Grower's Market Kohlrabi

I'm back in the summer groove, after a herky jerky start. Or I should say, almost back in the summer groove, since the bosque trails are still closed to fire danger and for me, being back in the groove means my days start off with a Barelas bosque walk to the Rio Grande.

I fell into the groove of the Saturday morning routine I've been honing for more than ten years. I woke up, fed the hungry cats, who won't leave me alone until I pour food into their bowls in the following order - Apricot's bowl on the window sill (double adobe walls make for nice window ledges), Luna's bowl under the trastero, and Avi's bowl under the 1930s era Gaffer and Sattler stove.

Then I brewed my java, grabbed some canvas bags, and headed to the Grower's Market at Robinson Park in downtown Albuquerque. One of the best things about living in Barelas is the walkability - if I don't dawdle, I can be at the Grower's Market in 6 minutes. But I always dawdle, because there is always something interesting to look at that slows my pace and speeds my thoughts.

This morning I had a hankering for greens. So I purchased lettuce, Swiss chard, beets (with leaves attached) and radishes (also with leaves attached). I decided that I'd try something new, so I bought a kohlrabi. The vendor told me that I could slice the root and eat it raw for lunch, then saute the leaves for dinner.

I decided to try something a little different than what she suggested.

For lunch mija and I had hunks of baguette purchased from Carey Smoot, former owner of the marvelous Downtown Gourmet, which had the best cheese selection in all of Albuquerque, as far as I'm concerned. I'm still mourning the fact that Downtown Gourmet is closed and I cannot get my favorite French cheeses in a few minutes walk. We topped the baguette with slices of Los Poblanos Organics tomatoes (because we're still waiting on ours in the garden to ripen), and locally made provolone cheese. Then we parked ourselves in the big cane chairs on the front porch and talked about singer Amy Winehouse's demise and her hit song Rehab.

For dinner I decided to experiment with Kohlrabi. It turned out so good that I'm posting my recipe.

Kohlrabi Saute with Wild Rice blend

2 carrots, sliced

0.5 red onion, chopped

1 Kohlrabi, chopped root and leaves (peel the outer skin off, then chop)

olive oil (about 1 Tablespoon - ish???)

curry powder (about 1 Tablespoon)

honey (about 1 Tablespoon)

Make wild rice blend first (I use La Montanita's bulk mix and cook with a 3 to 1 ratio), then start chopping vegetables.

Saute onion until semi-soft. Add carrots and kohlrabi root. Saute for 5 minutes. Add a small amount of water - just enough to cover the bottom of the pan. Put lid on pan and steam for about 10 minutes. Add curry, stir. Steam for 5 more minutes. Add honey. Stir. Steam for 5 minutes. Add kohrabi leaves, steam until cooked - should be dark green. Put wild rice in a bowl and top with vegetables. Salt to taste. (I added a very slight shake of salt to my bowl - just enough to add brightness to the vegetables!)

For next time, I might add a dash of tumeric and garam marsala. And if I have some green tomatoes, it might be okay to mix up a small batch of green tomato chutney as a topping...

Bats in the Neighborhood Tonight

It has been simply forever since I've blogged here, and to tell the truth, I'd forgotten it until I saw my blog listed on the Duke City Fix blogroll. DCF and DeafDC have been getting my posts, but I'm back on track. My goal is to post short snippets of my life in Barelas - no long essay posts on this blog!

We've had our new dogs for exactly a week now, and we've been taking them for walks in different parts of the neighborhood - Barelas Community Center, Tingley Park, Tingley Beach, and Kit Carson Park, which seems to be everyone's favorite place because of the thick grass and lovely tall cottonwoods.

Tonight we got to the park later than usual, and we saw bats!

There were so many mosquitos feeding on me that I thought the bats might swoop near me, but no such luck.

The dogs are half-named. The boy is Dunbar and the girl is unnamed but we'll fix that this weekend.

