Janice Williams Loves Austin

I thought all morning about the entry I would write about performing last night with the Geezinslaws at the Broken Spoke. I visited with Mr. White and nice listeners like Bob and Virginia and Rich. It will be a good entry, but I got busy instead making a turkey dinner and never got around to the writing.

For Thanksgiving, Mark and I had a hospital turkey dinner and no leftovers. On the drive home, we debated what constitutes the “must haves” of a good turkey meal. Yes, turkey and dressing are required, but also homemade rolls and pie. I added cranberry sauce, though Mark detests it. I have been considering making a turkey dinner since then and decided today was the day. I didn’t want to do it on Christmas because I really would like Christmas Day to be a day of rest.

No rest today. I cooked a big ol’ turkey, two pans of dressing, gravy, homemade rolls, candied yams (NO, no marshmallows, I don’t like that), green pea salad, green beans, ambrosia salad (yes, with marshmallows here), cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and apple pie. I don’t think of apple pie going well with this kind of a meal, but Mark thinks apple pie should go with every meal, so I made it for him.

Some observations:

• Carving a turkey and packaging up the leftovers is almost enough to make a vegetarian out of me.
• Making everything time out so it is all hot and delicious on the table at one time is an art I have not mastered.
• Making a great apple pie is an art I have mastered.
• Making great dressing is an art I have mastered (I started when I was 10, so I am experienced at it).
• It’s days like this that I wish we had a dining room. Eating in our kitchen while the counters were still piled high with pans and dishes kills the ambiance (so I sat with my back to it).
• Using soda when the recipe calls for powder will ruin a batch of cornbread.
• I don’t know how anyone keeps clean cookbooks. I know they make those stands that protect them and some people slip them into a plastic bag, but none of that would work for me because I’m flipping pages and looking at different recipes in the same book. The advantage, of course, is that the Joy of Cooking opens right up to the pie crust recipe because that page has been smeared with lard and flour over and over. (Disclaimer:  The Joy of Cooking does not advise the use of lard, that was my own secret ingredient discovery). And the recipe for homemade rolls in Better Homes and Gardens (the 1977 version) is all smeared with flour and water, too.
• Aprons make sense. But I still don’t wear one.
• This makes me appreciate Mom, Mamma Williams, Mamma Hallford, my sister Mackie, Aunt Leta, Aunt Dorothy, Aunt Louie, Mark’s grandmother Lena, his Aunt Carolyn, and every other woman in our families who has put together meals like this and made it look so effortless.
• It is a lot more fun to enjoy the full turkey meal when someone else has prepared it (not that I’m complaining!).

There’s been so much going on and so much to report, I could be here all night, but let me give you a quick recap of the annual Mark and Janice vacation. We set aside some days to go on vacation months ago and I put them on the calendar, not knowing that unemployment would come knocking on the door. We decided it was still important that we make a quick trip and that’s what we had.

First I went to Dallas earlier in the week and brought my mother home with me. Mom was going to act as kitty-sitter to grand-kitties Nathan Jr. and Willie while we were gone.

Friday, Mark and I hit the road… to downtown Austin. I wondered if we would have started our vacation in our hometown if we lived in any other city? But downtown it was with a big Mexican food lunch at Las Manitas. How many more lunches will I get there? I don’t know, so I loaded up on the chicken enchiladas mole again.

We went to the Armadillo Bazaar on the opening day. A great place to be while it was cold and gray and rainy outside. I think we mainly found Christmas gifts for ourselves. I checked out the Texamericana booth. Texamericana is an organization created by musician Barbara Kooyman (remember when she did “The Futures So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades” in Timbuk 3?). Their purpose it to help independent musicians sell music and support public and independent radio stations all at the same time. Great mission. I’m going to be helping them at their booth on Thursday at night, Saturday in the day and then on Christmas Eve at night. I hope you’ll come by and see us at the booth. Cool people. Cool purpose.

We drove on to the metropolis of San Marcos and did some more shopping there at the outlet malls. More gifts for us! And we found a few gifts for some of the others on our gift list (which is, fortunately, very short).

Next up? Gruene. Mark and I had a lovely stop in beautifully decorated Gruene, Texas. You can’t help but be in the Christmas spirit there with the lights on the water tower and on all the old buildings lining the street. Now, for the sake of the story, I should tell you that we heard and saw Jerry Jeff Walker at his sold out show. I wouldn’t be lying if I said that, but it would be a little bit of a fib by omission. We had not planned to be in Gruene on this Friday night, so we didn’t have tickets. But we did hear Jerry Jeff because you can hear a band in Gruene Hall all over Gruene. And we even saw him and the band through the cracks in the walls/windows. Django Walker was playing along with Dad and we heard “Gettin’ By” (my new theme song), Up Against the Wall, and then Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the classic that Jerry Jeff and Django recorded on the Gonzo Christmas album when Django was about 12 years old. We tried to eat at the Grist Mill, but their Friday night crowd was pretty stout, too, and we didn’t want to wait. So we had a beautiful night at the Grist Mill, Gruene Hall and listening to the music and we didn’t spend a dime!

