Family Fun

So, off to Wurstfest in New Braunfels last weekend: an all out community celebration of suds and sausage-onna-stick, along with culinary explorations of deep-fried-anything . . . like Oreo cookies. (Seriously. I tasted one . . . not bad, really, but just because something can be done - doesn't mean that it ought to.) Although Wurstfest after dark on weekend evenings probably does get a little rowdy - in the daytime it still is very much a family-oriented, family friendly event. The music and the fairground rides, the face-painting and the funny hats appeal to all ages, and what is more - can all be enjoyed by all generations together.

After the fairground rides at Wurstfest, I thought the most popular part for children at Landa Park was either the stone walk alongside the Comal River or the long sloping lawn between the Wurstfest grounds and the riverbank. There were a handful of children amusing themselves by collecting pecans fallen from the trees, or lying down on the grass and rolling down the slope.

One of childhood's simple and basic pleasures, that is. (The only way to improve upon it would have been to ride a skateboard or a wagon down that slope . . . but since the slope terminated in a metal fence a little above the riverbank . . . perhaps best not.) Anyway, Halloween trick-or-treating at La Villita and good community fun at Wurstfest provided excellent family fun for next to nothing, save the effort of actually getting there.

What other upcoming events and venues are there, which offer similar scope for family fun? Well, there are the seasonal waterparks, like the Schlitterbahn (also in New Braunfels) and the year-round delights of Sea World in San Antonio . . . but there are lower-key and more old-fashioned establishments like the San Antonio Botanical garden, and the Science Treehouse at the Witte Museum. And the Witte also currently has an exhibition marking the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, too.

And we're coming up on Christmas; over the next two months there will be Christmas parades, visits by Santa or the Three Kings to every possible venue. New Braunfels will have their Christmas market, and so will Goliad, with their Christmas on the Square. Santa will arrive on fire-trucks and tame long-horns, and communities all across the Hill Country and San Antonio will ornament themselves with miles of Christmas lights and tableaus. And it will all be fantastic!

City Lights

by Julia Hayden

It's axiomatic that if you actually live in a place that is storied, or famous, or a destination for out-of-town visitors, you can actually get kind of snobbish about those places that draw the tourists. Even stranger - you might actually spend years living in a city and never setting food in the places that people specifically come to visit. Well, you know - real life, having to earn a living, mow the lawn and walk the dog. All of those necessary activities will interfere with touristic appreciation of the high points of your particular metropolis. And . . . ugh . . . that's just for the tourists, Mac - WE actually live here! This possibly explains why my father and his parents lived down the street from a historic and fairly famous Southern California mission for decades . . . and never once set foot in the place.

I've actually gone both ways, in previous locations: when we lived in Athens - that is, Athens, Greece, courtesy of the USAF - we were heading downtown to the Akropolis and the old Plaka, the original village clustered around the bottom of the hill that it sat on - all the time. Loved living there, loved the classical ruins, shopping along the narrow streets and in the tiny stores in the old part of town. And by old part of town, in Athens that meant late medieval to the 19th century. But after a year spent in Seoul, ROK - again, courtesy of the USAF - all my Korean friends laughed at me, for I had never gone to any of the tourist spots in Seoul. I had traveled by them, or seen them from the street, or gone through the subway stop nearest them on my way to a job. But actually stop and visit . . . er, no. Places to go, studios to record an English sound-track in . . .

In San Antonio, I think we've pretty much struck the happy medium . . . I mean, we've gone downtown to Alamo Plaza fairly frequently - and not just because we have friends visiting from out of town who want to see the Riverwalk, or La Villita, or the Alamo itself. No - there are other reasons; either for research purposes, for political events, or just to take our neighbors' grandson to La Villita for trick-or-treat, and to the Riverwalk for the Halloween boat parade last weekend.

It reminded me again, of what a terribly pleasant place the Riverwalk is - and how very, very nice our fellow-citizens can be. We waited for the Halloween boat parade with a couple from Illinois, who were absolutely ecstatic about the mild weather - and how very pleasant the Riverwalk is, especially those reaches which are not yet wall to wall restaurants - but beautifully landscaped riverbank parks. Early evening is when the Riverwalk is at it's best. Twilight comes a little earlier, among the tall trees and down below street-level. The strings of lights twinkle on, among the leaves and reflect off the water, birds take shelter here and there, and people are heading in to dinner. There are days and times when I would not mind living in a place that overlooks the Riverwalk, of having that view for myself, every evening.

So if that makes me as much of a tourist as that nice couple from Illinois . . . I can deal with it.

