Serendipity in Santa Fe

"We've definitely got to find an exotic location to celebrate Christmas this year," I complained to my husband Wayne several months ago.  As much as we love our home town of El Paso, Texas, after decades of spending Christmas at home, we had pretty much partaken of all the holiday spirit that is offered locally.

So that's how we found ourselves this December in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  A short drive (in West Texas terms) of six hours took us from an altitude of about 4500 feet to 7000 feet and from about 50 degrees daytime high temperatures to the 20's and 30's. I pulled jackets, sweaters, boots, and gloves out of the back of the closet.  I even found an old pair of long underwear that I tossed in the suitcase at the last minute.

A four day stay at the lively La Fonda Hotel on the Plaza was plenty of time to discover small pleasures that are often not mentioned in travel guides. The first afternoon we sat for a quiet moment in the ornate Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi.  Soon the very entertaining dress rehearsal of a Christmas pageant began..The leader instructed children with angel wings to position themselves on the top row of platform, the shepherds to take the middle row, and the animals to position themselves on the bottom row.  Delightful!  

Rehearsal at St. Francis

     

The next stop was the lounge in La Fonda, always an opportunity for great people watching. Chips and salsa and tea sustained us until dinner that evening.

View down the bar at La Fonda Lounge

Dinner  at La Fonda gave us a decorating inspiration for our home.  Why couldn't we (or rather Wayne) paint some of our glass window panels like the ones adorning the hotel dining room?

Decorated glass panels at La Fonda

And why was the guacamole concocted and served fresh at our table so much better than the guacamole we make regularly at home?

Dusk arrived early, but the views around town were memorable.  Our room with a balcony overlooked a quiet side street.

View from our room

The main plaza turned into a wonderland of lights in the evening.

Main plaza

And the Basilica of St. Francis was especially inspiring at night.

St. Francis Basilica

But the highlight of the trip was joining 30,000 revelers in making a Christmas Eve walk, with a full moon adding to the magic. Bundled figures of all ages ( and some magnificent furry dogs) made their way slowly up Canyon Road, stopping to admire houses and art galleries adorned with farolitos and Christmas lights.  Groups of carolers joined in spontaneous singing of Christmas carols around small campfires. The Ghost of Christmas Present must have sprinkled the revelers with magic dust, because a holiday spirit hovered over the crowds.

Canyon Road with moon peeking through tree

We had a memorable Christmas holiday, enjoying the serendipity of small delights in Santa Fe.  I hope your Christmas was a merry one as well.

My First Escape Room Experience

 

Lock me up in a room for an hour with a group frantically searching for clues to escape?  Not my idea of a fun evening, given my tendency to suffer from claustrophobia, I thought.  But a recent escape room experience with family members and friends in my home town of El Paso, Texas, changed my mind about this trending entertainment.

Escape rooms go by several different names, such as puzzle rooms and mystery rooms.  I prefer the emphasis on puzzles and critical thinking.  After all, Clue was my favorite board game growing up, and I am still addicted to Agatha Christie mysteries.  Some have observed that escape rooms are a real world version of video game challenges. Others have compared escape rooms to physical adventure games.  

So, what exactly is an escape room?  It is a decorated room into which you and other participants (usually two to six) are locked until you manage to escape or sixty minutes is up, whichever come first. The room contains numerous hidden clues, puzzles, codes, and gadgets that, if located and interpreted correctly, allow you to open the door to freedom.

The El Paso escape room version is named "Disaster, Room 915."  It is located in a house in an older section of the city.  After being greeted by the host in a small living area and receiving a short orientation, we were ushered into a 70's era kitchen, informed that we needed to find an abducted child, and locked in.

One of the aspects of escape rooms is that they can serve as team-building activities.  I was fascinated by roles that different members took on.  The leader of our group was a young, thirty year old professional, a friend of our son's, who quickly assumed a leadership role.  He told us to search everywhere for clues and to call out anything we found, without stopping to analyze if it was a true clue or not.  Working together, we eventually located a hidden key.  Someone said, "I wonder what this key opens?"  Probably ten to fifteen minutes later, someone else said, "I wonder if this key opens the door?"  Duh!  It was, but we only escaped to a locked hallway with two other rooms to explore.

