Food in the Desert

A generational cafe in west Texas, and food as the ultimate connector.

West Texas, about an hour outside of Talpa

Years ago, there was a diner in the middle of west Texas that was owned by my great-great grandmother, then by my great-grandmother, and then eventually, the building was sold by my grandmother.  It was called the El Rancho Café, in a tiny town that no one has ever heard of called Talpa, population 197.  The food that was cooked in the café was cooked by my great-great grandmother, then by my great-grandmother, and then helped out by my grandmother.  It was simple, rural-rancher food.  It was southern, country cooking: green beans, potatoes, chili, salmon croquettes, roast beef sandwiches, hamburgers (cooked thin and flat), okra gumbo, and fried green tomatoes.  My great-grandmother (who I knew, remembering her best for making me vanilla milkshakes in a silver milkshake blender) cooked fried chicken every Sunday.  She had been taught by my great-great grandmother to cook the chicken in lard in a black cast-iron skillet—years later, my grandmother then switched from lard to peanut oil, who later taught my mom the same recipe.  When I started making her fried chicken and asked my mom for the recipe, I nixed the peanut oil (which is inflammatory for the body), switching it out for a grass-fed lard that I rendered myself.  Without even knowing, I had switched back to my great-great grandmother’s original recipe:  cooking it in lard, from a real farm pig, in black cast-iron skillet.

I found this out by asking my uncle Tony a million questions when we visited his house in Houston. Because I knew there was a short-term farm job we could apply for in New Mexico, I knew we would be driving through West Texas.  I wondered if we could drive past the site of the El Rancho Café (we didn’t—it was out of the way this time around).  I knew I’d been there when I was little, but I didn’t really remember it.  I always heard so much about it—it’s the reason why my dad likes his burger patties so flat and thin, almost burnt, and where my grandmothers made what they famously called “dippin’ eggs”, a term for sunnyside eggs where your toast is just a vehicle to dip into the golden liquid pool of the yolk.  “Dippin’ eggs” are still what my dad calls them, what I call them, and what my sons now call them.

My great-grandmother was very much tied to the cafe, figuratively and literally (the house they all lived in was attached to it).  It made enough money but was a lot of work, and she worked all of the time.  Her husband, my great grandfather, was a paraplegic from a car accident.  He worked as an insurance salesman, and was not able to help her in the kitchen.  She did all of the cooking.  Eventually, my grandmother, her daughter, helped at the café too.  They were like a lot of people in west Texas at that time: living in a rural environment and getting by how they could. It was the only cafe in town, so it was a good business.   My other great- grandparents (on my dad’s dad’s side, my grandfather’s side) were ranchers, living nearby in another tiny west Texas town.   My great-grandfather on that side was called Daddy John; he wore a big cowboy hat and spurs.  They had a big garden, raised animals to butcher, had a milk cow, and made a living selling off some sheep that they raised.  “I didn’t know they grew that much food,” I told my uncle.  “Oh yeah,” he said, “they raised all of their own food.”

Talpa, TX. My dad and my great-grandparents, holding me as a baby, outside of the cafe. A “closed” sign hangs on the door.

Sometimes a line exists when you are in a family, like an invisible string, a spider’s thread, connecting everyone.  I loved my grandparents more than anything.  I have a cassette tape from when I was young, maybe eight, where I interviewed my grandfather.  Though the audio is muffled, you can hear our thick Texas accents crinkling over the spinning film, where I asked things like what his favorite musical group was (“The Supremes” was his answer).  My grandfather worked in oil and gas, as many rural people in Texas do, a blue collar job with a pipeline company, often times scraping to get by.  Stories have been told to me of my dad’s family having to eat pinto beans and corn bread for weeks because the money was too tight for much else. 

In junior high, I came into my teenage environmentalist self, protesting fossil fuel companies and, in my early twenties, working for a bike activist organization, claiming I would never own a car. (While that is a little cringey to think about now, to my credit, I only rode a bike and didn’t own a car until we started farming, so, ya know, I tried.)  I read about inhumane factory farms and the environmental devastation they caused in the seventh grade and decided to be a vegetarian, and later vegan.  My grandmother was not happy.  “Alison, your body needs meat!” she would tell me emphatically, between the blowing of smoke from her cigarette, convinced I would die.  I could hear the worry in her thick Texas drawl.  If only she lived long enough to see me butcher chickens and goats. 