Las Posadas de Barelas

One of my favorite Albuquerque memories is walking through the luminaria-lined streets of Barelas in a light snow, following the Las Posadas de Barelas nativity and enjoying the sounds of Christmas carols sung in Spanish and English. My two children, dressed up as an angel and a shepherd, were old enough to carry their candles without setting themselves on fire, and young enough to take heed of mom’s words about the dangers of mixing candlefire with horseplay.

In case you are not familiar with Las Posadas, it is a lovely Hispanic tradition that reenacts the travels of Jose y Maria prior to the birth of Jesus, with the nativity procession moving from door to door in search of shelter.

Carolers sing traditional Spanish songs seeking shelter, followed by the residents of the house and their guests denying this request. The procession continues to the next house in hopes of finding shelter, and at the last location, Sacred Heart Church, the doors are thrown open and everyone enters (except the burro, who always refuses). Most of the Barelas households on the Las Posadas route participate every year, decorating their home with strings of lights and luminarias, and hosting parties on the night of Las Posadas. When the procession arrives, partygoers spill out of the brightly lit homes singing their parts in this age old ritual.

The tradition dates back to the 1500s when it was brought to the New World by the Spanish. It has been an official event in the Barelas neighborhood for 62 years, thanks to the efforts of Patrick Turrieta and many others too numerous to name.

Las Posadas de Barelas is one of two times a year where my many worlds collide here in Albuquerque. It is one of the many reasons I love this city, and Barelas in particular.

On this night I see my next-door neighbors, friends from organization boards, commissions, and committees that I’ve served with over the years, family members, people from the NM Deaf community, parents from long gone soccer teams that my children once played on, fellow artists and writers and actors and musicians from Barelas and points beyond. I bump into teachers from my children’s schools both past and present, former River Rangers, homeschoolers and unschoolers, and cherished bioethicist/philosopher friends and colleagues from UNM. On this night I get to have conversations in English, American Sign Language, and Spanish, and sometimes a mixture of the three as I introduce friends dear to my heart to each other.

Each year we invite some of our friends to join us in this neighborhood tradition, and this year is no different. I remember my Austrian friend Gabi, crowing with delight at the polka sounds of ranchero music played at the Barelas Community Center celebration following the walk through the neighborhood. I remember jostling through the crowd to get nearer to my dear friend Brenda Hollingsworth-Marley so that I could hear every word of her beautiful rich alto singing voice. (And in case you would like to hear her too, she will be performing at the Q Bar in Hotel Albuquerque on 4 January from 6-9pm). And I remember watching my buddies from the Hearing Loss Association of Albuquerque fiddle with the settings on their cochlear implants and hearing aids so they too, could reap this benefit.

I remember my Jewish friend from Jerusalem peppering me with questions about the significance and symbolism of everything from the farolitos to the order of the procession. And I remember one bitter cold posadas night some years ago when my signing deaf friends joined us and our fingers froze like popsicles mid-sentence.

I remember watching powerhouse Bareleña Dolly Sanchez de Rivera standing at the entrance of the Barelas Community Center, greeting almost everyone by name and marshalling them into helping out in some way, somehow. I remember sotto voce conversations with my Belgian neighbor about her childhood Christmas memories and the importance of creating community and raising our children to be of Barelas and not apart from it.

I remember seeing my neighbor Adam, a young baseball-addicted teenager, transformed as Joseph and walking with pride alongside a very stubborn burro carrying another neighborhood teen portraying Mary. And of course, I remember the stalwart women of Barelas who return to the community center each year to serve hot chocolate and biscochitos to the crowd as we wait for the program to begin in the Indian Room.

This Saturday we will be doing our part for Barelas, making and setting up luminarias along the walking path, helping the children of Barelas clamber into their costumes, and passing out candles and bilingual song sheets.

Las Posadas de Barelas is on December 22, 2007. It begins and ends at the Barelas Community Center at 801 Barelas Road SW. The procession begins at 6 pm sharp, followed by refreshments and the Fiesta de Navidad, which ends at 10 pm. Dress warmly, and bring candles and flashlights. All are welcome.