In the next room, someone spied five letters written on the ceiling, hidden by a thin piece of cloth. My husband Wayne, always ready to solve a problem quickly, got on a chair and climbed up to rip down the cloth.  (We later learned from the host who was watching the activity through a video camera that tearing down the cloth was not what was intended.  If we would only have turned on the light switch in the room, the letters would have become illuminated!  Oops!)

The next small room off the hallway was narrow and dark with a bookshelf stacked with movie videos. We knew they must have held a clue, but once again we failed to find the light switch outside the door and were trying to read with small flashlights. (Our cell phones had been confiscated, of course.)  Several of our group became engrossed in remembering how a combination lock worked.

About this time, a voice came through the intercom, advising us that time was up.  "Just five more minutes?" someone in the group begged.  No, time was up.  We were among the 80% of escape room participants who do not solve the puzzle.

Escape rooms have become a lucrative business around the world.  They started in Japan, moved to Europe and other parts of the world, and then arrived in the United States.  Our Los Angeles based son informs us that escape rooms are especially entertaining in his city because of the abundance of actors and set designers available.  The last one he participated in involved being locked in a jail cell!  Local themes are often incorporated into escape rooms, which are after all part game and part theater.

If you are interested in visiting one of the 2800 escape rooms in the world, you can check with escape room directory.  Trip Advisor reviews escape rooms as a favorite entertainment.

And did I suffer from panic or claustrophobia in the escape room?  Not for a minute!  I was too mentally involved in finding clues and interacting with my group.  Of course, our puzzle was not like another one I heard about. That one had a zombie who approachs you and only disappears when you successfully locate a clue!  Yikes!

      

A premier climbing destination ( and more) in my own backyard

Rock climbing, bouldering, hiking, and picnicking- who would have thought we could find all of that in our own backyard? Well, not exactly right behind our house, but only thirty miles east of my home town of El Paso, Texas.  I'm talking about Hueco Tanks State Park and Historic Site (http://tpwd.texas.gov/state-parks/hueco-tanks).

A visit from out-of-towners over Thanksgiving holidays pushed my husband Wayne and me out of our comfort zone for an outing to an area that I had been aware of all of my life but had seldom visited.  I thought Hueco Tanks was dusty, barren, dangerous, and devoid of human comforts. I was embarrassingly misinformed.  This rock formation at the entrance to the park sets the stage for a setting of unusual beauty.

A hint of things to come

First and foremost, the rock formations challenge rock climbers and boulderers.

The park offers opportunities for roped free climbing with a guide in certain areas   The more popular type of climbing is bouldering, which is strenuous climbing over rocks, using only holds that naturally occur on the rocks.  Hueco Tanks State Park has a worldwide reputation for excellent bouldering, both because of the innumerable possibilities that exist for climbs and the lure of  temperate winter weather. Reservations at the park are a must November through March.

The younger and fitter members of our group spent the day bouldering.  Wayne and I opted for a less strenuous day, hiking on easy paths to view rock art left by ancient peoples and locating spots for future picnics.

.

I enjoyed viewing the many huecos, indentations in rocks that hold rain water and give this unique park its name.

I was also impressed by a stop at the restored Escontrias Ranch House, now an interpretive center, where viewing of a short video is required,  reminding visitors to respect the land.

Spending the day communing with nature at the end of November?  How cool is that?  And I can't fail to mention the wonderfully clean and heated restrooms provided throughout the park.  I do like my creature comforts!

What's a holiday without crescent rolls?

For most of the year, I can avoid buying those seductive cans of crescent rolls with the Pillsbury Dough Boy in the baker's hat on the label.  When November holidays roll around, however, my resolve to eat healthy goes out the window, and I find myself buying crescent rolls by the double pack (they go fast!)

Tradition in our household has it that we serve crescent rolls wrapped around little smokie sausages for at least one holiday breakfast.  And I must admit they are delicious.  But with the dire warnings about smoked meats nowadays and my increasing dislike of meat products, a recipe that appeared recently on Flipboard for 4-Ingredient Mini Apple Pies using crescent rolls caught my attention. Anything made with apples can't be that bad a food choice, can it?

The recipe was easy.  You take a can of crescent rolls and cut each of the eight pieces of dough in half so that you have sixteen triangles. Then you cut one to two apples into bite-size pieces.  Many varieties of apples are plentiful in the Southwest during fall, so you can choose from Granny Smith apples, which have a tart taste, or Fuji apples, which are sweeter.

