Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (9 page)

The woman was taking Mol to task for something she had written about then-president George W. Bush, whom we had come to know in Molly par-lance as “Shrub.”

Quelle
surprise.

The woman was jibberjabbing away, as some people do when making a point, reiterating and, not getting the desired response, saying the same thing again. She droned on, a sclerotic passive-aggressive smile fixed in place.

I didn't know how to intervene, but I now stood behind the woman, facing Molly, spasmodically shifting from left to right and regressing to somewhere around sixth grade. I was twitching, doing a bit of furtive glancing here and there, and scrunching my face into strange contortions.

I knew Molly wanted an out, but I just didn't know what to do. So there she was, listening, nodding, and waiting for this scold to wind down. Suddenly Molly interrupted, apologized, and excused us, leaning in and conspiratorially whispering that she had to get me home for my medication, which was almost overdue.

We concluded our foray up and down the aisles—intermingling impulse purchases with stuff actually on the list. We arrived at the checkout counter shocked—shocked!—to learn we'd spent almost three times as much as we had anticipated.

E: “I thought we were using artichoke hearts in the salad.”

M: “I thought we were doing hearts of palm.”

E: “Why don't we do both?”

Problem solved.

After the drive home in Bob the Pickup, much slicing and dicing, chopping and pureeing, ensued in Molly's not-so-spacious kitchen.

A sip of Chardonnay for her, a sassy Shiraz for me.

Hellman's in the potato salad?
Mais non
. Out came the blender, eggs, lemons, oil. Hellman's might be the mayo of choice when I flew solo in the Ivins kitchen, but when I was sous chef, it was homemade or not at all.

Hope Reyna, Molly's housekeeper extraordinaire, insisted the kitchen was never as much a mess as it was when I visited. She was kinda right, which is why I hid from her on the morning after a particularly enthusiastic meal. Leftovers went to Athena the poodle, who devoured them voraciously.

So, yes, anyone who ever ate at Molly's house has most likely eaten from a plate touched by Athena's big, long, pink poodle tongue.

9

MOLLY
'
S FOUR-PERSON KITCHEN
often felt like some kind of architectural afterthought, but there was actually great order about it. Nevertheless, four people would be hard-pressed to maneuver in it in any meaningful way.

Built-in floor-to-ceiling cabinets housed odds and ends of dishes on the three bottom shelves of one side, while upper shelves and door shelves were stocked with herbs, spices, and all manner of oils—safflower, olive, extra-virgin olive, peanut, grapeseed, canola.

There were salts—sea, kosher, smoked, pink (from Hawaii),
fleur de sel
from France—not to be confused with gray salt, also from France but indigenous to the coast. Oh, and let's not forget sauces—Worcestershire, A1, tamari, light soy, dark soy, Chinese soy, Japanese soy, and Thai fish sauce, for the one time we decided to cook a Thai meal. She didn't love it. Actually, she didn't even
like
it. The photograph in the magazine looked appetizing enough, and Molly was never above trying new flavors. Although Thai remains one of my favorite ethnic cuisines, it was not Molly's—then or ever. She never liked collard greens either, although she could lay into their cousins, Swiss chard and kale. I filed that under “go figure.”

The other side of the cabinet housed wheat flour, white flour, rice flour, organic raw sugar, light brown sugar, dark brown sugar, turbinado sugar, and honey—orange blossom, raw, and wild. Canned goods consisted mainly of artichoke hearts, hearts of palm, anchovies, large capers, small capers, capers rolled in anchovies, Italian tuna packed in olive oil, and those remarkable San Marzano tomatoes.

Until I met Molly I had never heard of San Marzano tomatoes or, for that matter, of Campania, Italy—which, I learned, is in southern Italy and was for the longest time the only place these exquisite tomatoes grew. Flourishing there had something to do with a perfect confluence of sun, soil, and precipitation.

By the time we finished talking about tomatoes I was ready to dust off my passport and head for the Amalficoast. Call it a food-pantry-as-geography lesson. The kitchen cabinet's odds and ends of canned goods also reflected her propensity for impulse shopping, such as an escargot kit replete with snails packaged with shells and a recipe for assembly. Maybe she made them, but not with me.

Increasingly frequent forays to Austin assured respite in Molly's kitchen. Whether we barbecued shrimp, roasted hot dogs, or baked meat loaf, the therapeutic value of cooking was immeasurable, especially when I could sit at the kitchen counter and look out over a stone patio surrounded by live oaks and see the sky change color at sunset—all the while squishing together ingredients that anchored one of my favorite birthday meals.

February 1, 2003. The date and year are, as they say, indelibly etched in the old memory bank. I had only recently left the
Dallas Morning News
to join the
Denver Post
, but I returned to Texas on January 31. John and Susan Albach had organized a birthday dinner for me the next day, my real birthday. We were going to rendezvous at Javier's, a lovely Mexican restaurant. It was not to be.

Early on the morning of February 1 NASA's Columbia shuttle exploded minutes after takeoff, and the resulting debris field covered parts of Central Texas. The
Denver Post
found me and I was dispatched to Amarillo to assist with coverage. I had been at the paper barely five months, so I answered duty's call, flew to Amarillo, covered my piece of the story, attended the church service where shuttle commander Rick Husband was eulogized, and returned to Dallas thirty-six hours later.

