When one thinks of wine country, one rarely thinks of Texas. However, according to the literature supplied by Go Texan, there are actually eight designated viticultural areas in the state, with the Hill Country area being the second largest in the United States. It was our recent good fortune to be invited to the Texas Two-Sip Dinner at Jack Allen’s Kitchen.
It’s strange, but we actually don’t eat a lot of fresh tomatoes at our house. For one, Sean steadfastly despises them. For another, while I find them tasty enough, they’re rarely anything I seek out. Typically, I buy tomatoes to cook into sauce or as a cooked ingredient in something else, and consequently, I go for the paste tomatoes, typically Romas. Recently though, I got to taste the sort of tomatoes that I’d actually enjoy eating out of hand.
I know you wind up seeing a lot of blather about curing bacon, grinding sausage, and cutting up meat, but Sean and I actually eat vegetarian meals more often than you might imagine. Among our favorites are saag paneer with naan and tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches, however a new love has entered our life, and curiously, it features another kind of grilled cheese. Well, grillable, anyway. Thanks to Lisa of Lisa is Cooking, I have been routinely making Braised Chickpeas with Greens and Haloumi Cheese for the past couple months.
I was recently gifted with a bag full of the most delicate little yellow-orange mangos. Lindsay of Apron Adventures fame offered them up about a month ago, and I could not resist. The mangos came courtesy of the National Mango Board, whose website is an excellent resource for all manner of mango information, not the least of which is a rather large collection of recipes.
After a few beers to celebrate a friend’s birthday, we decided that what we wanted more than anything was pizza. We decided to hit one of the places we didn’t have stomach capacity to visit during the Tasty-Up Trailer Tour this past spring. Tucked away just this side of nowhere is one fantastic pizza joint: Spartan Pizza.
I hate licorice. There, I said it. You’d think I’d be totally into the strange black rope-like candy that is, against all aesthetic evidence, edible, but I’m not. I do, however, find that I enjoy food items with licorice-like flavors. Fennel, for instance, is lovely. Star anise is an excellent flavoring. And it turns out that if the variety’s right, I even enjoy absinthe (beyond the tiny dab I use in my Sazaracs).
This is Sean’s and my eleventh year in Austin, and this is the first year we really did SXSW. South by Southwest is a couple weeks long film, interactive, and music extravaganza filled with conference activity, films, endless musical acts, and of course, parties. We’ve gone to a sprinkling of free shows in the past, but we’ve never really done the immersive, four-days-of-music-debauchery that we managed this year. Matt, a college friend and the fellow who officiated our wedding, came down to make sure we didn’t puss out and go home too early.
When the offer came for a review copy of a new cookbook about baking with whole grain flours, I could barely contain my excitement long enough to provide a professional-yet-adamantly-affirmative response. We’ve been working on reducing the amount of refined white flour we consume, but it hasn’t been easy. Luckily, we now have Good to the Grain to fall back on.
When I was younger, I had nothing but scorn for Valentine’s Day. Pink and red were the predominant colors, and everything was fluffy and lacy – definitely not my speed. Even these days, I’m not sure you could pay me to go to a restaurant on the big day. However, I am more than happy to use it as an excuse to cook with fancy ingredients I wouldn’t normally indulge in.
Johnson’s Backyard Garden CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Box 5 brought us several new items. We received a couple bunches of mustard greens, an avocado, and a big fat rutabaga (a vegetable I haven’t tried before). This is part of why we decided to go the CSA route - to be forced to try veggies we wouldn’t ordinarily think to buy. With this post also, I’m going to shift from explaining every little thing I do, to just relaying the recipes that were most interesting.