Image via Wikipedia The area shown in red is East Texas.

I’m fixin’ to tell you a little Texas secret: I was brought up not saying “fixin’ to.” My maternal grandfather came from a family of “preachers and teachers.” He brought my mother up to speak properly, grammatically and correctly. He was very strict.

We did not say “fixin’ to” at my house. In fact, I did not even have a Texas accent until I was 10 and decided to talk like my friends at school. Sad but true.

So when I went up to East Texas to go to college, it was a full four years before I found myself, one fine May day, telling someone I was “fixin’ to go class.” As we used to say in those days, I about swallowed my teeth.

In case you are unfamiliar with the phrase, “fixing to,” pronounced “fixin’ to,” is kind of interesting. It means “getting ready to” or “about to” do something.

I wonder if it is possibly a parallel usage to the Spanish “acaba de” which means exactly the same thing. At least that may be why the use of “fixin’ to” lingers here in Texas. It just sounds right to lots of Texans.

I’m not sure about anywhere else, though. But I’m fixin’ to find out.

Pecans (puh-CONNS) are wonderful Texas trees that bear delicious nuts. They are native to Texas, and they are prolific. You still find pecans in the oddest places, where parks and such have been built where homesteads used to be.

You have to have at least two trees in the same small area for them to bear nuts. But that’s a good thing. Pecans are great trees for shade, especially if planted on the north and west sides of the house to keep it cool. Then the leaves fall off in the winter when you need the sun to keep it warm.

Also, pecan trees put down deep taproots instead of spreading all over the top of the ground, breaking up the sidewalks and messing with the foundation of the house the way oak trees do. And also unlike oaks, pecans don’t topple over during windstorms the way oak trees sometimes do if the ground is really saturated with rain for a few days.

Pecans even tend to keep the grass from growing so deep underneath them, which makes less work for whoever has to mow. And, of course, they are hardwoods, so when a pecan tree dies—or has to be cut down for some other reason—you have really fine wood to burn or build with.

Pecan wood soaked in water is great for smoking meat. It’s much more subtle than mesquite.

It used to be just about everyone who had a yard would plant pecans if they could. We Texans do love our pecans, especially in pecan pies. They are great in cookies, and brownies, and used to decorate the tops of cakes. But we also like them candied or baked with cinnamon sugar, or just toasted with salt.

Buttered-pecan ice cream was a big Texas favorite for generations. In recent years, though, our hearts were won over by the Blue Bell ice cream flavor, Pralines and Cream, made with crumbled up pecan pralines. Naturally we pronounce “pralines” the Texas way (PRAY-leens).

It takes about 7 to 9 years after you plant a pecan seedling for it to bear nuts. And that’s if you go to a nursery and buy a really big one in a giant tub about 3 feet deep (because of the taproot, you know).

Naturally there’s a family story about a pecan tree. My grandparents lived on a corner in a tiny little town. There were deep drainage ditches along the roads on two sides of the property. All kinds of seeds and flower bulbs used to float up and take root at the edge of their yard, which was made up of four city lots.

One year my grandfather dug up a seedling that he said was a pecan, and he planted it in the front yard near my grandmother’s fig orchard (on the north, of course, so the figs would still get plenty of sun). He was a great gardener, who had grown up on the remnants of the family plantation, and he figured he knew his trees.

Well, Nana was annoyed. She was a knowledgeable country Texan, too, and she knew a black walnut when she saw one.

Pampa had dug up the seedling from the ditch right near the big old black walnut tree in the back, which had nuts that were almost impossible to shell and pretty much inedible. So planting a tree like that was just a waste of good orchard space to a fig lover. They argued about it for years!

Pampa planted that tree when I was one year old, and there are family photos of me beside that tree as we both grew up. But it just took forever to bear nuts. And the argument about what it really was became kind of a long-running joke in the family.

I had just turned 17 when Pampa died, and the tree had still not done anything but get taller and taller. Nana thought it was downright useless, but of course she would never cut it down, because it was Pampa’s tree.

That fall, though, the tree finally bore nuts for all to see. It was a pecan.

We all just knew that somewhere up there in Heaven, Pampa was smiling.

Quite a few towns in Central Texas were settled in the 1800s by people from Czechoslovakia. They brought their language, which some of their descendants still speak, and their music. That’s how the accordion and the polka-like rhythms became an important part of Tejano (tay-HAH-no) music.

Best of all, those Czech settlers brought the recipe for the delectable breakfast pastries known as kolaches. A kolache (kuh-LAH-chee) is sort of sweet and bready, usually about 2 to 3 inches across, and squarish (because they are baked close together in a pan). They are about 3/4 of an inch tall, and there is a well in the center that is filled with fruit jam—or sometimes cream cheese.

Kolache shops also sell sausage “kolaches” that are really just kolache dough wrapped around a small link sausage and baked, looking like a large pig in a blanket.

And they make bacon kolaches that are made like a jelly roll (a thin layer of dough rolled up into a round cylinder) but with bits of crisp bacon instead of jam. I suspect that the meat kolaches are a 20th century invention, but they are good, especially the bacon ones.

There are kolache shops all over the place these days. You can’t have a business breakfast meeting in Houston without kolaches (unless you are having really great breakfast tacos and lots of fresh fruit), and they are delicious!

Caldwell has a Kolache Festival every year, and I keep meaning to go up there and try the home-baked kolaches. Somehow when I was a child, my family not being Czech, we missed out on the kolaches. They didn’t have their own festival in those days.

I want to go straight to the source and try out the real kolaches in Caldwell. I hope you get a chance to do that someday, too.

Meanwhile, if you ever see a kolache shop, stop in and try some. Yum!

Grapefruit, oranges, peaches, plums, and apples. People don’t exactly think of Texas as an orchard state, but we are!

Texas Ruby Red Grapefruit

Cases of the sweet, colorful Texas Ruby Red grapefruit from the Rio Grande Valley (which we just call “the Valley”) are shipped all over the U.S. at this time of year for business and personal gifts. They have been a traditional Christmas gift for decades.

Pronunciation Note: Despite its being spelled “Rio Grande” so it should be pronounced REE-oh GRAN-day, we pronounce it REE-oh GRAND. Just to be different, I guess.

Texas Oranges

People tried growing oranges in Texas, but for some reason that never caught on much, though we do have some orange groves in the Valley, and they sell TexSun orange juice. But we still have towns with names like Satsuma and Fresno, as far north as East Texas, to show that they tried.

Fredericksburg Peaches

Way up in the Texas Hill country of Central Texas they grow a lot of peaches. The peaches from around Fredericksburg are especially prized. Homemade peach ice cream is a very big deal in peach season up around there. And all over Texas, we love our peach pie and peach cobbler.

Caldwell Plums

In East Central Texas, up around Caldwell especially, the Czech farmers grow a lot of beautiful plums. They make tart plum jam, and they put that in wonderful Czech breakfast pastries called kolaches (koh-LAH-cheez). I’ll tell you about kolaches another time. Yum!