Salsa . . .

About the time we were leaving Arizona for Ohio, we visited friends en route in Tucson, AZ.  We happened to go to a local swap meet held in an area near the Pantano Wash.  A wash is sort of a dry wadi as found in North Africa.  When, and that was a rare thing, there was a good healthy rain storm, the wash turns in to a raging torrent of flood waters.  So this area was located in good residential area but some what uninhabitable because of the close proximity to the wash.

As we perused though the junk so to speak, we found a family selling Desert Rose salsa, their brand name, out of the trunk of an old dilapidated car.  So we bought a couple of quart jars of the stuff and found it to be absolutely superior.  It had great taste and flavor.

A year or two later while visiting Tucson again we tracked it down to high end department stores.  It had grown in reputation and moved beyond the trunks of cars the shelves of fancy places.  They had even come out with a new issue called "Commeertavio."  Generally meaning commemorative and it was commemorative.  By then we had progressed to the "hot" version of the salsa and the Commeratavio was a step a beyond that but very tasty.

We started at that point of tracking down the maker and found we could mail order the stuff.  And so in our travels we would around Christmas time get a whole case of the stuff sent to us.  This went on for years.

Later, in California while working for Rockwell International in San Bernardino, on Fridays we would bring snacks in and that gravitated to salsa and chips.  Finally we reached the point where we brought in our favorite commercial salsas and rated them.  Desert Rose was the champ.  And was in great demand.

By then we could get the salsa at high end specialty grocery stores in California.  It was now an off the shelf product.  We no longer had to order from Tucson, we could get it in Redlands.

Years later we ended up in Tucson working for Raytheon and the local high end food stores had it on the shelf.  That was really pleasing to us.  In fact, that was about the only time we ever went to that grocery store was to get salsa and we bought all they had in stock.

Then it disappeared.  It was not to be had.  It seems the company sold out to a bigger operation and then was discontinued.

So we looked of a suitable substitute and did not find one anywhere.  Later while now living in Ruidoso, New Mexico, I found a salsa put up by an elderly lady in a small town of LaLuz.  LaLuz is between Terazozo and Alamagordo, NM.  There was a Pistachio company that sold it at their store on the high way between those to towns.  It was close to Desert Rose so we began ordering salsa from the Pistachio people.

Just a few months ago we passed through that area and stopped at the store to pick some pistaschios and salsa.  Well we got the pistachios alright, but the elderly lady had retired.  There was no more LaLuz Salsa to be had.  It seems she could not get her family to help her make the salsa and it had become to much of a burden to her.

None of the local salsas like Joe T. Garcias comes close to Desert Rose or LaLuz.  I guess our tastes are not compatible with the local desires.  We keep looking and trying but it just is not the same.

An era has past.  We enjoyed it but it is no more.  Times have changed.

Ebola . . .

Ebola.  We are learning more and more about it day by day.  It seems we are as up to speed as the Center for Disease Control.

The two secondary cases from Dallas have been moved by the government to higher isolation facilities, one in Atlanta, GA and one in and around Washington D. C.  That unloads the local hospital from the terrible load of treating and isolating the patients.  And the local hospital has turned into a empty palace for the sick.  Patients are cancelling even cancer operations in dire fear of Ebola infection.

It is clear the President has failed to recognize the dangers, or at underestimated the danger.  The CDC has clearly muffed it in all directions.  We learn to day the Frontier Jet, allegedly cleaned three times, has never been taken out of service.  Could thousands now be suspect?  Who approved this nurse's travel plans?

Now a lab person is self quarantined on a cruise ship down in the Gulf of Mexico.  The Mexican government will not let the passengers to embark into Mexico.  The ship is on its way back to Galveston.  I foresee that it will be quarantined and cleaned to (meaning disinfected from stem to stern).  Who let this nut to go on a cruise!

 People are acting stupid including our government. People on volunteer quarantine go out to get their favorite soup.  Now the President as appointed a Czar to manage things - a lawyer.  Give me a break.  We don't need some dam Democratic lacky, we need a competent doctor to be the Ebola Czar.  There are certainly many more experience physicians with disease and disease control that some dam lawyer.  Just another stupid thing by the current administration.

Fox News just had an expert on disease incubation periods say that the 21 day incubation time is a 30 year old number.  He has studied the numbers and infection can occur 30 to 35 days after exposure.  Another study out of Minneapolis says Ebola may have mutated into an airborne virus (I hope not or else we are doomed by the inept central government enamored with being politically correct.)

Will they wake up?  God save us!

The Oaks . . .

We have two red oak trees in the front yard.  They are Shumard Oaks, relatively fast growing trees.

