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 built-up city, there would be lots of hungry lunch-time customers.

Quite likely, a good number of those hungry workers would have exhausted all of the available and nearby restaurants and fast-food places. It's an expensive and time-consuming operation, opening up a new restaurant in a profitable location in the big city. Conventional wisdom has it that the odds on a new restaurant venture failing within the first three years of operation are fairly high – so starting small with a food truck is a logical solution. Without the huge start-up expense of real estate and a building – all the budding chef-entrepreneur needs is a kitchen on wheels, a map of the city - and one which permits food trucks to park on streets relatively unhindered - and a lot of hungry customers. These days, it also helps to have a Facebook page.

Food trucks have a relatively long history, as these things go. According to the invaluable Wikipedia, the mobile kitchen/canteen had it's origins in Texas – in the chuck-wagon developed by Charles Goodnight for use on the long-trail cattle drives after the Civil War, when the Transcontinental Railroad had pushed far enough into Kansas to make Texas cattle profitable in the larger markets of the East. From the horse-drawn chuck-wagon, came lunch trucks, which provided meals to shift-workers in the big cities, especially those working the night shift around the turn of the century. This trend continued, of lunch trucks serving meals at construction sites, and setting up at fairs and festivals. The US Army maintained mobile canteens – kitchens on wheels, which are most likely the direct ancestor of today's food trucks.

According to the same source, the current popularity for food trucks coincided with the economic downturn; a plentitude of food-trucks with no construction sites to service, and a similar glut of hopeful chefs with no restaurants to work in. Necessity makes opportunities – and in this case, a very useful one. Out on 281 and Thousand Oaks, outside the 1604 Loop, a far-seeing local entrepreneur established a sort of gourmet food park – the Boardwalk on Bulverde, set aside for food trucks and customers to meet, greet, and eat. My personal favorite food truck is permanently parked on Nacogdoches, next to the Cordova Auto Center; Ericks Tacos, which has Mexican-style street food to die for and funky street-dining atmosphere to spare. Oh – and look out for the green sauce; nuclear fission in a small plastic cup. On a book trip up to Abilene, we ran across Short Bus Hot Dogs – which is a hotdog stand set up in a converted school bus. And yes, they have a Facebook page. Charlie Goodnight didn't have any idea of what he set in motion, in 1866.

How does the garden grow?

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By Celia Hayes

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary ...How does the garden grow? At this point, it's hard to say anything definite; for much of February I have been sidelined with the current flu, possibly in combination with a whopping reaction to all the pollen in the air for the last few weeks. All the plans for the garden were on hold until this weekend ... filling up the big raised bed with another humongous bag of good potting soil, constructing the first of several smaller raised beds, getting a dozen or so tomato starts planted in either home-made topsy planters or in the existing Earth Boxes, and planting the onion starts and the various beans. All of that ... and the thunderstorm which roared through in the wee hours of Sunday morning just seemed providential. I wish that we could count on a good solid rain every two weeks or so from now until autumn ... that, and the assortment of seed packets that I bought at Lowe's on Sunday will come forth and thrive as advertised.

Beans, and peas, zucchini and summer squash and mesclun-lettuce mixes, oh, my. I used to have very good luck growing the mesclun and salad mixes from seeds from a specialty mail-order nursery during the first few years I was here and trying my best to have a usable, edible garden. Last season, the tomatoes worked out all right, although I honestly could have used more, more, more in the way of bearing plants. I'd like to have so much in the way of tomatoes and zucchini that I am reduced to leaving bags of them anonymously on my neighbors' doorsteps, running the doorbell and running away. I'd love to have enough bearing bean plants that I could go out every evening as I did in Utah, and pick enough fresh beans for dinner.

As for the home-made topsys; I had very good luck with a number of inexpensive planters' pots from Lowe's, and making hangers to suspend them from picture-hanging wire. All I needed to do was cut a square hole in the bottom of the pot with the kitchen shears, and then cut an ordinary cellulose kitchen sponge in half. A slice halfway through the half-sponge and a hole for the stem of the tomato plant, fit the leaves through the hole in the pot, and fill up the pot with good potting soil, and we're in business.