Our destination for the night was Goliad. We have been to the presidio and mission on previous trips, but never when they were open for tours and that was where we wanted to be when daylight came. So we forged ahead and made our way across to Gonzales and Cuero and Goliad. The courthouses in all the little towns were beautiful. We really enjoyed seeing the nightlights in small town Texas.

The motels along the way weren’t much, so we did make it all the way to Goliad and to the slim choice of motels there. Very slim. Ah well, the unemployed can’t be staying at Marriotts and Hiltons on vacation. My Aunt Billie always brings her own sheets and blankets when she travels and never, ever, gets into a motel bed. This weekend I realized she may have a point.

Okay, let’s just skip on ahead. I don’t want to recall too much about the Budget Inn.

After the rain and the cold of Friday, Saturday was bright and sunny. Quite windy and the wind made it feel colder than it was, but at least the sun was out and it was dry. We had a lovely breakfast at the Emprasario Restaurant on the town square of Goliad. I recommend it. I felt like a food critic because we seemed to order one of everything and found it all to be delicious. Mark declared the refried beans the best he’d ever had.

On to the beautiful Nuestra Señora de la Bahía del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga Mission. A beautiful place with an amazing history, going back to 1749. And the beginnings of Texas ranching were here as the priests and Spaniards and native Americans gathered cattle and raised them (even drove them to feed Spanish soldiers on the coast that were aiding in the American Revolution). We spent time in the chapel, lit a candle for my cousin who is very sick, and walked around the grounds imagining life there 250 years ago. We had a weaving demonstration from a park volunteer, too. I certainly knew what a spinning wheel was, but, honestly, I didn’t know how one worked. Now I sort of have an idea. It is hard to fathom what our forefathers had to go through to make a simple shirt.

On next to the presidio across the river. It also has a beautiful chapel that was for the soldiers of the fort and for the townspeople of La Bahia that sprang up around the fort walls.

This is the chapel and fort that James Fannin and his men were held in and then massacred in March of 1836, just after the Alamo battle. We visited the chapel and toured the fort museum and were in awe of the restoration. The chapel is original while the rest of the fort had fallen into disrepair and had to be recreated.

Outside of the fort was a recreated home of General Zaragosa, the hero of the Battle of Puebla in Mexico when the Mexican forces defeated the French forces in 1862. That’s the battle that is celebrated on Cinco de Mayo. I had no idea that the hero of that battle was “a Texan.” Of course, he was born here when it was still Mexican territory.

We drove over to the monument honoring Fannin and his men . . . over 350 deaths in that massacre on Santa Anna’s order.

Still lots of daylight ahead of us and we had fulfilled our mission of seeing Goliad’s monuments. So why not go to the coast? We continued south through Refugio and on to Port Aransas. It is certainly the down season in Port A and a lot of businesses were closed. But we were mainly there to see the Gulf, which never closes. It has always amazed me that cars are allowed to drive on Mustang Island’s beaches and you can just drive and drive for miles. We headed south on the beach, stopped and walked a bit, and drove some more. The wind was blowing a gale along the beach and the waves were high. But the winds were blowing outward and were knocking the tops off of the waves and sending the spray backward. The sand on the beach was blowing and creating snaking along, dropping back into the ocean to be pushed back to the beach again.

Looks like we’re on a cruise, doesn’t it?

Enough beach and wind and cold, we headed to a restaurant. I think it was the Pelican or something like that (aren’t they ALL something like that at the coast). In their front window they advertised the music they bring in to perform and there was a Derailers t-shirt on display. It surprised me. I felt a million miles from home, but here was a shirt of my friends’ band.

We had some killer monster-sized shrimps and got our fill of the coastal life. It was 5:30. At this point we felt like we had done just about everything that needed to be done to feel like we were on vacation. So what to do? Head home, we decided. We’d rather sleep in our own bed than have another night at a Budget Inn (which we would NOT let happen, that’s for sure) and we came back to Austin. Mom didn’t even get her fill of kitty-sitting or enjoying our house. And she didn’t have time to get started on making more fudge and the traditional Christmas Chex mix.

So now it is time to think about Christmas ahead and all that takes place between now and then. There are Christmas parties, lots of great music, and I’m going to address Christmas cards at some point between now and Dec. 25, too. I’m glad to be home. Living in Austin is enough vacation for me.