Posole

Eastside Road, January 6, 2013—

HOMINY DIDN'T ENTER my life until I was nine years old, I'm pretty sure. It was then, in 1944, that we drove out highway 66 to Oklahoma, there to spend a year with my grandmother, following the death of her third husband. (She had bad luck with husbands, and deserved much better.)

So I generally associate hominy with Oklahoma and points between. Taos; Albuquerque; Flagstaff. Second Mesa, Arizona, especially, where you can get that wonderful Hopi lamb stew with posole. I like hominy. When I was a kid, after we got back to California from that benighted year in Oklahoma, Mom used to warm up canned hominy, white as snow; we ate it with garlic salt and Eagle chile powder sprinkled on it, and maybe a little hot sauce of some kind. Hominy always has a faint taste of alkali to me, and reminds me of the soapy smell of the community laundry in Welch, Oklahoma, where Grandma washed our clothes in a community Maytag with soap made, I'm sure, in someone's kitchen, all lye and fat, and the suds were tight and grey, and the clothes never really clean, but always smelling of laundry.

Well: I digress. Down the hill to the neighbors' house today for Twelfth Night: A big pot of posole; tortillas toasted in the flames; shredded cabbage and cilantro and thin-sliced radish to strew on top. Gee, it was good. Before, guacamole two ways, Meadow's and mine. After, eggnog, Lindsey's way, with rum and bourbon, eggs and cream. Delicious. Tomorrow perhaps we fast.

Red blend, "L. Preston," Preston of Dry Creek, 2010