The three pots of eggplant from last year are doing OK; I finally moved them out of the greenhouse and into a sunny spot against the back fence. I have crossed my heart and vowed to actually eat the eggplants this time. There were four or five on the plants last year, but they went to seed before I got around to doing anything constructively culinary with them. Quite a few of the okra pods also went to seed – but there I got the good out of them and saved the seeds. Now I have a whole Earthbox full of okra sproutlings. My ambition as regards okra is to have enough ripe pods at one time to make a meal of, or possibly a single jar of okra pickles. And that's been my weekend in the garden – what about yours?

Brooks City Base

Brooks City Base, formerly Brooks Air Force Base, and before that variously Gosport Field and Kelly Field #5, is located slightly to the south-east of downtown San Antonio. At the dawn of American military aviation, Brooks and Kelly were comfortably far out enough in the country that aviators of fixed wing and lighter-than-air flying machines could train without endangering any but themselves. Brooks Field was officially established in 1918 as a training base for the Air Service of the US Army Signal Corps. For some years, Brooks Field was the Army Air Corps primary flight training school, until that mission relocated to Randolph AFB. After that, Brooks became the new home for the Aerial Observation Center.

Following World War II, Brooks was the home for several reserve and tactical units, officially becoming an Air Force Base with the establishment of the Air Force as a separate service. In the early 1950s, Brooks became home to the Aerospace Medical Center – to include the School for Aerospace Medicine (SAM), which would deal in research with applicability to flight and space exploration. President John F. Kennedy’s last official act as president was to dedicate the SAM building on November 21, 1963. He was assassinated the following day in Dallas.

The mission of Brooks AFB continued to be focused on science and medical research with regard to aviation and space flight, including aerospace medical learning, aircrew health assessment, and such activities as the Air Force’s drug testing lab, and an occupational and environmental health lab.

In the mid 1990s, when Brooks was listed as excess for current military needs and slated for closure by the Base Realignment and Realignment Commission, a plan was worked out by city, state, local and military planners to privatize Brooks, essentially to replace military activities with a mix of civic and privately owned scientific, or educational establishments.

Brooks is also home to the Museum of Aerospace Medicine, or “Hanger 9” – a World War I-era frame aircraft hanger, the single remaining hanger of 16, built in Brooks’ earliest days, when flight training was accomplished in Curtiss JN-4 “Jennies”. Hanger 9 is listed as a national historic monument.

Currently, Brooks City Base is home to the Air Force’s 311Air Base Group. The military mission is expected to close in 2011.

Neighborhoods and suburbs adjacent to Brooks City Base include Highland Hills, Stinson Park and Kingsborough Park. Brooks City Base is also a short distance from San Antonio Missions National Historic Park, and Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Ongoing Garden Plans – and a Lament

by Celia Hayes

Well, we'll need a bag or two more of potting soil to properly fill up the big raised bed that I wrote about a couple of week ago, so there'll be a delay in planting it. There'll also be a delay in constructing the two narrower raised beds, which will be placed against the fence, with a bit of latticing attached, so that that plants which wish to climb – like beans, peas and cucumbers – can go to town. The big bed will be planted with zucchini and summer squash, which are supposed to produce by the ton, but which last year got attacked by some nasty kind of crud/parasite which attacked their stems and killed the plants themselves almost overnight.

The patent topsy-turvy tomato planters, which saw stout service these last two years by actually producing a nice little selection of tomatoes, were not up to another year. The heavy plasticized fabric that made up the body of the planter disintegrated to the point where I could tear it merely by poking it with a finger, and not very hard at that. The two planters which had been intended as a kind of hanging butterfly and humming bird garden fell apart even faster; one of them shredded spontaneously as we were taking it down from the tree. But the good news is – the rest of the unit, especially the metal ring and the wire loops and hooks which the whole thing hung from are still perfectly sound. And that gave me an idea to just create my own topsy tomato planters with those useful bits. I have a number of inexpensive plastic pots; just cut the drain hole a little larger, trim an ordinary cellulose sponge to fit inside the pot, insert a tomato seedling in the pot drain hole and secure it with the sponge, fill up with potting soil, and suspend the plastic pot from the hanging frame that we built last year, using the metal ring and wire loops that I saved from the old topsys! Here we go – a whole new forest of suspended tomato plants, and with luck, and the judicious application of the right kind of fertilizer and insecticides ... more tomatoes!

