We missed
our 6:00 am. flight this morning because I forgot my passport and I had to return home to fetch it, so we had to pay $75.00 each
to re-book onto the next flight three hours later. We made it to Dallas by 11:45 instead of
8:45. I had packed bagels smeared with
goat cheese and garnished with capers, onion slices and gravad lax, so after
the 6:00 flight left and we had re-booked onto the next flight, Suzette and I sat in coffee ship area and drank
cups of chai and ate our breakfast bagel sandwiches.
Elaine
picked us up at the airport and after I fetched our bag from the first flight
drove to theDallas Simon's house, where we found Billy cooking green cabbage in a sweet
vinegar sauce and mashed sweet potatoes.
I handed Billy the bottle of 2013 Archery Summit rosé and gravad lax, which
he put it in the fridge to chill.
Rebecca was
at home for the holidays and at around 2:00 Rebecca began blanching haricot
vert and made a light caper, parsley and shallot sauce to garnish the beans.
Also, Elaine
also began cooking a dish of sautéed apples and onions.
Around 2:30
Jerry and Marion and their daughter, Celia, and Marion's mother Jessie, arrived bearing a roasted turkey, a big bowl of
dressing, brown gravy, a bowl of cranberry sauce and a bowl of cranberry
chutney. Jessie, brought a bottle of 2012 Edna Valley Chardonnay.
Then Sandy
and Rita Holsweig, Elaine and Jerry’s Dad and Mother, arrived. Rita is a world class baker and this year she
baked four pies; an apple, a pumpkin, a pecan and a chocolate pecan.
Jerry sliced
the turkey and by 3:00 we started putting food on the table and assembling
around the table. We were ten counting
Celia, who was enthralled with a book didn’t join us until the pies were served
at the end of the meal.
I picked up the dark meat platter and took
a thigh and slip it in half and served Suzette ½ of the thigh. Then we passed the food bowls and platters
and each took portions of Marion’s cranberry sauce, Bill’s sweet and sour
cabbage, Rebecca’s string beans lightly garnished with their shallot, parsley
and caper sauce, Elaine’s sautéed onions and apples, Marion’s dressing and
Jerry’s roasted turkey and the brown gravy and Bill’s sweet potatoes. It soon
became apparent that over the years of joining together for Thanksgiving
dinners that every member of the Holswieg/Simon/Sackler family unit had self-selected to cook their best
dish.
Rebecca made
a similar string bean dish for our Christmas party when they last visited a
year or two ago. Rita baked and Jerry
made his wonderful roasted turkey as he did for last year’s Thanksgiving
dinner at their house and Marion made lots of things again this year as she did
last year. It seems that the host and
hostess fill in any gaps and this year that meant that Billy did the sweet
potatoes, the cabbage. and a lovely appetizer of chopped chicken liver with egg and chopped
onion and slices of French baguette.
We opened
the wines and soon found that the 2013 Archery Summit rosé was not chilled
enough, so we added cubes of ice to it.
The rosé tasted slightly dry at first.
As we ate the rosé opened up in our glasses and soon took on a really
strong character and tasted fruitier and more full bodied. Billy, Suzette and I
mainly drank it and Billy agreed that it tasted great (Jubilation’s $30.00).
After the
meal Billy served Armangac, Calvados, and two Piere William brandies and we all
took slices of Rita’s pies and Elaine served tea and coffee.
After
everyone left, I took an hour nap and awoke at around 7:00 to find that Elaine and Rebecca had gone shopping and Suzette resting beside me in the bed. Suzette would not budge, so I left her and went to see what Billy was doing.
When I
told Billy that I wanted to go buy a bottle of wine to take to Mexico, we
discussed the 2011 Domaine de Gueneau Sancerre of which he had an empty bottle of on his
counter. Billy called to find if it was in stock and then drove us to their
nearest Central Market. When we arrived
at the Central Market wine department, I went a little crazy. A young man who was very knowledgeable about
the wines helped me. It seemed that he
had drunk all the wines and had a lot of favorites he could recommend. There was also a table with several wines and
champagnes for tasting. After we tasted
and talked and he found out that I like dry white wines and needed something
that would complement shellfish, he recommended an Austrian Grüner Veltliner white for a dry wine to take to Mexico. Since we already had a Sancerre in the grip, I
chose it, as well as a new bottle of E red, which was a blend of Monastrell,
Tempranillo, Grenache and Carignan grapes rated over 90 points ($17.99) for
Rebecca’s roasted lamb dinner tomorrow evening and bought the Sancerre for Billy to replenish his cellar.