Next combine 1/4 cup brown sugar (I used Splenda  Brown Sugar Blend, so the amount was really 1/8 cup), and 2 tablespoons cinnamon.  Melt about half a stick of butter, and you are ready to assemble the mini-pies.  

Place a piece of apple on each crescent roll, brush with butter, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar, and roll up, adding more butter and cinnamon sugar mixture on top. Here are the mini-pies ready to go into the oven.

Bake at 375 degrees for about 15 minutes.  Let cool before eating if you can resist popping one into your mouth. (My husband and I couldn't wait; hence, I couldn't take a picture of the finished product.) The crescent rolls were as satisfying as ever, and the baked apple bite was a surprising taste addition.

I'm getting hungry just writing about the apple mini-pies.  It's a good thing I bought that double package of crescent rolls yesterday!

Stargazing in the Southwest

I have a new hobby in life  - Stargazing! Like most newbies, I am no doubt overly enthusiastic. But on October 24 before sunrise, I trundled outside to pick up the newspaper from the driveway and, just by chance, looked up in the sky to the east.  What a sight.  Three beautiful spots of light framed by the still black sky greeted me. The planet Venus was the brightest, accompanied by a slightly dimmer Jupiter, and a smaller Mars.  Forgive me for saying the sight took my breath away.

From Sky and Telescope

I began looking forward to getting up before dawn so that I could check on the movement of the three planets.  (Yes, stargazing may change your sleeping habits!)

From Sky and Telescope

Every morning, Venus would drop a little more in the sky to a position below Jupiter, until on November 3, Venus and Mars were near each other and Jupiter appeared above them.

From Sky and Telescope

I was hooked on the possibilities for stargazing in the Desert Southwest.  Our area of the United States has temperate weather almost year round and lots of wide, open spaces. optimum viewing conditions if one can escape the city lights. 

Now it was time to gather my resources for stargazing.  First I put a Star Walk app on the iPhone and the iPad. Then I checked out books on astronomy (rather too technical) and stargazing from the public library.   And then I signed up to receive emails from Sky and Telescope and Cosmic Pursuits. Flipboard on the iPad also has several sources on Astronomy that I am now following. Talk about TMI!  It was a flood of information.

My plans for the future include investigating Stargazing Parties in West Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.  And my husband Wayne keeps asking me if I am ready for a telescope for the bedroom balcony.  Thanks, but not yet, I say.

I am still enjoying just looking up at the sky before dawn and after sunrise to see what sights I can discover. 

Autumn musings and a breakfast recipe

When does autumn begin in your part of the world?   September, October, and November are traditional months for autumn weather in the Northern Hemisphere, but here in the Southwestern part of the United States, summer lingers with a vengeance throughout the month of September. All hopes are on October to bring relief from mind-numbing heat.

October is my favorite month in El Paso, Texas. my home town.  We can’t boast about leaves changing to red and gold, because trees, plants, and grass are all still green, even enjoying a growth spurt in the cooler weather.  But weekend outdoor festivals are on everyone’s calendar where you can listen to music, eat, drink, and be very merry with family and friends. 

The neglected pots and pans in the kitchen beckon because we can now cook without heating up the house.  This is the season that will end with Thanksgiving Day, much celebrated with traditional home-cooked dishes. Winter with its cold and dark days is too far away to worry about. This is the season of harvest and plenty.  

Here is one of my favorite autumn morning breakfast dishes, made with cranberries.

Salado Berries  This recipe brings back Thanksgiving memories.  For many years, my husband Wayne and I traveled to Central Texas to celebrate the holiday with members of his family, the Calks. Often his brother and sister-in-law, Max and Jeannette, would meet us in Salado, Texas, a delightful town several miles north of the capital, Austin. One year we stayed in a bed and breakfast where we were first served this breakfast dish.

One bag fresh cranberries (I buy them in season and freeze for use all year.)

One cup white sugar (or Splenda)

Mix the above ingredients together and microwave for five minutes.

Then mix the following ingredients and crumble on top of the fruit mixture.

One cup flour

One cup oatmeal

One-half cup brown sugar (or one-fourth cup Splenda brown sugar blend)

One-fourth cup butter

One-half cup chopped pecans

Bake uncovered for 40 minutes at 325 degrees.

Great served with bacon and eggs or an omelet.

.

Liven up Mondays with a taco

Monday nights can be a real drag.  The work week stretches out in front with the weekend in the far distance.

Recently, my husband Wayne and I decided to try to cure the Monday blues by going to a local restaurant that advertises "Taco Monday."