The one remaining topsy that I don't think we will use this year is the one for peppers. I've removed all the plants which survived from last year, and replanted them in large pots – just like I did with the ones from the year before. All the peppers – cayenne, Bell and jalapeno alike – are thriving. The one seedling vegetable variety that we do not need to re-stock the garden with this year is pepper. Seriously, I think there must be about fifteen individual pepper plants.

Which brings me to a lament a local casualty of the drought over the last couple of years; the Antique Rose Emporium outlet on Evans Road has closed. It actually closed six months ago, and when I first heard of this, I thought it must be a rumor. Surely we had been there – just before Christmas, sometime in September, I thought. But no – and there went a place which not only supplied me with darned near everything the least little bit exotic in my garden, but with gave me an example of what a beautiful, blooming, native Texas garden could be, stocked with roses and herbs and adapted perennials! So passes the glory of one of my favorite retail outlets, although there is some comfort to be had in knowing that their main establishment and website is still in business. I have no idea where we will go now for vegetable starts and herbs; split our devotion between HEB, Lowe's and Rainbow Gardens, I guess..

Plans for the Garden – Spring 2013

by Celia Hayes

When just about everything in the garden was done producing for the year and the weather began to cool off, my daughter and I put up the folding gazebo-greenhouse which one of our San Antonio neighbors decided was surplus to needs. Into it went all the surviving plants, and the delicate things, like the patchouli plant, the pepper vine, an earth-box full of salad greens and lettuce, and another with three tomato plants which had self-seeded from last year's crop. In advance of the first cold snap, we zipped up the window openings and doorway, and aside from unzipping the door long enough to water everything once a week, we pretty much ignored it. All the plants inside thrived on this regimen, and one of the tomato plants has already put forth baby green tomatoes the size of grapes ... in late January. We do not know, of course, what kind of tomatoes they are – could be the black cherry sort, the yellow pear-shaped sort, the heirloom beefsteak variety or even the egg-shaped roma tomatoes ... all of which we had in the hanging planters last year, or in one of the earth boxes. Any of them could have self-seeded – and the resulting plants are thriving. So – yes, we will keep the gazebo-greenhouse up. As a matter of fact, it was such a pain to assemble that we are extremely reluctant to take it down.

As it turned out for us last year, although the hanging turvy planters, the earth boxes and the pots of various sizes produced a splendid-looking assortment of vegetables, and the garden looked nearly the best that it ever has been, the actual crop wasn't that impressive. It wasn't enough to entirely supply our salad green and vegetable needs throughout the summer and fall, and certainly not enough that we were going around to the neighbors leaving sacks of zucchini and peppers on the doorstep, ringing the doorbell and running away.

So, this year, we're moving on to Plan ...well, by this time it is Plan C. Plan A, back in the beginning was in just digging in lots of sand compost to what is essentially hard clay – which worked for some things, but but vegetables. Plan B, which was to plant the vegetables in containers, was what we did last year – and there just isn't enough container space. Plan C is – a series of raised beds, made from wide pine planks, and filled with compost and good potting soil. This is what we have started; last weekend I built the largest one, from a pair of 12-foot planks, which the nice people at Lowe's were kind enough to saw into 4 and 8 foot lengths. Four pairs of corner joist fasteners and a handful of wood screws – and there we go. Fill with soil, and put square concrete pavers around the edge so that we're not waiting through the mud every time we water ... and there's the first raised bed. We should be able to build and fill two or three more, and fit into various unused spaces in the back yard, which will offer lots more space for vegetable-growing.

We've carried over enough cayenne, jalapeno and bell pepper plants from last year that we need not buy any more for this year. Alas, one of the tomato turvys has split and disintegrated under the stress of two years hard use, and I suspect the remaining two are very close to following suit – so, here we go, looking for more. With the greater space available in the raised beds, we might better be able to grow more squash, zucchini and bush beans – and just today when we were at Lowe's for some shelf brackets, I noticed that they had bags of onion starts and seed potatoes ... and those are definitely things that I'd like to have. And that's the plan for my garden this year – what's yours?

