Scattered Work

Wanderings

One day, rode my bike past the old Lone Star Brewery by the river, and saw a circle of people praying in front of this sign. The next day, I took this photo.

The old CPS power plant is across the river from the brewery. It used water from the river for cooling. Later, in the 1950s and 60s, CPS was one of the first municipal power companies to use grey water for this purpose.

I’ve been seeing a lot of these along the river. The birds must be enjoying themselves.

Behind the office where I now work, across the highway from the airport, in the midst of a light-industrial, well I don’t want to say ‘wasteland,’ is this flood-plain area where no one can develop (that is, make buildings or parking lots). Sometimes I walk around back there on my lunch break.

Tags: CPS, crawdads, flood plains, Lone Star Brewery, San Antonio River

Southside onion hunt

Yesterday around two in the afternoon I got a text from Justin Parr: “let’s go hunt some wild onions.” He was somehow convinced that it would be the perfect time to find unopened onion scapes, the little pods which eventually turn into flowers, and which can be quite delicious. By five we were in the car headed down to the southern end of the Mission Trail along the San Antonio River.

We’d spot little trails cutting down to the banks, poke around among the elephant ears and grasses and various weeds. Pretty early on we started spotting wild onions with the scapes intact, just as Justin said. But it wasn’t until we made our way to a little park by an old Spanish acecquia that we started really finding them in large quantity. (At this same park, Bill Fontana once recorded audio of Justin and I riding our bikes over a wooden bridge, which he incorporated into his sound installation on the Riverwalk near the San Antonio Museum of Art).

We grabbed a scape here, a scape there, slowly filling our foraging bag. Finally we found a patch in a sandy area that was big enough to just start picking whole onions, and we got about 30 of them — actually leaving many behind. By this point, it was only about 6:30 or 7, so we still had plenty of light.

After picking up some beer and a couple of ingredients, we headed back to my house to cook it all up. I made an onion cream soup with some of this wonderful stuff, while Justin battered and fried the scapes. I can attest to the fact that onions growing by the San Antonio River are definitely quite tasty, and that wild onion scapes are a wonderful once-a-year treat. If you get a chance to try them, don’t turn it down. They taste a bit like onion, a bit like asparagus, and a lot yummy.

Here they are fresh:

And here they are fried:

Not a bad way to spend a Friday evening in this beautiful South Texas spring weather. We’ve already started discussing spots to seed some wild onions further up the river, so next year’s crop will be even more prolific.

Tags: flora, foraging, Mission Trail, San Antonio River, southside, wild onions

Main Plaza Farmers’ Market

My girlfriend, who just wrote an article on the San Antonio Food Bank for San Antonio Magazine, tipped me off to a new farmers’ market in Main Plaza organized by the Food Bank on Tuesdays. We went down there today to check it out. It’s pretty small — the first image below shows about the entire extent of it.

The only thing missing from this photo is a booth selling some pretty tasty fish tacos, courtesy the Food Bank’s Catalyst Catering program. The market’s just getting off the ground, and it’s only there for a few hours around lunch time on Tuesdays. But for at least those few hours, this farmers’ market provides the best tomatoes within a five mile radius of my house. The carrots are quite good as well.

Tags: farmers' markets, food, Main Plaza, San Antonio Food Bank

Autenticas Carnitas

Tags: carnitas, photos, west side