tel: 512 280-1192 Friday, Feb 21 2014
Coming this Sunday: Tomatoes - everything you need to know
to have a productive tomato patch. 2 p.m. Free. Expert Kevin Call-
away from Hondo will help you with plant choice, types of soil,
location, organic fertilizers... and will turn you into an expert. (He
will be at the nursery on Saturday to answer questions.)
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Nursery Notes: fruit trees have arrived. Apples, pears, peaches
and pomegranates all in stock: $34.99. Stop weeds in their tracks
with organic corn gluten: we have a new liquid corn gluten,
applied with a hose: 32 fluid ounces for 1,000 square feet: $19.99.
Our greenhouses are overflowing with spring veggies. Please come
by for a visit.
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Fire & Native Species: a fascinating Ted Talk by Mark Simmons
from the Wildflower Center is now on-line. Mark describes pre-
scribed fire as 'incredibly satisfying. We're a fire species, and we
like this kind of thing.' eco-metropolis
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Central Texas Gardener: Studio guest Judy Barrett talks about her
new book 'Yes, You Can Grow Roses.' On tour, Penny Kerker-Smith
from the First Austin African Violet Society perks up the office and
the house with violets. Sat. noon, 4 p.m. or Sun., 9 a.m. www.klru
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The Intelligence of Crows: this video from the Cornell Lab of Orni-
thology offers a fresh appreciation of this amazing bird's abilities as
a problem solver: bird brain
Mick Vann: 'It's kinda like culinary heaven, with chickens.'
The Mystical Manchaca Rancho
Winslow Supper Club
Chef/author Mick Vann's Austin Chronicle article this week focussed
on the informal supper club that meets once in a while at the house
of Diane and Chris Winslow, owners of It's About Thyme.
To call the home of Chris and Diane Winslow in far southwest Man-
chaca a ranch might be a bit of a stretch. It's an immaculately main-
tained rambling house sitting on five acres at the back side of Elliot
Ranch.
It does have six horses (five of which are completely worthless minia-
tures), three dogs (the best of which is Hershey), some parrots, a herd
of angry and disrespectful chickens (looking right at you, Dwayne Jr.),
rat snakes in the barn, a cat or two, and coyotes in the distance, but it's
probably not a true ranch in the grandest expression of Texas parlance.
I take credit for coming up with the name Rancho Winslow while re-
counting our culinary exploits on my blog and in the Chronicle; "ran-
chette" doesn't quite roll off the tongue. It's not even really a supper
club in the strictest sense. It is a clubbish group that partakes of supper,
but it's more a gathering of close friends and family centered around
a food event of one sort or another, calendar-related or otherwise.
When a Rancho Winslow article gets mentioned or reprinted in the
Hays Free Press, or posted to the It's About Thyme website, CBoy
and Di get hounded by folks wanting to know how they can buy
"tickets" to the supper club, or when the next "event" is, or how can
they get added to "the list." After several drinks, we've often joked
that it might be a good way to raise some extra cash for a fishing trip,
but we don't need the extra pressure, and commercializing it would
sully the experience. It's all about camaraderie and joie de vivre.
Chris Winslow and I first met back in the ponytailed, early Seventies.
He had just started building his plant empire at Marbridge Farms; I
had heard of his nursery and was a houseplant freak living at the leg-
endary Bean Palace on West Sixth Street. We met and became fast
friends, and have been ever since.
His much better half Diane, who owned It's About Thyme Nursery
before Chris left Marbridge and moved over there, has long been
known as the Martha Stewart of Manchaca. Di is the queen of decor-
ating and handicrafts, and certainly knows her way around a kitchen.
Chris cooks exclusively on the outside grill or the smoker. Di and I
clicked immediately and she and I began to collaborate on meals for
one event or another, first at their old house on Cattleman Drive and
later at Rancho Winslow.
It's a function of Chris' chatty, gregarious nature to invite too many
people, and once invited, no one ever passes up the opportunity. I
remember one blisteringly hot afternoon at the Cattleman house where
I had agreed to deep-fry an especially bounteous harvest of redfish
and specks that came from several fishing trips to the coast, for what
grew to a crowd of 60.
The danger of my cascading sweat hitting the cauldron of hot oil almost
surpassed the threat of me collapsing from heat exhaustion, and I had
batter up to my elbows most of the day. But matched with a squeeze of
Mexican lime and the homemade tartar, rémoulade, and sinus-searing
cocktail sauces that Di and I had concocted, the fish was sublime. We
ate fish until the beers were burpless.
Visit the website: www.itsaboutthyme.com Visit the nursery:11726 Manchaca Road, Austin, 78748 Like us
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