My great-great grandmother lived in a house attached to the café, later living with my great-grandparents, and then occasionally my grandparents, all living in that same house.  The door of the house opened up into the cafe’s kitchen.  A little like a farmer who had her farm and farm stand in her back yard, you can never really go home and leave work, when work is right there, outside your door.  It is your life, and for better or for worse, you are tied to it.  

I tried to find pictures online of Talpa and of the café.  My dad doesn’t have many pictures, even though he was there so much as a boy and young man, eating at the counter or at one of the small tables, alongside truck drivers, oil workers, ranchers and ranch hands.  When my dad was young, Talpa had a population of a little over 200.  Now it is 127.  All pictures I find with a google search are of abandoned buildings surrounded by prickly mesquite trees and cream-colored grasses.  My uncle tells me there isn’t even a stoplight in town; just one, yellow blinking light, on the main road.  Like a lot of small West Texas towns, drive a few seconds more and you’re gone.  It’s just you, the flat road dotted with craggy tumbleweeds bouncing like beach balls, and a sign for the next town over.  It’s easy for your mind to wander, and wonder if you were even there at all, if you missed it entirely.

Talpa, TX. Image from ourruins.com.

West Texas takes a long time to get through.  It feels scary to me, partly, with all of its sharp rocks and dry wind, its prickly pear cacti and eventual mountains; rippling dark red ones, like they are made up of giant goblin fingers.  Dry creek beds look as though they are made out of bones.  It’s the dryness, I think, that really alarms me, and how the desert is only getting drier.  Ditches we pass are filled with large flat stones; I see a javalina in one of them, and wonder where it finds a drink.  I read in a guide brochure that I pick up about people in Austin buying land and building houses out in west Texas, in some of its towns outside of Big Bend and Davis Mountains, during the pandemic, and having them as second homes, as well as renting them out as air B and Bs.  My thoughts, as usual, go to food; how does any food grow out here with so little water?  How can it support an expanding population?  The last thing this place needs, I think, is more development from a bunch of people who just got to Austin.

In the 1880s, there was a large ranching boom in west Texas.  For the next several decades, the ranching of too many cattle and sheep in some areas over-grazed the native lush grasslands, depleting the native plants’ population.  Without a network of roots, the land became susceptible to erosion.  Much of these grasses disappeared, being swallowed and replaced by clusters of Ashe Juniper trees, as well as non-native plants, and bare, rocky ground.  Overstocking, droughts and the Great Depression ultimately ended the ranching expansion, but you can still see its environmental effects today.  Though there are some conservation-minded ranchers, some who work with conservations organizations, you still see ranches with animals over-grazing, eating the dotted patches of grass right down to the chalky soil.

Climate change tells us this will all get worse, that the desert will get drier, and the wet regions will get wetter.  I think about how my family out here was just trying to make a living in such an already harsh climate.  I think of the fossil fuel industry, along with factory farming, and other human-created factors that are leading climate change’s catastrophic acceleration.  So many rural Texans went into the fossil fuel industry like my grandfather, my dad’s dad, did, because those were the jobs available, and still are in many parts of Texas.  Later, all of his sons would go into working for oil and gas pipelines, at least for brief periods of time.  I wonder what my grandparents would think of the hoity-toity development in some parts of this area, known for oil and ranching and sparsely-populated towns and milk-hued buildings.  I wish I could ask them questions about living here, and about growing and cooking food here, about both the connections and differences we have.