In Defense of Barelas

Said in 1996, in and around UNM…


“You live where?”
“In Barelas.”
“Where’s that?”

“You live where?”
“In Barelas.”
“Why?”

“You live where?”
“In Barelas.”
“In the barrio? Is that safe?”



Eleven years ago last summer, I purchased an old adobe fixer-upper in Barelas. It had crumbling pavement in place of a front lawn, a sagging porch, and a parkway filled with bindweed and goatheads. A collection of used tea bags dangled from the wrought iron grating enclosing the front porch. The dried tea bags fluttered in the breeze like aspen leaves and puzzled our traditional Hispano neighbors, who wondered out loud if they were part of a protective religious ritual.

Our house had two claims to fame in the neighborhood. Folks either knew it as the former home of several UNM Ski Team members and site of infamous wild parties, or associated it with local politico and native Bareleño Al Otero, the New Mexico State Representative who pushed to locate the National Hispanic Culture Center in Barelas. After we moved in, we became the people who bought the Ski Team house or the Al Otero house, depending on who you talked to. Shortly before we closed on the house, President Clinton drew some positive attention to the neighborhood by speaking at the Barelas Community Center. The 4th Street Revitalization project began as we moved our furniture, books and toys into our new home; some say this started the seismic shift that transformed Barelas from a poor neighborhood to an up-and-coming funky place to live.

Why Barelas? I needed to be close to UNM, where I was beginning graduate work in philosophy. We didn’t want to live in a New Mexican version of a Levittown suburb. Barelas was affordable; we bought an adobe house twice as big as our NE Heights apartment with a monthly mortgage that cost less than our rent. We could walk to the zoo, downtown, and the Rio Grande bosque. Plus, Barelas felt like home – there was something about it that reminded me of Guadelahabra, a neighborhood in my home town of La Habra, California, blended with a dash of my grandparents’ stomping grounds of Boyle Heights and Santa Ana. Downtown rehabilitation was pie-in-the-sky talk at the time, ground-breaking for the Aquarium and Botanic Gardens hadn’t started yet, and drug dealers and gangbangers lived down the street. Still, something about Barelas smelled right and it wasn’t just the home cooked tortillas y frijoles, though that helped.

About a month after we moved in, we started hanging out on the front porch. We couldn’t see much at first, just a treeless concrete streetscape with people walking by. I’d park myself on my rickety five dollar faux Bentwood chair purchased from the NM Animal Humane Society Thrift Store and read Leibniz and Descartes while drinking yerba buena iced tea. The front porch became an extension of our living room – the place where we colored, drank coffee, played with ants and grasshoppers, read Dr. Seuss, and cut up magazines for art projects. It also introduced us to the neighborhood.

After a while, I started noticing neighborhood patterns and habits. There was the dapper eighty-ish Hispanic gentleman with a fedora who walked by every morning; the blonde hippy chick headed to Arrow Market a few times a week with a little girl, a baby, and a dog in tow; and the homeless Anglo guy with the Grizzly Adams’ hair and beard who favored pink muu-muus and pushed a shopping cart down 4th Street.

One morning, while I was agonizing my way through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the man with the fedora interrupted his stroll to ask me what I was reading and how I liked the neighborhood, in that order. It turned out he was a retired academic who lived a few streets over. One thing led to another and pretty soon we found ourselves talking about the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein, logical positivism, and the retired prof’s experiences in Austria in the 1930s. In Barelas, no less!

Barelas has changed a lot over the past decade. I still sit on my front porch and watch the neighborhood go by - these days I’m more apt to be pecking a blog on my laptop than reading early modern philosophy. More artists and writers live here than when we first moved in, and downtown is hopping, not just hoping. People still refer to our place as the “Al Otero house”, but these days, it is also known as the house with the colorful flowers and exposed adobe front porch. The dapper guy with the fedora stopped his morning constitutional about nine years ago, but not before we had many conversations about history, art, philosophy and life.

To my regret, I never did catch his name.