I had known that my daughter, the chef, wouldn't be able to attend the dinner, but her husband at the time assured me he would go in her stead, convey apologies, and explain on my behalf. At the last minute, for reasons unknown to this day, he decided not to go. I had no idea that they never knew what had happened until I returned from Amarillo to find a series of telephone messages trying to find me, escalating from concern to annoyance to alarm. Molly had not felt able to make the drive to Dallas, which was just as well. The party proceeded without either of us, much to my everlasting chagrin.

With many apologies and considerable embarrassment behind me, I now headed to Austin and the house in Travis Heights to continue my birthday celebration—or more accurately, to begin it. When I arrived, Molly was scrubbing big fat Idahos. One of her favorite vegetables, haricot verts—what the rest of us call baby green beans—were rinsed and ready to go. At the last minute they would be steamed and buttered and Molly would make the dressing for the Caesar salad.

I settled into my favorite perch at the kitchen window, smushing together milk-soaked bread, beef, pork, veal, onions, herbs, bell pepper, celery, garlic, ketchup, and Worcestershire sauce. The remaining vestiges of guilt over my dinner party absence earlier the week before vaporized concurrent with aromas of a baking meat loaf.

As the meat loaf rested, Molly whisked together lemon juice, garlic, and vinegar, incorporating a raw egg yolk and chopped anchovies into the olive oil.

It was a perfect birthday dinner: Caesar salad, meat loaf, mashed potatoes, mushroom gravy, baby green beans, and a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. As a special Molly treat I even had those candles that always relight no matter how hard you blow.

The year 2003 was memorable for another reason, though: Molly's cancer was back. Thank goodness for her Travis Heights friends and neighbors.

Say “Travis Heights” to locals today and they know you're talking high-dollar real estate. Nice lawns. Nice landscaping. Hybrid cars. Taxes through the roof. At least one chocolate Lab, standard poodle, golden retriever, or some designer or rescue dog on every third porch.

Not so in the early '90s. Hookers trolled the intersection of Live Oak and Congress Avenue, almost right around the corner from Molly's house. The only neighborhood theater was on South Congress, and it showed triple-X movies all day and half the night.

South by Southwest, now one of the world's premier music events, was in its early gestational stage. Nothing much legal happened south of Riverside Drive, save for thrift shops, an occasional restaurant, the iconic Austin Motel, the old Hotel San Jose and the equally iconic Continental Club, whose musical attractions worked their way from '50s supper club status to '60s burlesque (remember Candy Barr?) through the blues, swing, rock, and rockabilly sounds of the '70s and '80s.

In short, the area in those early days had a quasi-seedy, kinda cool, funky, edgy look and feel. Artists and musicians sought out the neighborhood because it was affordable. Prescient entrepreneurs knew, to quote '60s R&B singer Sam Cooke, a change was gonna come. The area now has a quasi-edgy, fauxfunky, expensive look and feel. Molly moved into her house in the 1980s when it was a compact little bungalow on a spacious corner lot. Financing was made possible by the enormous success of
Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?

Nothing like having a runaway hit spend a year on the
New York Times
best-seller list to underwrite a first-time home purchase.

As successive books followed suit, Molly had to do something with her money besides shell it out in taxes or give it away, more often than not without benefit of tax breaks. She decided one way to get relief was to buy a bigger house.

By the time she made the decision, however, she discovered that housing values and their attendant prices had escalated beyond her proletarian sensibilities. Besides, she liked her neighborhood. She'd become accustomed to the house where she had written the columns that catapulted her to even greater fame through syndication.

For what she would have paid for a newer, bigger house in a “nicer” neighborhood, she could add on, expand to her specifications, and stay right where she was—especially since her neighborhood was getting nicer anyway.

Before the Great Renovation, a curvy stone walkway led to an entrance set back some twenty yards from the street. The addition featured a semi-secluded driveway leading to a front door that opened onto a garden room.

A pond to the immediate left was stocked with koi. Among the plants thriving in the humid atrium were dill, thyme, basil, and chives. A skylight allowed just enough filtered sun to keep the plants happy. An automated watering system maintained proper humidity for trees, shrubs, and bromeliads.

Just when there seemed to be nothing else to add, Molly installed a five-foot-tall birdcage that housed four pairs of lovebirds. Every now and again she would open the cage door and let the pretty little critters soar across the atrium. When they got hungry, they'd fly back in.

For the most part.

(If you already see where this is going, you're right; just know that somewhere in Travis Heights there are bound to be beautiful descendants of, oh,
finches and a few of Molly's lovebirds. When the birds were flying free, the ceiling fans were always turned off. Well, almost always. 'Nuff said.)

A walkway through the atrium brought visitors to a second front door that opened onto a large living/dining room. The dining area was immediately to the right, and a large glass wall was straight ahead, opposite the entry. For reasons that were never clear to those who tripped up it, a step led to a twenty-by-fifteen-foot master bedroom that included a large walk-in closet, a wall of shelves filled with novels, histories, thrillers, crossword puzzles, books of poetry, and works ranging from William Makepeace Thackeray, Carl Hiaasen, and Elmore Leonard to J. K. Rowling, Sue Grafton, and Madeleine Albright.

Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in Molly's office—which had once been the living room—housed histories, political treatises, art books, and dozens of cookbooks. Molly even had an entry in the 1990
Austin Hill Country Celebrity Cookbook
for her Hungarian Paprika Mushrooms recipe. (Proceeds went to the Austin Parks Foundation.)