Robert Murphy's ranch-hand meals-in-a-package delight customers.
A caterin' cookin' cowpoke dishes up savory Dutch Oven meals,
many of which are heated with choice chile pods.
I spotted vendor Robert Murphy not long after I arrived early at the Downtown Mall. It was Saturday, Farmers Market day and the ordinarily pacific strip was alive with bargain shoppers clad in sweatshirts and sweaters to ward off the unusually cool April morn. A long queue had formed at Murphy's table. The burly, mustached merchant, dressed in his trademark black cowboy hat, white shirt draped with black suspenders, and jeans sporting a turquoise and silver belt buckle, ladled out steaming chile stew from a cast iron kettle into little plastic sample cups. "Well, how do you like it?" Murphy asked each taste tester. "A lot," was the usual response. Murphy, with salesman suave, would then gesture toward his display board from which dangled packaged dehydrated foods emblazoned with "Murphy's Enterprises."
"You just add water, tomato and maybe meat, and you've got yerself a meal," he said with pride.
Murphy, 57, has been a fixture at the Farmers Market since 1993, the same year his sister suggested that he use his savory Dutch Oven "ranch-hand" recipes to create dehydrated meals. "She figured they'd appeal to busy housewives, workers, backpackers and campers," Murphy said.
Murphy received first-hand experience in Dutch Oven cookery as a teen when he worked for A.B. Cox (now deceased) at the Cox Ranch during the summers of '57, '58 and '59. "A.B. taught me a lot...how to ride horses and to work cattle and how to cook the best Dutch Oven meals. It was mostly cowboy food - steaks, biscuits and potatoes. He always used fresh red chile powder to spice it. We didn't have many other spices in those days," Murphy observed. Cox sun dried the red chile on a screen and then crushed and powdered it. "It tasted really, really good," Murphy said, smacking his lips in savory remembrance.
Murphy was born in Las Cruces at the long-since-gone McBride Clinic in 1941. "It was located just behind where the Branigan Cultural Center is," Murphy said. "There wasn't a hospital in those days. And the clinic only had three rooms."
Until his marriage 21 years later, Murphy lived in the family home on Watson Lane. Later, he and his bride purchased a 1937 vintage, three bedroom home on South Main, where Murphy still resides. He worked ten years for El Paso Electric before starting a construction business in 1974. Meantime, Murphy catered Dutch Oven meals to small groups. "I got the idea [to cater] from attending other people's functions and eating their food. I'd think to myself, 'I could make a better meal than that'."
Murphy's tasty concoctions include enchiladas, chorizo, Spanish rice, and green-chile corn bread. He also whips up biscuits, gravy, beans, and peach cobbler, all prepared in heavy cast iron Dutch Ovens over charcoal. Murphy's brisket and turkey fixin's are also popular with customers. The meats are smoked in two handspun pits in his backyard. Each pit, which measures 4 ft. by 4-1/2 ft. deep, can accommodate 12 twenty-pound turkeys or 200 pounds of brisket.
Murphy has catered groups as large as 200. His buddies - Charlie Pirtle, David Smith, Carl Wood, Bill Sadler, and Gary Williams pitch in at party time. "They all like to cook so they don't mind volunteering," said Murphy.
When he's not catering, Murphy donates time to youth programs like the Boy Scouts, and peddles his popular 20 Dutch Oven dehydrated products, everything from savory marinades - which he uses to season his turkey and brisket offerings - to snappy salsas and chile corn bread to lip-smacking desserts. Murphy's staff includes his three children, Bob, 27, who packages the products, Patricia "P.J.," 25, who pens the marketing material, and his youngest, Sean, 23, who deftly sketched the logo - a likeness of dad's cowboy hatted head. Chile Network International, which distributes New Mexico chile products in the United States and abroad, recently took on Murphy's products, which has boosted business. "It's just getting better and better. I'm happier now than I have been in years."
The caterin' cookin' cowpoke can be reached at 526-4219.
