Suburban Deluxe

A Grand Day Out

I know I've said it before, but one of the best things about living in Houston is leaving it... there are so many interesting places just a few hours away; it's one of my favourite things to have a semi-early start on a Saturday or a Sunday and go driving out to somewhere new (or old!).

A few tell-tale clues will reveal that this trip actually took place in mid-October last year, but due to aforementioned laptop issues I didn't get to post the pictures until now.

Old Courthouse - Blanco. We went in and looked at historic photos which lined the hallways on the ground floor - fascinating!

The current Blanco Municipal Court. I guess while you wait to be judged you sit in the porch swing and compose your mind.

I have to confess that I have developed a real taste for proper Barbecue, since living here - and this sort of place, somewhat rough-and-ready, one-off places in small towns, tend to have the very best. As witnessed below (that's for Dave AND me - I'm not quite such a piggy as to be able to eat all that alone!):

Above and below - Wildlife Garden and seed farm.

Courtyard of an antique store in Fredericksburg (our actual destination, but it took us most of the day to get there, as we stopped off so much!)

The eight-sided church in central Fredericksburg. It was in a park in the main part of town, which was holding a mesquite festival the weekend we were there - lovely handmade furniture, Christmas decorations, and similar.

An Absurdity of Gagas

If you decided, one random Friday night, to try the new 'Imperia Bar and Grill', located in a just-like-all-the-others strip mall and advertised at the roadside as 'Russian Cuisine', what would you expect?

Well, probably not this:

Eight waitresses, for four customers (including the two of us), all dressed as Lady Gaga. They had her music and videos playing too, and pictures up all over the walls and windows... it was clearly not their usual practice, either, as they spent most of the evening scurrying around admiring themselves in the mirrors, taking photos of each other, and otherwise being amused by themselves... when, upon leaving, we asked what the occasion was, we were told, 'Nothing; we just decided to do this tonight.'

(Dave and I discussed what the proper collective noun for a group of Gagas should be... we came up with, and rejected, 'an excess' and 'a banality' before deciding on 'an absurdity'. Do you agree?)

Bluebonnet season

Springtime in Texas is far more beautiful than the harshness of the summer might indicate. The best of it is really to be seen in the hill country, as far as I have heard, though unfortunately I've not been able to see that for myself... however I was fortunate enough to be at a conference in San Antonio the weekend before last, and we (my colleague Melanie and I) detoured a little north on the way home to see if we could find any bluebonnets. And we did.

Step back in time

One of the things I like the most in Texas is to get out of Houston and drive around in the countryside. You can find such interesting and pretty places, within a couple of hours of the big city, so even a day trip can be great. I know I've blogged on some of these small towns before, but I never get tired of exploring them, so expect more from time to time!

Recently we made a great discovery - the newly renovated Sengelmann Hall, in Schulenburg (Schulenburg features in my Off the Map post, back in 2008 - you can actually see the unrenovated Sengelmann Hall in the first Schulenburg photo in that entry).

Apparently, the guy who bought it has spent many many dollars on it, and the result is a charming blend of old and new:

A big open eating area, with a low stage and what looks like the original backdrop,

walls scraped back to their original colours, and the shop next door turned into the kitchen (the open doorway in the far wall leads into the kitchen),

a Biergarten out the back - with fully-grown trees brought in to grow and shade it...



...and a perfectly reproduced copy of the original, elaborate bar, serving (among other things) a menu of 'Pre-Prohibition Cocktails' (Dave tried the Corpse Reviver #2; I had a Floridita and later a Moscow Mule).



The food is great, German and Czech inspired, and made from local ingredients where possible... and they have regular live music, both downstairs in the dining room and upstairs in the dance hall. Read more about Sengelmann Hall on their website; don't forget to check out the menu, and of course the photos of before and after!

I hereby issue a standing invitation: anyone who comes to visit us will be taken to Sengelmann Hall (time and inclination permitting) and regaled with some of the best food and drink Texas has to offer. Come one, come all!

* Just a reminder that you can click on any of my blog photos to see a larger version of the picture - I know some of the details can be lost in the smaller versions.

I paid a dollar.

I saw a camel.

The road less travelled

Driving home on Friday (the snowy day), we decided to take a different, more picture-skew, road to normal, and had the promised reward for 'taking the road less travelled'... in true Houston style there was nowhere to park, or even walk, for quite a length of it, so we had to walk briskly along the road itself, and stand on a tiny inch or two of shoulder (without sliding down into the ditch) when cars passed, but it was worth it!