Tacos are an integral part of Southwest culture.  Almost any ingredient can be put into a taco shell (a corn tortilla, crispy or soft) to qualify as a taco. And tacos are the ultimate hand-held food.  No one would ever consider eating a taco with a knife and fork.

The Riviera Restaurant in El Paso, Texas has been around a long time, as you can see from the sign on the outside of this restaurant.

The interior of the restaurant is fairly typical of many El Paso restaurants, except for the original art on the walls.

A large sign at the entrance assured us we had come to the right place on the right evening for tacos.

My eyes went to the vegetarian choices - bean, potato, guacamole and avocado, while Wayne, the carnivore, focused on beef, chicken or al pastor (pork). 

Our server brought the requisite tostada chips and salsa to the table and took our orders.  You can see by the picture below that Wayne and I were in a race to see if the salsa was authentic.  (It was.)  One can usually judge the quality of a Mexican food restaurant by the flavors in the salsa. 

El Pasoans are so spoiled with free chips and salsa that any local restaurant that actually dares to charge for this dining staple is suspect of not being quite authentic enough.

The taco plates arrived, served with lettuce, tomato, and grated white cheese on the side.

The meal had been so inexpensive that we decided to top it off with our favorite dessert - flan.  Flan is a baked custard with caramel sauce, and it is truly delicious.  It was so tasty, in fact, that I forget to take a picture until we were halfway through the dessert.

Many local restaurants advertise "Taco Tuesday", but I am glad the Riviera gave us a chance to go out on the town on what would have been otherwise a pretty boring Monday night!

Mild, medium or hot - how do you like your green chiles?

The green chile harvest in Southern New Mexico heralds the approach of many invigorating sensations - the promise of cooler fall weather, the anticipation of outdoor festivals, and, best of all, the fresh green chile season.

"What's the big deal with green chiles?"  you may well ask if you are not familiar with this fall ritual.  Locals take the availability of fresh green chiles very seriously indeed.

This year my husband Wayne and I were invited by another El Paso couple to join them in a traditional chile-buying expedition.  Although fresh green chiles begin appearing in local markets in August and continue through September, we made plans for an outing to nearby Hatch, New Mexico, billed as the Green Chile Capital of the World!

The small town of Hatch is located about an hour and a half's drive from El Paso, Texas. And it is a pleasant drive, city streets giving way to farmland as we arrived around noon.  At  Sparky's, the traditional stop for hamburgers, our lunch conversation was mostly green-chile centered. Is it better to have the store roast the chiles for you or roast them at home on your own grill?   How many pounds of chiles should you buy to last a year?  And most important of all - should you request mild, medium, or hot chiles? Opinions on these important points differed greatly!

This looked like the right spot for our chile shopping.

Fresh bags of chiles were arriving from the farm.

And being quickly unloaded.

Wayne and I chose a 40 pound sack of mild chiles to have roasted on the spot.  The terms mild, medium or hot are of course relative terms.  And this is one decision you don't want to leave to the chile salesman!  Wayne bit into one of the raw chiles from the mild stack and gave his seal of approval.

The chiles were put into the roaster and removed when the skins had blackened.  Ah, if only I could capture the distinct aroma of roasting chiles on this page!

Our friends chose two sacks of medium-hot Big Jim chiles, which they planned to take home to roast. They also bought a ristra, red chiles on a string, much used in the Southwest for decoration or preparation of red chile sauce.

We put our chiles in a cooler with ice in the trunk so they wouldn't get over-steamed and brought them home immediately to bag up for the freezer.

 

Then came another big decision.  With this abundance of chiles, how should we use them?  We consumed a few with a light sprinkling of salt during the bagging process.  I decided to make an easy, all purpose green chile sauce using a recipe in the September issue of  New Mexico Magazine.

Basically, you saute onions and garlic, add a little flour, add chopped and roasted chiles, then add chicken stock and salt. Bring to boil and simmer for 15 minutes.  Quite easy!  We had enough sauce for cheese enchiladas, topping for an omelet, and the last bit mixed with a little white cheese for a supper side dish.

There is something very comforting about having two freezer shelves stacked with roasted green chile packages waiting for some creative cooking.  And I'm so glad we chose the mild chiles!  All taste without the burn.  Guess we are going soft!

