A good weekend

Saturday was mostly taken up with shopping.  Getting the week's groceries was fine, but trying to find something special for a birthday present was less easy and involved a lot of driving up and down and getting in and out of the car.  That's what happens when you don't know a place very well and are looking for something specific!

In the evening we went to a concert by the Brazos Valley Symphony Orchestra who played 'Nimrod' by Elgar, 'Crouching Tiger' by Tan Dun with a 17 year old cellist and some stirring drumming and Rimsky Korsakov's 'Scheherazade.  We also picked up the programme for next season and information about other musical groups.  Things to look forward to in the Autumn. 

Copperhead?

Today we've been on a 7 mile walk round Lake Somerville - well, not the whole way round, just  3.5 miles one way, picnic lunch and then 3.5 miles back.  Nice easy track near the lake side, although the lake is only visible on a couple of occasions.   Not many people to be seen; three cyclists and 5 other walkers in total, which compared to our last walk was positively crowded!   We had planned to go back to the Sam Houston Forest but the hiking trails were closed - worries about stressed trees falling down and managed 'burns' to clear dead wood and undergrowth.   It got quite hot at Lake Somerville and the humidity went up so when we arrived home we felt a bit blasted!   However, it was a good day.  Many wild flowers, a snake and leaf cutter ants at work.  The leaf cutter ants were particularly interesting as they were the speciality of our late friend Dave Stradling and we had heard a lot about them from him, but had never seen them.  

Pelicans

Pink evening primrose? 

Ant nest exit/entrance

Leaf-cutter ants

First book group meeting at Barnes and Noble

We missed the deadline for getting out flyers at Barnes and Noble, so it wasn't surprising that the first meeting of the book club was attended by Austin and me.   Never mind, we had a really good discussion about the book (The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin), chatting away non-stop for 50 minutes!   It augers well.  The next book is The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.  I wonder how many people will turn up?  We had to find a name for the group, so have called it The Good Book Group....a bit of a double entendre there! 

Mariscos al ajillo

Tonight we recreated a dish that Peter had at Hugo's, a Mexican restaurant in Houston.   It came pretty close!  It was the first time I've bought fresh water lobster tails and tried to open the shell and butterfly the flesh as they show you on Youtube.  I wasn't very successful so our lobster was without shell, but still very delicious!

And here it is - scallops, prawns and lobster in garlic served with rice on the side!  

I give this dish 5 out of 10 for presentation as you can't see the lobster for the pile of onion!

Master Chef it ain't ...

Success!

That's better!  

Not tasted it yet (what restraint!) but it looks like a great improvement on the last attempt.  I substituted bottled water for the saline, soft local tap water and upped the yeast.  It's the same flour but this time I added sunflower seeds, poppy seeds and sesame seeds. 

Sit and fit again today.  I know it sounds ridiculous but it really is a good exercise and although it's in no way aerobic (my pulse stays low) I can feel all my muscles have had a really good tone up! 

Even more nice people...!

My young man at City Hall in College Station (not to be confused with my young man at the book shop) put me in touch with a woman called Patricia who is involved in various local historic preservation committees.  We met up for a coffee yesterday afternoon at a place called Sweet Eugene's.  I'd never heard of it and approached with no real idea what to expect.  Turned out to be a delightful coffee shop with an eccentric collection of assorted chairs and tables, a dark and cosy interior and a relaxed atmosphere - evidenced by the number of tables occupied by young people on their laptops with no evidence of consumption of refreshments in front of them.  

Over coffee Patricia and I shared interests and life stories and discovered a lot about each other in a short space of time!  She used to work on the space programme in Houston and knew all the moon landing astronauts, has lived in Greece and Turkey and now finds herself in College Station by default.  She described herself as moving over to the 'left' as she grew older and now she's involved in a number of political, historical and philosophical activities.  

Patricia was very sympathetic when I described my trials with the decades worth of microfilm  and suggested another volunteering opportunity, did a bit of phoning,  and this morning I went to the Carnegie Historic Center and met Anne who is in charge of Oral History projects.   She has asked me to work on material they have on a school for Mexican Americans which has now disappeared since integration.    But before we went into too much detail Anne whisked me off to a talk she was going to by a writer who was reading from her new book at the Brazos Valley African American Museum.  It's very salutary to go round the museum and see the indignities to which black people were subjected in Texas up until quite recent times.    Schools were not desegregated until 1966.  The writer Tayari Jones gave a spirited reading of the first chapter of her new novel and answered questions.  She had a great sense of humour!  I bought a copy of 'Silver Swallow', which she signed. 

The contacts list in my phone is gradually expanding! 

Staff of life

There are three reasons why it takes me twice as long as usual to do a weekly shop in the supermarket.   