The one in front of the window I look out everyday is the larger of the two oaks.  I think it has to do with the soil.  The top soil on the left side of the front was scraped off to level the lot for the house.  So naturally  the soil is not as nutritional as the soil on the right side.  So the tree on the right is bigger, and grows faster than the one on the left side.  Both have been treated for "Oak Wilt" and that treatment seemed to perk them up a bit.  Both have been fertilized a couple of times and of course the grass has been treated three or four times a year.

Any way the tree on the right is a little more than a foot in diameter now, rising up well above the roof line of our house.  It is quite stately.   I reminds me of the Pen Oak we had in the front yard in New Roads when I was growing up.  That tree was about 75 years old, when lightening struck it, and started an internal fire.  It must have smolder for a year, all remnants are gone from the tree.

I discover yesterday the Shumard has dropped its acorns.  That is a sign of maturity, I understand it takes usually 12 years of age before they produce any fruit.  Since we have volunteer growing in the flower bed (which the deer keep eating the top off) I am sure it produced acorns last year.  But this year there is a bumper crop of rather large sized acorns.  The Burr Oak produces the largest acorns I have ever seen, almost an inch in diameter.  These are about an half inch in diameter.

So I policed up a few of them and will see if I can get them to grow.  We have a ton of Post Oak acorns floating around.  They are smaller in size.  The Post Oak is a notoriously slow growing oak tree, takes maybe 50 years to be a 10 inch in diameter tree.  And they never get very big, die off before for any number of reasons.  They do not tolerate much of anything around them, animals, yards, fertilizers and so on.  I have seen them just die in the middle of the summer for no apparent reason, healthy one day and dead the next.

We do have a Barkley Oak on the side yard that is a volunteer.  There are a few of them scattered around the neighborhood.   They too are members of the "red" oak family, have a similar leaf as the Shumard but have the distinction of not dropping their leaves in the fall.  Their old leaves are pushed off in the spring by new growth.  But it is also a relatively fast growing tree.  I even tried to cut it down once when it was just a two or three footer.  But later we cut down the Hackberry tree that was next to it.  We managed to save it and it is now up about 20 feet and trunk is about four inches in diameter.  A Post Oak the same age is near by and is all of three feet high and about an half inch in diameter.

I had to pull up an Shumard in the back yard that had died.  It was pot bound when planted and when I pulled it up (it was quite dead at the time) the tap root was all coiled up and it had literally chocked itself to death.  I will try to get one of the volunteer oaks to grow there or maybe if successful with by planted acorns will put one of them there.

We have about 30 Post Oaks in the back.  There is one Elm, three large Hackberries (trash trees but produce shade), a smaller Hackberry.  We have two Peach trees off to the left in the back but they have maybe five or six more years before they will die off.  None of those threes are close enough to the house except for one Hackberry to produce an shade for the house.

There are lots of oaks in our neighborhood and most have been well taken care of.   Makes the place look good.

Back from the Big Easy . . .

Every year near our wedding anniversary we travel to New Orleans and stay in the French Quarter.  We try to stay at the Monteleon Hotel but could not get a room there this year.  We stay around the corner in the Hyatt French Quarter.  That was a mistake not of our choosing, the Hyatt is not a bad hotel, but the Monteleon is a great hotel.

We had learned not to arrive there on a Monday, all the good restaurants are closed Monday.  So we arrived on a Tuesday, we stay over night en route at the camp on False River.  WE ate at Not Your Mama's in Livonia as all the good restaurants in New Roads are also closed on Monday.

We noted the lake is down at least two feet, maybe a bit more.  This is a biologist pipe dream of rejuvenating the lake.  I think it is a large waste of time.  However the dredging to be conducted in the flats at each end sounds like a great idea.  I understand they will just the dredge materials to build two islands, one at each end of the lake.  The spoil from the dredging is to be used to create the islands.  The dredging is to deepen the ends of the lake that have filled in from farm field run off over the many years.  All this is said to bring life back into the lake.

We trolled around in Baton Rouge a bit, visited LSU, stopped at the book store and bought a few things.  We also ate lunch at the Piccadilly Cafeteria out on Essen Lane.  That was yum, but we did not over do it as New Orleans was calling us.

The first night we ate at our traditional place, Galitore's.  As usual, it was outstanding and great service.  The second night we ate at Antoine's, we had been trying to get there for some time.  Unfortunately, while the food was adequate, it was not as good as Galitore's.  We were disappointed.  In fact we ranked the place behind the Red Fish Grill and ranked Galitore's as the best of the best in the French Quarter.

He ate breakfast every day at Café DuMonde - benguies and coffee for me, coke for Judie.  As usual the coffee and benguies are unchanged but I recall the pouring of coffee and mill from two pots into your cup, a practice long gone.  We also trolled through French Market and had our blacked catfish po boy for lunch.  And then we visited Aunt Sallies and bought pralines.  Naturally we partook of the samples.

It was sad driving out of New Orleans, in the rain, heading home again.  But we made it back in one piece and racked up another visit to the Big Easy.