A great veggie and fruit treat for summer

With Southwest Desert temperatures hitting high marks on the mercury in these dog days of summer, the very thought of heating up the kitchen to prepare a meal gives me a good excuse to eat yet another bologna fold-over sandwich for supper.

But a nagging voice keeps invading my thoughts, reminding me of the virtues of eating lots of vegetables and fruits.  Recently, my husband Wayne, master griller, offered to cook supper outside. Yes!

To counterbalance whatever carnivore delicacy I knew he would be grilling, I emptied the vegetable bin onto the kitchen counter.  Red onions, zucchini, jalapeño peppers, tomatoes, and red, yellow, and orange bell peppers.  After a little trimming and chopping, these vegetables went into a special grilling pan, an inexpensive purchase we made several years ago.

While digging around in the refrigerator for vegetables, I came across a bag of peaches we had been ignoring because of their bland taste.  I was about to throw the peaches in the trash when some vague memory of hearing about the joys of grilling fruit came to me.  I peeled and cut up the peaches and added them on top of the vegetable mix.

Here is Wayne liberally seasoning the mixture with olive oil spray and Jerry Baird's All-Purpose Seasoning.

The vegetable/fruit dish was ready for the grill!

Wayne cooked the mixture over a mesquite wood fire, spraying it several more times with olive oil. When the vegetable were crusty, he declared the dish done.  It looks like he sneaked a piece of his favorite sausage in on the side.

We had grilled vegetables many times in the past, eating them virtuously because they were a healthy choice. But the peaches were the unexpected added touch to give this dish a truly gourmet quality.

There were no leftovers.

Decorating the Garden WITHOUT Plants

Gardening in the Desert Southwest certainly has its challenges!  Trying to grow flora in El Paso, Texas, my hometown, is a constant battle with blazing temperatures in the summer months, freezing temperatures in the winter, gale force winds in the spring, and autumn, well, I can't complain about autumn weather.  But did I mention our meager average 9" of rainfall per year?

Visitors to our home from other regions of the state and abroad are often visibly shocked when we take them on a tour of the property. 

"Your yard looks so empty!"  observed a friend visiting from London. ("We like big, empty spaces in the Desert Southwest," I replied defensively.)

"The yards in El Paso look unfinished," observed a family member from the central part of Texas.

("That's called xeriscaping.  We believe in water conservation,"  I explained.)

 "Don't you feed your plants? They look awfully small," remarked another gardener from the northern part of Texas. (Of course I do, I thought to myself.  Why bother to explain that the same plants that grow to enormous sizes in other environments have to fight to even exist here?)

So I turned to objects for help in enhancing the garden.

This fountain was purchased in our neighboring border city of Ciudad Juárez and installed in the courtyard.  The fountain is showing its age with discolorations and crumbling sides, but it has lasted, providing a soothing, bubbling sound, for over twenty-five years. 

Several seating areas give the illusion of a leisurely life style.

These chairs and small table are in the pool area.  You may notice that we keep the cushions on the back of the chairs instead of the seats because the outside cats love to curl up here, leaving mounds of cat hair. So much for human relaxation!

On the wall behind the seating area are metal sculptures that my husband Wayne made in his workshop.  To the left are male and female figures holding hands, looking like they are off to do something fun. Next is a figure Wayne named "La Azteca"  (the Aztec).  He even dressed her up in a pair of turquoise earrings.  The figure to the right is Kokopelli, the Native American fertility god, playing his usual flute.  Hidden by foliage in the summer time is another Kokopelli figure, this one playing an unexpected didgeridoo, an Australian musical instrument.

Two retro metal chairs with a small round table placed under a shady pecan tree next to an adobe horno (outdoor oven) provide another seating area.

Mother Earth, adorned with garden symbols such as corn, flowers, and a rake, keeps watch over our new Tucson Yard.  Wayne constructed her of rebar, a metal building material.

A roadrunner, fashioned by Wayne from a plow disc, a pipe and scrap metal, also adorns the Tucson Yard.

This roadrunner is made out of railroad spikes.

Sometimes though, garden decoration can be accomplished by simply re-purposing an item. This old deep fat cooker, made by a life-long friend of Wayne's in Del Rio, Texas, now is the perfect spot for an airplane plant to flourish in the summer in the shade of a pecan tree.

I'm not suggesting I'm giving up trying to coax a luxurious garden from the Desert Southwest, but meanwhile, these garden objects will feed my soul with good memories on early morning walks through the garden.