I still don't know where everything is and a different logic is applied to the layout to the one I'm used to.  There are byways, special counters and sections  that prevent you from  cruising up and down each aisle in a methodical fashion.   In the shop I usually go to in College Station there are at least 5 quite separate places where cheese can be found...speciality and foreign cheeses, bulk cheeses (large pieces, wheels etc), everyday cheeses, cheese that has been sliced or grated and cheese in a section the criteria for which completely eludes me, though I have stood in front of it and tried to work it out!    This makes for a lot of to-ing and fro-ing....did I miss something here...oh, no, here it is again on this counter... Thinking about where I usually shop at home, I realise that there is also more that one place where you can find cheese (three in total I think), but five seems to be overdoing it!  

The second reason my progress round the aisles is delayed is because I gawp at the huge variety of products. There's a lot of processed food, I think you can buy a 'mix' for anything, and a great deal of it is not what overweight people should dream of eating and I mean OVERWEIGHT!   I know I've been going on about my weight and you'll think that I'm the pot calling the kettle black, but my problem is that I eat too much of the good stuff!  I arrived at the checkout one day with a basket which was 60% fruit and vegetables and the young man sliding the items down the belt asked "Are you having a healthy eating week?"  I won't bore you with my haughty response (!!) but he entered into a conversation about his diet and admitted that he only knows how to cook spaghetti bolognese and wished he could enlarge his repertoire.  Sadly, there's such an emphasis on 'convenience' that people are buying packets of stuff they could so easily prepare for themselves - minus the additives.   Bread here lasts forever - you just know it contains a lot of preservative. 

And thirdly,  every item comes in a bewildering number of varieties.  There is so much 'choice' that buying anything requires detailed reading of the ingredients labels to really understand what you're getting.  Avoiding added sugar is a nightmare.  Sugar creeps into practically everything and labelling is poor.  There's no standardisation so it's hard to quickly work out the number of grams of any ingredient per 100 grams for comparison purposes.  So sugar is labelled as x grams per serving and a 'serving' can be any amount that the manufacturer thinks you might eat at one go.  The serving size is given, so you have to stand there are do 'sums' in order to compare two products.   

So, to avoid the preservatives and the sugar and the wrong type of fat, etc., I decided to make my own bread.  It took some time to decide between the different types of yeast and sadly there wasn't a great variety of bread flour but I made a white loaf with unbleached flour and added sunflower seeds and sesame seeds to give it a bit of bite and flavour.  The flour is different and so is the water (it's very soft and saline) and the yeast was a bit strange but my first loaf turned out to be edible.  Not perfect - a bit heavy - but edible just the same and not a bad flavour.   Just flour, water, salt and yeast.  I'll try and vary the proportions next time and see if I can get it to rise a bit more. 

OK, rant over!  There is actually a great selection of fruit and vegetables and very helpful staff and 'baggers' who will also take your groceries to the car for you, though the 'baggers' would rather fill plastic bags than the 'bags for life' that I take with me...but that's another story! 

A weekend in Houston

Menil Collection building

We started our weekend in Houston with a picnic in the grounds of the Menil Collection, admiring the outside of the building and the trees.  The Collection is in a suburban setting and the park was clearly a neighbourhood meeting/picnic place.  

The Collection is reminiscent of the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich - the eclectic collection of a wealthy couple (surrealism, cubism, impressionism, American postwar art and some very striking Pacific Islands and African works), all beautifully displayed and lit.  

Interesting tree roots

After checking in to our hotel we took the new tram/railway system to the university district, walked several blocks admiring the mix of housing, including some very striking architect designed modernism and found Cafe Rabelais which turned out to be as authentic as a French cafe can be outside France and had a great meal! 

Next day, after contending with a scrum in the hotel's breakfast area, we went to the museum quarter - again by rail/tram - and after looking round the sculpture garden, lost ourselves in the Museum of Fine Art.  First stop was the special exhibition showing treasures from the Venice Ghetto which had been miraculously hidden and only rediscovered recently.

Sculpture garden 

Sculpture garden

The museum is well laid out, wasn't crowded and had a good selection of something by just about everyone.

I think this was one of my favourites.

When we couldn't absorb any more, we went to the Contemporary Art Museum and didn't think much was going on there!   Now we have looked it up on the web, we realise we must have gone to the wrong place so there's a treat in store next time we go to Houston. Next was the Museum of Health where we pottered for a while and then went for a walk in the park opposite and came across a wedding taking place in the rose garden. 


After a recuperative nap at the hotel we took a taxi to Hugo's, a Mexican restaurant where Peter chose well and I chose badly, but I could see that there were some delicious meals floating around.  I hope to go back there some time and have another go!

On Sunday we went to the Natural History Museum, first to the butterfly house which was very enjoyable and then round the palaeolithic gallery where there was a fine display of dinosaur bones which a small boy of our acquaintance would have enjoyed.  

Reminds me of someone...

Ditto...sorry, couldn't resist! 

The labelling and explanations were not always very clear.  These fossils were stunning, but we couldn't work out how they were formed.

 Then lunch!

And finally a trip to Bayou Bend - a house built in the 1920s which now houses a collection of American furniture.  Sadly our walk round the garden was curtailed by thunder and lightening.

And then a chance on the way back to snap this road sign which has amused us every time we pass.  We have such a childish sense of humour!