Libraries

by Celia Hayes

Knowing how important historic 'firsts' are to civic life and the partisans of hometown institutions, I expect that any day there will be a showdown between Lockhart and Galveston over which town has the oldest continuously operating public library in Texas. A routine googlectomy turns up the competing claims of the Rosenburg Library in Galveston (1871) and the Dr. Eugene Clarke Library in Lockhart (1899), despite the 30 years difference. Perhaps the Rosenburg Library was sidelined in the aftermath of the great hurricane which struck in 1900, and that is why the 'continuously operating' caveat is in play.

In any case, San Antonio's public library system was late to the game, with the oldest library branch only opening in 1930. (It's the San Pedro Branch, in San Pedro Park.) A round of public libraries in Texas were funded around the turn of the century by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, a bare handful of which still exist as libraries, although many of the buildings are still in use for other purposes. Generally, it appears that any lover of books and reading in Texas before the last quarter of the 19th century was pretty much on their own, although this does not rule out private libraries and friends circulating books among themselves. Having so many other civic and personal needs – such as sheer survival, defense against bandits, Indians, wild animals, poverty, drought, flood, and all – the life of the mind and of literary interests rather naturally took a lower priority until relatively late in the game. Once established, though – and especially in smaller towns – libraries took a central part in civic life. I wonder if establishing libraries, schools and churches wasn't as much of an outlet and focus for the women of a town, at least as much as the militia, volunteer fire companies and fraternal organizations were for their husbands.

Perhaps Texas were late to the game in establishing public libraries for citizens, but I'd have to say they've made up for it sine then. And local libraries in smaller towns are still a mainstay of the community – especially if they are centrally located. I did a talk for the library in Harper, and another in Junction a couple of years ago, and found it to be so. The Junction library even had a lovely little coffee bar set up in the facility, so that patrons could read and caffeinate at the same time. The library in Comfort is also on the main street, in an old two-level store building. Fredericksburg's main library is also right in the very heart of town, in a Beaux Arts building that once was the Gillespie County Courthouse. Boerne's main library is also in a historic building on the main town square – another indication of how important a repository of books for the loan of, to the public, can become.

As many books as I do have myself – the library will always have more.

Ft Sam and Brook Army Medical Center Complex

by Celia Hayes

Having been in pretty good health over the last two or three years, it has been that long since I had to make an appointment to see a doctor – which since I am a military retiree, usually meant a long trek into the wilds of Brooke Army Medical Center, or BAMC – or as I liked to call it 'the world's largest red-brick Skinner box'. I was better acquainted with the grounds around it though; during a time when I worked in an office nearby. During my lunch hour, I used to walk across the street, flash my retiree ID at the gate, and walk briskly around the footpath which circuited the grounds – skirting the parking lot at the top of the hill, around the back of the tall brick structure, down to the complex of new dormitories, the park at the bottom of the hill, around past where the original Fisher Houses are, and where they were building a pair of new ones, the bright and shiny new dome of the state of the art rehab center, up the hill past the helicopter landing pad, and a wide and empty grass field and back to the gate again.

All that has changed since I worked that job – and I probably couldn't walk anything like the same route today. The empty field has been filled in with an extension to the main building of practically the same size, and a huge parking garage. Now there are apparently twice the numbers of employees coming onto the BAMC complex daily as there were when I last went in for a routine appointment ... so, I was not much looking forward negotiating the acres of parking lot and miles of corridor. But now it seems that the routine outpatient clinic has moved out of BAMC altogether and into it's own bright and shiny building on Fort Sam itself. This, I feared, would not be an improvement. Fort Sam has been overtaken by changes too.

For those couple of years after I retired in 1997, I thought that Fort Sam was definitely getting pretty shabby. I would drive through and notice that the old warehouses and loading docks were looking exceedingly crumbly, and even the stolid old Spanish-colonial style blocks of dormitories and administrative buildings had the paint peeling off them in sheets. What was the Army coming to, I would wonder, that they couldn't even send out the troops to slap another coat of paint on those buildings? The old hospital building looked like one of those mock structures that fire departments practice in, and it all looked dispiritingly shabby. Such were the benefits of the peace dividend, and the end of the Cold War.