Less fun after-effects of the snow - quite a few of our more tender plants outside in the garden are now blackened and dead - most of the ferns, the bougainvillea, the hibiscus, the basil, other more tropical plants... we were able to zip up the little greenhouse, and the seedlings in there all survived, and we covered the lemon and it seems to have done ok, but a lot of the rest, even some quite large trees, have lost all the prettiness they had just a few days ago, which is a shame. I hope some of them will recover in the spring.

We've also had quite a bit of water get into the house, seemingly through the base of the wall, into the kitchen - the water is lying between the two layers of floor (new flooring was lazily placed over old flooring, by the people who had the house before us) so it's quite difficult to dry it out! The same thing happened, on a smaller scale, after Ike, and it got back to normal after a few weeks, so we hope to sort things out eventually.

Oh, and for those who asked about the video clip in the previous post - Rebecca made it, and sent it to us; I thought it was too funny not to share ;)

Things to Do in Houston: Central Market Cooking School

Central Market is a special, up-market version of our local H-E-B supermarket (roughly a Coles or Tesco equivalent for those not in the US). We probably visit Central Market, which is located downtown, about once a month, for special things our local H-E-B doesn't stock - we can get Bonne Maman jams there, for instance, and fresh lamb, as well as a huge variety of cheeses and breads, along with all sorts of marvellous fresh produce. It's not particularly cheap, but it's great fun to visit, and worth it for treats.

Throughout the year, the Central Market Cooking School offers all sorts of culinary courses - from sushi to soufflés, cupcakes to tapas. Dave and I spotted a fantastic looking class on Whole Grain Breads, but when we tried to register it was already full. However, on Friday the organisers called me and said they'd had a cancellation, so Saturday morning saw us out bright and early for a breakfast of quiche and potato latke in the café downstairs before heading up to the cooking school.


We sat at tables of four - our table partners were Jill and Heather, both great fun - and were instructed from the front by our instructor, Marian. The class was a mixture of do-it-yourself and learning skills, so one recipe was made from scratch, the second used dough prepared earlier that morning, and the third was a demonstration (though we did get to eat the results!)


(Don't you love it when a camera catches a split-second expression you'd never normally see on someone's face?!)


My hands were too doughy to take any photos earlier in the process than this, but this is my loaf of Rye Sandwich Bread, sprinkled with caraway and a tiny bit of salt, and ready to go into the oven.


Here are our table's Currant Brioche Braid Coffee Cakes - somehow I got the lion's share of currants in my piece of dough, and as they'd been soaking in rum it was a heady experience! Plus it made the dough quite hard to form... the result was excellent though so I think worth the extra effort.



Our loaves at home... we stopped on the way to get some things at the hardware, and as we've had record-breaking heat here this past week, the car was literally like an oven when we got back into it; not only were the bread containers almost as hot as when they'd been removed from the oven at the end of the class, but the car was filled with the most heavenly smells!

Update #1 - Hell and High Water

Our floodwaters have now largely receded - well, they're confined to the reservoirs, at least, which are still fuller than full - but it took some time for that to happen! For days after the initial downpours, water remained at about the levels it had been at the height of the flooding; some of the roads cleared within a day or two (like Clay Road, the photo through the mist with the cars all stranded in my original post), but some of the others stayed closed for weeks. One of the most interesting was the closure of Highway 6 - a major road - despite the extreme inconvenience and huge traffic jams caused by its being out of action, we found it interesting enough to go and explore it one morning (it was closed for about five days, including over a weekend).



It was very odd to stand in the middle of a road down which we would normally hurtle at a rate of about 60mph! We saw one utility truck, one cyclist and a jogger during our stroll, but otherwise what was most noticeable was the quiet, and the sounds of wildlife - apart from a distant hum of traffic from Highway 10, a mile or so to the south, we remarked that it could have been a post-apocalyptic scene; no one left alive but us...



Also interesting were the playing fields along Clay Road, and the golf courses there and on Highway 6 - they were almost completely underwater, and I laughed one morning as I passed the golf course to see technicians out on a little island trying to stop the automatic sprinklers which had come on!





All of these photos were taken a couple of weekends ago; most places remained underwater for at least a week and a half after that, but in the last few days have dried out rapidly, and there is now a faint green fuzz of new grass in most of the muddy fields, and life has gone back to normal in most places. It'll be interesting to see what happens if we get another big lot of rain, though, as the reservoirs don't have much empty space! And of course, hurricane season is about to start...