My wife’s family is Virginian. Mostly they were farmers, and watermen, tugboat type. They live and have lived in the tidewater counties East and South from Richmond Virginia.

When we first married we took a trip to their homes, one was the farm at seven Pines, the hundred acres that had been in the family since the war between the states. There we all pitched in to help uncle Heiter fertilize and hoe a patch of staked tomatoes, probably an acre or so. While we were busy hoeing, Aunt Ruby and Cousin Rowena were equally busy in the kitchen.

In the past the kitchen had been detached from the house to limit the fire hazard of the wood stove. Now there was an enclosed breezeway between the two where we all crowded into the dining table for dinner (lunch). One of the dishes was corn pudding (Cawn Puddin’).

After everybody else had their share, I emptied the dish.

Now, years later I am a living (still) legend where corn on the cob and corn pudding are concerned. But I paid dearly. I learned how a colicky horse feels.

Now I moderate,  and only take seconds of corn puddin’ (well, maybe seconds twice!)

Aunt Ruby Taylor’s corn pudding recipe:

2 cups cream style corn,
three eggs,
2 cups milk,
1 tablespoon melted butter,
1 teaspoon salt ,
A few grains of cayenne pepper  

Beat eggs, then add milk, seasonings, butter and corn. Put mixture in a shallow buttered one and a half quart baking dish. Bake in a pan of hot water at 350°F, until it will not adhere to knife inserted 1 inch from edge, about forty-five minutes to an hour. The hot water should be halfway up the pan, do not let water evaporate or the pudding may separate and become watery. Serves six–or two hungry Cowboys.

Now you know what farm life in the south tastes like!

We’ve had some storybook horses in the five decades of our life with equines. Probably one of the most memorable is the little Sorrel blaze-faced mare we knew as “Annie”.

She quietly changed our lives. A grand daughter of the mighty cutting horse Mr. San Peppy, she had flunked out of cutting school, and had been donated to the college as a lab horse. The professor who had her thought she deserved better than to become a statistic in scientific research, so he encouraged me to take her for a ranch horse.

When we got her she was a little bit lame, and had a big healed scar on her left shoulder, the same side as her blue eye, which made me wonder if she might be a little vision impaired on that side.

A known cutting horse trainer had worked her for a little after she arrived at the college and he said

“she shore has a pretty way of lookin’  at a cow!”

We discovered in her one of the fiercest cutters we’d ever known. She would cut out a cow and hold it, with no help from the rider and at times on a hard turn you could touch the ground with your stirrup.

She competed in the newly formed Texas reining horse Association, introduced countless riders to their first cutting horse (I can still hear them giggle as she ducked and dived to hold a cow) and did many exhibitions of work without a bridle.

Once I started a show saddled, coming into the arena bucking as she was always a little cold-backed and did a reining pattern. By the end of the fifteen minute show I was doing a reining pattern without bridle or saddle and standing on her back doing rope tricks and cracking a bullwhip.

Yeah, Annie was a piece of work!

As I walked through the mare pasture,  a blaze faced chestnut mare came up to me, and nuzzled my hand as I stood quietly in the dew sparkled morning Bermuda grass. I got to thinking about her ancestry.

Her daddy was a quarter horse I met out in the west Texas town of Fort Davis. They called him “bud”. He had some Poco Tivio breeding crossed with some Hancock. He was a big horse, but so well proportioned that if you weren’t  next to him he didn’t look big. However if you were next to him you’d be really close, because he was super friendly. He was even nice under saddle, so much so that riding him you wouldn’t know he was a stallion.

A real gentleman.

We bred him to a mare  whose daddy was named “Slim”. I remembered Slim as a cutting horse who worked best on really “bad” cows. Easy  cows bored him. But get him in front of a heifer who wanted to run over him and he was awesome! He was sired by a full brother of the famous “Jewels Leo bar” known as “freckles”. That brother was called “Son o sugar”. The mare Slim was bred to, was the daughter of a local stallion named Jody who was an incredible roping horse, a powerful cow horse, and a dream of a trail-riding, smooth, saddle horse.

My mind reeled back through the generations of this mare’s family and I realized that I knew all of them, I rode all of them and their genes were packed into her and the baby she was incubating. Other than feeling real old, it also made me feel proud and thankful for the gift of these great horses and for the decades of wonderful experiences they gave us.

Comino! The very word whispers “south of the border, down Mexico way.” I hear mariachi music when I smell its earthy tang! You may know it by it’s English name, cumin. This herb, common in most Mediterranean countries, like a weed, is the ground up part of a plant in the parsley family. . It is the second most used spice in the world, after black pepper. It is cousin to coriander, Caraway, fennel, and dill, all of which have aromatic properties and are used in spicy foods. Cumin was brought west by explorers in the 16th century, and is a major component of Mexican food, especially chili powder. To me it has an earthy, brown, aroma, almost reminiscent of dirty socks. However unappetizing that description may seem, I can’t imagine cooking without it. I was initiated to its wondrous flavor at about age nine when I was visiting my cousins in Arizona and ate my first hot tamales. The tingling of my tongue and palate was wonderful. The red and brown mixtures of taste and smell was instantly addictive! I chased that flavor for decades. When I learned to make enchilada sauce in the 60s, somehow I didn’t get the Comino part, just the wonder of New Mexico chili powder. Then, in a magic moment in Clovis New Mexico we learned from a mentor the effect of adding Comino in with the deep red chili powder. Now, it’s like breathing or walking—first Chili, and then Garlic, then Comino. Magnifico!