Julia Hayden, who writes professionally as Celia Hayes, spent twenty years as a military broadcaster in the Air Force before retiring. She contributes to a variety of online magazines and websites, and is also on the board of the Independent Authors Guild, a non-profit association of writers published by small or regional boutique publishers. She is the author of four novels set on the 19th century American frontier. Julia currently lives in San Antonio with her daughter and an assortment of dogs and cats, Her literary website is at CeliaHayes.com.

VA Hospital Holds Drive-by Flu Clinic for Enrolled Veterans

If you are a Veteran enrolled as a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs patient, you can get your annual flu shot at the main drive of the Audie L. Murphy Memorial VA Hospital in San Antonio.

The drive by flu shot clinic will be held from Saturday, November 6, 2010 from 0800 until 1500. Get protected against the flu. Please bring your VA ID card for verification.

For more information please visit the South Texas Veterans Health Cars System website. Check below to find a non-VA Flu Shot clinic:

Check above to find a non-VA Flu Shot clinic:{source}

 Wurstfest October 29th thru November 7, 2010

New Braunfels, Texas

Oh gosh - since Halloween was just this last weekend, then it means that New Braunfels' annual celebration of sausage and meat-onna-stick in every form imaginable and sudsy, tasty adult beverages must be in full swing. Landa Park, all this week until Sunday. Just drive north on IH-35, exit at New Braunfels and look for the lederhosen, dirndls and very strange hats. Seriously, follow them to Landa Park, to the permanent Wurstfest grounds by the old municipal waterworks, where Texas and Germany collide head-on, with fascinating and flavorful results.

Image a German beer garden blended with a regional mid-west county fair, lightly sprinkled with your favorite Texas BBQ pit - the kind of place with a huge BBQ pit out in back, and everything served with home-made sauce - that's Wurstfest. Really, you haven't lived until you've listened to a Teutonic umpah band play "America the Beautiful." You might have, but you still would have missed a lot of the fun of it. We went last year, and will go again, of course; it's a couth and family-friendly excursion and only a short hop from San Antonio.

It's another one of those things about South Texas that visitors from other states might not know - that there was historically a strong German element which settled in this part of Texas. The very name ‘New Braunfels' ought to be a dead giveaway; the town was founded by a German nobleman, Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels, who named it after his home castle.

Alas, the prince - while having a nice eye for location, location, location - had first been taken in by a couple of shady dealers who essentially landed him and his backers in Germany, sight unseen, with what they thought was a huge and much more promising tract. Which happened to be in the middle of the southern Comanche tribe's hunting grounds, so settlement there would not be possible - or even survivable for another twenty-five years or so. Prince Karl and the settlers that he and his organization brought from Germany settled down in the Hill Country, and around San Antonio, where some of them established an inordinate number of still-existing concerns, like the Menger Hotel, the Pioneer Flour Mills and the Y.O. Ranch.

And while you're at Wurstfest, don't miss the Spass Haus, with one of the worlds largest collections of beer bottles on tap. It's either a bottle museum with a bar in the middle, or a bar decorated with 17,000 historic beer bottles of all nations.

RECON

Real Estate Center Online News October 26, 2010 Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Material herein is published according to the fair-use doctrine of U.S. copyright laws related to non-profit, educational institutions. Items attributed to sources other than the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University should not be reprinted without permission of the original source.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE . . .

COLLEGE STATION (Real Estate Center) - If you think today's U.S. economy is something new, you need to watch our new 17-minute video, "The Pendulum."

In part one of this three-part series, Chief Economist Dr. Mark Dotzour travels back in time to show that today's governmental decisions have amazing similarity to those of leaders in the 1920s, '30s and '40s.

AN INFLATION-DEFLATION PRIMER

COLLEGE STATION (Real Estate Center) — If you haven’t heard about them, you haven’t been reading, listening or watching the news. Few Americans can define them, much less explain their differences. Mark Dotzour and Gerald Klassen help clear the confusion over inflation and deflation in a four-page white paper released earlier this week.

Which is worse, inflation or deflation?

“Deflation is much worse because it leads to falling profits and asset values,” said Dotzour, chief economist for the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University. “When profits and asset values fall, people go bankrupt. However, deflation is beneficial for those on fixed incomes with no debt because their money buys more. Deflation results in lower interest rates.”

Is real estate a good investment during deflation?

“The answer depends on how much equity you have,” said Klassen, the Center’s research analyst. “During deflation, commercial rents will fall, and some tenants will go out of business because of falling profits. The most important thing when buying real estate during deflation is to avoid the need to go back to the bank to get relief on the mortgage payment.”

Dotzour and Klassen address other fundamental questions in their new paper. What is the best investment strategy during deflation? How does deflation affect mortgage rates? What is the best way for the United States to end deflation and get the economy going again? What could cause this strategy to fail?

The complete paper is available on the Center's website.