Such have been the vagaries of current events and the realigning of military missions that things are also looking up on Fort Sam itself. This I discovered, finding my way to an appointment last week at the outpatient medical center, for treatment of a persistent bronchial cough. New units have moved in, the old buildings repurposed, scrubbed up and revitalized – and a number of new ones added to the current inventory. Among them was the brand-spanking-new outpatient clinic, as modern and up to the minute as anything that I ever saw on an Air Force base – which, as the Air Force was the newest of the armed services, usually featured built-to-purpose and relatively modern buildings, rather than the Army or the Navy's usual century-plus relics. I don't know what will happen next at Fort Sam – but I am pretty well certain that General Eisenhower and all those other Army officers who passed through early in the last century would not recognize much of it at all.

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 children's' 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 figuring out the insurance claims after the fire that burned their retirement home in 2003, it turned out that the teak Danish Modern style dining room table and chairs were worth a bomb, although Mom had originally picked them up for next to nothing. I hated that set, by the way – the edge of the chair seat hit the back of your knees like a karate chop – and bore the loss of it cheerfully.

We almost always ate family dinners around that table, when we had guests, and at holidays, since there was an insert which enlarged it substantially – but for everyday, we ate at the table in the kitchen, and when my parents moved to their retirement home, at the table in the sunroom. Then we had plain ordinary comfort food; things like meatloaf – which in my mother's version only contained about 50 percent actual meat – and the classic stand-by of macaroni and cheese. Mom prided herself on making it from scratch, and although I have tinkered with her basic recipe over time, I still follow many of her precepts, such as undercooking the macaroni just slightly, and making the cheese béchamel sauce slightly runny, so that it all cooks together in one delicious symphony.

Drop into a generous pot of boiling water, one half-pound (8 oz) macaroni shells or elbows, or even cavatappi pasta, and cook until almost but not quite done. Drain and reserve in a covered dish which the mac and cheese will bake. Slice up a quarter to a half-pound length of kielbasa sausage and mix with the cooked pasta. Cover and set aside.

In the pot in which the pasta cooked, melt ¼ cup butter, and blend with ¼ cup flour. Add ½ teasp dry or whole-grain mustard, a dash of pepper and a dash of paprika. If feeling really adventurous, substitute a dash of cayenne pepper for the paprika. Add 2 cups milk and blend with the flour mixture. When slightly thickened, add 2-3 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese, or a mixture of cheddar, jack or mozzarella, and stir until cheeses are melted. Pour over the pasta/kielbasa mixture, and top with 1/4 cup additional grated cheese (of any kind – Parmesan works really well) mixed with ¼ cup dried bread crumbs and 1 tbsp. butter. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour, until bubbly, and topping is browned. My father always liked his mac and cheese with a dash of tomato ketchup. When made with kielbasa, this makes a very satisfactory main dish

The Drafthouse and the Hobbit

by Celia Hayes

You know, there are some ideas which are so logical, simple in concept and satisfactory in execution that you wonder why it hasn't been done decades ago. I speak of the Alamo Drafthouse, and the whole notion of going to a movie, and having dinner and drinks in the theatre while watching the movie. Yes, you've always been able to get candy, drinks, popcorn and nachos and dip, and take them into the theater with you. Back in the day when we were overseas and the movie show time at the AAFES theater was the exact same time that the NCO and O-Clubs served dinner, we would openly carry bags of hamburgers and fries into the theater with us. And there may still exist a movie house in Landstuhl, Germany – the Kino which showed first-run American movies on two or three screens and had a luxurious full bar in the lobby. You could have a couple of drinks beforehand, and carry them into the theater, where there were little tables and a tiny desk-light attached to the back of the seat in front of you – it was all very logical, and very, very civilized. The nearest thing to it in the States back then was a community dinner theater, where indifferent food and indifferent acting combined for your evening's pleasure.