When we arrived
home we found Rebecca and Elaine playing Scrabble and sipping small glasses of
the Spanish liquor made at the Monastery in the Rioja that we almost visited
when we all traveled to Northern Spain several years ago with its distinct
European juniper flavor that we found in many other liquors in the Basque region that I generally think of as falling within the 1000 flowers of the Pyrenees category.
I took a
glass of the liquor and Billy and I retired to the TV viewing area and Billy
put on a CD he had bought called “Dirt Road to Psychedelia” by Scott Conn, which
chronicled the folk music and hippie cultural scene in Austin in the 60’s which was
when Billy and I went to UT, I attended from 1964 to 1970 and Billy
attended UT from 1966 to 1970.
As the movie
soon proved, those were not only formative and momentous years for us, but for
lots of other people who attended UT and was the period that gave birth to the Austin music
scene, that has only gotten stronger over the years.
We saw lots
of people we knew back then, including a credit to David Ambur, who was the
younger brother of Karen Ambur, who I knew because she was a friend of my then
housemate Steve Salinger, from Houston. I recall that David was really taken by the counterculture and also liked photography
and must have taken lots of photos and footage in that era.
Billy and I
agreed that we were not into the Hippie movement because we were in Jewish
fraternities and those two groups did not mix until around 1968/1969, when the
hippie psychedelic culture became dominant.
Billy and I were actually a bit ahead of the curve because we moved out
of the fraternity house and world and lived at different College Houses starting around 1967, which
was a much more unstructured and more countercultural environment.
I remember lots of stories from that era, such as hanging out and playing volleyball at College House with Bill Bennett, who was a graduate philosophy student at UT under John Silber who taught an Ethics course that I took one semester. I still find it ironic that Bill Bennett taught me ethics.
Another story that demonstrates an aspect of the nascent hippie
culture is that I met a girl once who was attending UT on what she called a
$200 per semester budget. She obviously came from a poorer family and her
entire budget for the semester, besides books and labs, was $200.00. A friend let her stay at her house and she
bought one five lb. bottle of peanut butter at the beginning of the semester and bought a loaf
of white bread every week and ate only peanut butter sandwiches every
day. In those days people could still do
that.
Billy and I were in a different
world; but in some respects just as insular a world. For
the first two years of our stay in Austin, we lived and took our meals and
partied at our fraternity houses with the sons and daughters of mostly Texas
Jewish families (Billy was an AEPi and I was a ZBT/Phi Sig), but we would buy prime
beef steaks and good French wine on the weekends, when the fraternity house
kitchen was closed, and cook simple but great French meals with asparagus and
béarnaise sauce and baked potatoes and go see visiting folk singer like, Doc Watson.
After I left the fraternity world I was invited to join a small group
of people who were addicted to or sought to be addicted to French food and
culture, who got together on Friday nights to cook meals. When I earlier complained about the lack of
inspiration in the food served at the fraternity house to Mother, she gave me a copy
of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" by Julia Child and a Sabatier
cooks knife with a 7 inch blade and said, “I guess you will have to learn to cook, darling.” The only member of the cooking group I recall now was Carolyn
Brooks from Port Arthur or Beaumont and of course Terry Teague from Fort Worth,
who may have invited me into the group.
The point is
that the dirt road is quite descriptive of the lack of resources that many
students at UT faced and the irony is that because of their reduced circumstances many of the poorer students gravitated to the folk music life style and that group included several musically talented persons who became some of the icons of the psychedelic rock era like, Chet
Helms and Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter and Freddy King.
Of course, many members of the folk music scene did not suffer from a lack of
resources, like Cary Marcus of the Neiman-Marcus family, who was a folk singer,
who I used to go see play at the Rubaiyat folk
club on McKinney Avenue in
Dallas.
We were
attracted to the folk music scene through our association with Boy Scouts and
Explorers where we had a strong group of musicians and singers and liberal
thinkers. I recall going to a New Lost
City Ramblers concert at TCU in 1962 or 1963, promoted by Heard Floore, Jr. and
others associated with our Explorer group.
Billy also reminded me tonight that two of our Explorer advisors, Louis
Page and Dink Starns, had opened the first beatnik coffee house on Camp Bowie
in Fort Worth in 1959 and 1960 called the Black Beret.
After
watching “Dirt Road to Psychedelia” and talking with Billy and our wonderful Thanksgiving Day meal, at
10:30 we all turned in.
Bon Appétit
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