My grandparents moved away from Talpa eventually, with their final years being lived out in a small town near Houston.  Whenever we visited, their kitchen was a free-for-all for us kids; a mixture of homemade food, like gumbo (my grandmother made a lot of okra or shrimp gumbo, from shrimp that my grandfather went down to the gulf to get and brought home in a 5-gallon bucket), and dishes like eggs and mashed potatoes and collard greens and liver with onions, as well as cabinets of processed foods: a tub of Tang powder (the orange powder that you could mix into water), wonderbread, miracle whip, ritz crackers and cheeze whiz.  My grandmother always tried to grow things, too.  She always talked about a small garden, and, I remember vividly, had planted several strawberry plants in the backyard.  Standing outside in the back concrete slab patio one day, staring at the wilty strawberry leaves along the chain link fence, in the scorching hot sun, I remember her sighing, “Just too hot here.  I can’t get them to grow.”  I wish I could have been a farmer then, instead of a 16-year-old who knew nothing, so I could have helped her plant those strawberries in the right season, Texas winter instead of spring or summer, which I think was part of the problem, and make some amendments to her soil.  I wish I could have peered into the future when, along with our good friends and farming partners, we later would plant thousands of strawberry plants at our own farm.  Grandmom and I always loved strawberries; she would sometimes go to the store to pick up a box to make her famous strawberry shortcake with whipped cream, which was also the main desert that was always served at the café. 

We all have threads that tie us together.  Ancestors’ threads are multiple, a cat’s cradle of shimmering celestial white yarn, blind to the naked eye but obvious to the spirit.  I can always feel these threads the minute I set foot on Texas soil; it is a palpable spark I can feel inside, weaving hot silver underneath the skin.  We can learn from our ancestors as our teachers, as our examples, as our foundation we can build upon or go in another direction entirely, through story-telling and learning family history; it’s sometimes where our roots can find answers.  We only need to notice their stitches. 

From the Tiny Kitchen:

In west Texas, on our way to New Mexico, we broke down on the highway.  Well, not break down exactly, but one of my least favorite things started happening where Alex starts panicking that the engine is overheating.  Things are beeping, Alex is swearing, the kids are crying.  It is not exactly as chaotic as you are picturing, but close.  Anyway.  I have gotten pretty good at making urgent “side-of-the-highway” food.  In fact, I see it as one of my newly developed talents.  So picture, if you will:  the bus is slanted, cars are whizzing by, Alex is covered in grease out back yelling “shit!”, and the kids are crabby and hungry.  Time to get that pan out!

This meal is packed with nutrition.  Sometimes when things go all out of whack, nothing makes me crabbier than a crappy meal, so I make sure to elevate my mood by making something really healthy.  Sweet potatoes and kale are nutritional powerhouses, and eaten together in a savory dish, they are pure magic, loaded with vitamins A and C.  Pasture-raised, organic eggs are full of good fats and proteins, as well as choline, good for the brain and nervous system. 

This meal is also super quick, and great for the starving and hangry.

Side-of-the-Highway Dippin’ Eggs with Sweet Potato-Kale Hash

• 2 medium sweet potatoes, chopped

• 1 onion, chopped

• 2 – 3 cups frozen kale or fresh kale

• 1 teaspoon cumin

• 1 teaspoon chili powder

• 1/2 teaspoon coriander powder

•  salt

• Freshly ground black pepper

• 4 eggs

• Butter or ghee

Heat 4 tablespoons of ghee or butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Once hot, add in the diced or chopped up sweet potatoes, chopped onion, cumin, coriander, chili powder, and season well with salt and black pepper.

Cook mixture, stirring occasionally, until sweet potatoes are cooked through and fork tender, about 16-20 minutes.

Add chopped or frozen kale into the skillet during the last few minutes of cooking. Taste the hash and season with more salt and pepper.

After the hash is done cooking, heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil, butter, or ghee, in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Once pan is hot, crack open eggs into the skillet. Season with salt and pepper and cover with a lid.  (This will help the tops of the whites set without overcooking the bottom of the eggs.) The eggs are done cooking once the whites are just set (the yolk will still be runny: a dippin’ egg).

Divide the hash among four plates, topping each with one of the dippin’ eggs. Sprinkle the egg with some pepper, salt if needed, and drizzle with some hot sauce if you want (I did!), and eat right away.

From the Road:

Currently, we are in southern New Mexico, in the beautiful Gila wilderness, working on a WWOOF farm. (For those that don’t know, WWOOFing is when you work at a farm in exchange for room and board.  For us, it is food and a place to park.)  Next newsletter I will write about working at this farm, and more about farming and food in the desert.