But it took to the late 1990s for the dinner-drinks-anna-movie concept to spring into being – in Austin, no less – and actually have drinks and a full dinner – appetizers, main course, desert and all - served inside the theater during the movie. What a concept! We were actually rather blown away by the efficiency of it all; waiters coming in and taking our orders before the movie, delivering the food relatively noiselessly, and coming around to settle up the bill in the last half hour. And since the movie involved was Peter Jackson's The Hobbit – Part One of Three and Oh My Aching Tushie! – some very sustenance was required for the almost three hour running time. The substance provided the other night at the Alamo Drafthouse at Blanco and 410 was pretty darned good, at that – freshly prepared and reasonably priced. You could spend a heck of a lot more at a restaurant, a bar and then at the theater on an evening out and have a worse evening out. The only criticism that I would make about the Drafthouse is that of course, you are eating in the dark ... and that the seats are not quite as luxuriously comfortable as at the Palladium IMAX. But the no-talking, texting, unescorted teens and children under six more than makes up for that; Blondie and I cannot count the times that we have been to a movie and had the experience comprehensively wrecked by inconsiderate people of every age being loud.

About The Hobbit itself? Well, aside from the aching tushie at about an hour and 45 minutes – it was all visually gorgeous, but I do think the director could have held himself to a two-part Hobbit and not repeated quite so many tropes from Lord of the Rings, but that's just me.

Picture Framing on the Cheap!

by Celia Hayes

In last week's post I mentioned the gifts that I was intending to give to three people who – because I am in business with, sporadically employed by, or just really, really fond of them – rate something a little more permanent than a jar of pickled pineapple spears and some fig jam. Of course fruitcake is permanent – but it's not something you can hang on a wall. Among the items that my daughter and I bid on when we went to an estate auction in Fredericksburg this summer was an envelope of prints. They were by two local artists, of Texas subjects, were printed on high-quality paper and rather pleasing to look at, if not particularly valuable. I had the notion to frame three of them properly and present them as gifts – but as as relatively un-famous published author – I had to do this on a budget. But inexpensive does not mean cheap-looking, given some basic materials and a little know-how.

Two of the prints were a fairly standard size – 9x12, and 10x14. The third was a little larger – 14x20 – but even so, finding good-quality frames to fit them was a breeze at Thrifttown, which had a whole rack of picture frames in various sizes for $2-$7 apiece. Of course, all three came with rather awful art already in them, but that is what the trash can is for. One had a nice mat, which I saved. I also saved the hardware to hang it from. Then I peeled off the paper backing and disassembled them all; the frames needed some minor touch-ups, and the glass in each was filthy. Two frames had the contents held in with glaziers' points, the third with staples, but all were easily pulled out with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. I used the glass from each frame as a guide to cut three new backs from ¼ inch foam-core board.

The three sheets of glass went into the dishwasher and came out perfectly clean and spotless. The frames were a different matter. From out of the shelf of painting supplies in the garage, I retrieved a can of periwinkle blue spray-paint, one of hunter green, and one with a little gold left in it. The smallest of the frames only needed a little touch-up – gold sprayed onto a paper towel, and then dabbed on the places where it had worn off. I carefully sprayed the other two frames and let them dry ... and when they were, I went off to Hobby Lobby with the largest and smallest frames and the large print to see about mats. There's a good selection of pre-cut mats available, but the print of the deer in the brush needed to have one specially cut because of the non-standard dimensions. Cost - $10 for the two mats.

That accomplished, I set about reassembling them – first with the clean glass put back into the frame. Then I used a Uhu glue stick to lightly coat the back of the mats and center them onto the prints. Each went into the frame on top of the glass, making certain that there weren't any specks of dirt or lint or anything on the glass, or the matt and print. Pop in the foam-core and secure it with glazier's points, and then to the next to final step: another swab of the Uhu glue stick all around the back of the frame and press a sheet of brown wrapping paper cut a little larger than the frame carefully onto it. When the glue dried, I trimmed off the excess all the way around with a razor-blade and replaced the hardware ... and there's a lovely and meaningful set off gifts. Two out of the three recipients loved them extravagantly, which proves to me that it's not the expense, it's the thought that really counts.