Road Foodie

Posted By bbinns on February 16, 2009

Valentine’s Day, Las Cruces
It is simple serendipity that I find myself cooling my heels in Las Cruces for three days, not part of a comprehensive travel plan. But, since the world is my lobster, I had best set about cracking it. Last night, I was in the mood for cheese, but spent waaay too long trying to decide which New Mexican joint would earn my patronage. In the meantime, I stopped in to the Double Eagle bar for a margarita and met Tina, who was keeping the end of the bar warm and cheerful while her son Mathew (he prefers Matt) worked behind the bar. Between her job as a psychiatric nurse, and his law classes at the university,plus this job, it’s about the only time she can find to hang out with her boy. Tina and I get to talking, as you do, and this Las Cruces native daughter gives me another hike recommendation, and describes a new pub called Brigid’s Cross, in Pacheco Hills, that overlooks the Mesilla Valley, and sounds like a good place for a sundowner. Tina and I have a blast talking about Las Cruces and Alamagordo and Ruidoso and I’m reminded of how vibrant New Mexico’s university towns, like this one, and Albuquerque, can be. After two margaritas, however, I do not feel like sitting down at a table alone for supper, cheese-jones or no cheese-jones. Down the road one of my dinner possibilities, Andele, has an outdoor take-out window, so I secure a beef quesadilla and a side of chile con queso, and head back to watch tv and indulge in a solo cheese-fest. What’s with chile con queso, though, I gotta ask? In Amarillo in December, it was neon orange and gelatinous as a supermarket onion dip. At our friend Linda’s house it’s a natural shade of orange, thick and blissfully elastic with a real-cheese flavor and fetching pools of hot, dark-orange oil (she did have it airlifted every Christmas from Felix’s, in Houston, which is now sadly closed). Here in Las Cruces, this particular chile con queso is white, sports tiny chunks of green chile, and is as thin as Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup made with the entire can of water recommended on the label (something I would never do, btw). My night’s repose is somewhat affected by the bloatedness that a two-cheese dinner will, unavoidably, impart.

And so, Valentine’s Day dawns, yawning ahead of me like a chiding challenge: do something interesting! East of town, on the way back from yesterday’s hike and encounter with a new ghost town, I have spied the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Museum. A fetching arrangement of old and rusting farm machinery caught my eye, so today I go back and give it some real time and attention. This is not, you understand, one of those roadside attractions (“Meteorite Crater!” “See the Dinosaur Eggs!”) that one comes upon when criss-crossing the west. Former NM governor Bruce King mobilized a hunk of money and expertise in putting together this spread, which boasts cow-milking demonstrations, a working blacksmith, the oldest metal bridge in NM, state-of-the art performance space, an art gallery, and the most profoundly moving multi-media exhibition I’ve ever had the pleasure of immersing myself in. Photographs, stories, artifacts and, in some cases, the actual voices of past generations of New Mexicans are cleverly brought together in a hangar-sized hall. From the earliest attempts to cultivate an unforgiving soil, through hardscrabble land-granters, to thick and glittering rodeo kings and queens of the sixties, I fall in love with some of these practical, funny, enthusiastic (and long-dead) pioneer types. (This feeds right into my fantasy life—leftover from two years at boarding school in Sedona, AZ—as a hard drinkin’ hard ridin’ frontier woman; see boots in last post.) I am too early for the milking demonstration, and the blacksmith is on his lunch break, but I do find a compelling pathos in all the stories and scratchy recordings, and also find a nice beehive oven to add to my gallery (assembled pending the eventual construction of a wood-burning oven back at the mushroom farm in NY). Ie, home. Somewhere I will not be for about another five weeks. This peripatetic life is exciting, but there can be moments of loneliness. Such moments tend to be amplified by the sight of scrubby land stretching out, all gold and grey, toward the far horizon. Spending Valentine’s Day alone doesn’t help much, either. Is all of this really worth it, just to avoid the Northeast winter? Ask me in about five weeks.

Category: 09, In the West | Write To Me
Tags: cheese, cross-country drive, driving, roadtrip, verde valley school