The first weekend in March is prime time for Gulf oysters. It’s also the date for the annual Oysterfest in Fulton. I spent the weekend in this tiny fishing port near Rockport along with a whole lot of tourists. Every year, tens of thousands of festival-goers eat several tons of raw oysters. The oysters here are eaten under the big top with cold beer and live music. It reminded me a little of Galway’s Oyster Festival–only with Lone Star instead of Guinness.

The “Flea Markets” on Airline Drive in North Houston form a giant mercado that draws some 50,000 Latino shoppers every weekend. Each flea market has its own taquerias and food stands.

De Buey Y Vaca is the most famous taqueria. (Buey y vaca means ox and cow, or steer and cow.) My favorite dish there was the barbacoa soup. Barbacoa soup belongs in the family of menudo, posole, and caldo de res. It’s a weekend breakfast soup eaten with a squeeze of lime, chopped onions and cilantro and a stack of tortillas. If you like barbacoa, this stuff will knock your socks off.

De Buey Y Vaca also had tacos dorados (golden tacos). These are tortillas that have been stuffed and secured with toothpicks, then deep-fried. The sweet potato version was bland, the refried bean filled taco was pretty good, but the best by far was the one filled with sesos, or brains. Brains are pretty neutral-tasting, really. That’s why brains and eggs became such a popular Southern dish–if no one told you what you were eating, you’d think it was tofu.

Sunny Flea Market specializes in fruits and vegetables. Cut-up melons, mangos, cucumbers and coconuts were among the fruit cups on sale at the Sunny fruit stand on Saturday morning. The lady behind the counter was also selling hot elote (sweet corn) on a stick or in a bowl along with chile powder-covered mangos on a stick and half coconuts. I had a bowl of elote, or sweet corn, mixed with sour cream, parmesan and chile powder. The strawberries on a stick covered with strawberry-flavored sour cream were quite nice too.

There were several Mexican hot dog stands here too. Mexican hot dogs start with bacon-wrapped frankfurters and are usually topped with beans, avocado, and salsa.

Mercado SabaDomingo has a huge dance hall and both outdoor and indoor vendor’s stalls. I had some chicharrones made from deep fried pork belly there.

Their food stands include several that specialize in goat tacos.

If you enjoy strolling around a Mexican Mercado, check this place out some weekend. It’s open Saturdays and Sundays only.

I received this e-mail letter from a satisified customer today. I have to say I was touched. I hope my kids remember me this fondly.

Smoking Turkey in the Rain

Robb-
I am not a Texan but I love BBQ. I live in the Pacific NW (Olympia, WA to be exact). It rains a shitload here, and today I smoked a turkey in the rain on my cheap little charcoal smoker. It took 7 hours and it was delicious.

I have spent a great deal of my life in TX. Although I grew up in Colorado, my old man lived in Houston back then so I had the pleasure of doing “divorced dad” trips to Houston every August for a great deal of my childhood. And as you can imagine, Houston in August pretty much made me hate Texas. But one thing I always, always looked forward to—getting good Texas BBQ. One time, my dad drove me up to the New Zion BBQ in Huntsville, which you know and have written about. I hurt myself I ate so much. The proprietress (I think it may have been the woman that started the joint–she looked ancient) looked at me after I had eaten and said to me, I quote, “Darlin’, if you slide under the table, I ain’t calling 911.”

Experiences like that (and there were many) helped me realize that TX is a special kind of place after all, especially when it comes to BBQ. Now my old man lives in Austin, and he is getting on being a truly old man these days. I have a sister there too, with a great husband and three beautiful kids. My mom left Colorado a few years back and moved to Georgetown to be near the grandkids. Me, I look forward to visiting every year for a lot of reasons now, but one big one is that I know my old man and I will always hop in his truck and head out to the country for the day and that day will always include a stop at a BBQ restaurant, whether its Blacks in Lockhart or Coopers on Llano, maybe one of those “shade tree” road side stands you write about. And I know I will always hurt myself again because it is always so good, and so uniquely Texas, wherever we go.

My old man gave me your Texas Legends BBQ book a few weeks back for my birthday and I just read it cover to cover over the weekend. I loved it. It inspired me to smoke my bird in the rain today. The only point of this message is to say thanks–thanks for taking me back to TX on a rainy and slate grey NW weekend, bringing back some special memories, and providing all the great recipes. The book is fabulous and I have found your web site now too. So, even though I am far from Texas, you do a fine job of bringing Texas to those of us who are far away, if only in body.

Regards,

Steve North
Olympia, WA

Barbacoa means barbecue in Mexican Spanish. In Mexico City you find seasoned lamb sealed in maguey leaves cooked in the coals of a fire. In Texas, cow heads became the most popular meat for barbacoa because the ranch hands were given cow heads as part of their pay. If you ever saw the movie Giant, you might remember Elizabeth Taylor fainting when the vaqueros unwrapped the burlap bag containing the head that had been buried under the coals.

There are a couple of old-fashioned barbacoa pits left in Texas–a restaurant called Vera’s in Brownsville has one. But modern health department regulations have pretty much put an end to authentic pit barbacoa. At Tex-Mex restaurants and taquerias, cow heads are now cooked in the oven with a baño Maria (water pan) or in a jacketed steam kettle like they have at Gerardo’s,

Gerardo’s Drive-In Grocery on Patton sells the best barbacoa in Houston. “Gerardo’s, Barbacoa, Vi, Sa, Do” reads the sign out front. Which means that barbacoa is available on Friday (Viernes), Saturday (Sábado) and Sunday (Domingo) only.

Owner Jose Luis Lopez was born in Michoacan. He opened the store in 1977 and named it after his infant son. Today Gerardo Lopez is all grown up and he works in the store too. The grocery offers a few raw vegetables and some raw meats along with the soft drinks and the chips, but mostly people come for the barbacoa, the carne asada, the chile rellenos and the other prepared foods.

On Saturday morning, Gerardo’s is a street party.

I made my first wild duck gumbo a couple of years ago after going duck hunting with my brothers. Four of us shot eleven ducks near Aransas Pass on our way down to South Padre for Thanksgiving. The Walsh family is a large clan and around 20 of us had gathered in a condo complex on the beach for Thanksgiving festivities. I used all eleven ducks and some barbecue sausage from Joe Cotten’s in one big pot of gumbo that we ate on Wednesday night. Everybody loved it–but the flavor was very stout.

Friends from Louisiana have since opened my mind to the many intricacies of wild duck gumbo. The duck hunting in Louisiana is legendary. The ducks once darkened the skies. That’s how the state got the nickname “Sportsman’s Paradise.” There aren’t as many ducks as there used to be and wild duck gumbo isn’t very common anymore. It’s wild game, so they don’t serve it the restaurants where we look for our definitions of Cajun cuisine. But among the Cajuns of South Louisiana and East Texas wild duck gumbo is totemic.

Your average Cajun cook could talk for three hours about the past, present, and future of wild duck gumbo and how grandma did it. The perfect blend of poultry is three wild ducks, one hen and a guinea fowl, I have been advised. (I have more trouble finding domestic guinea fowl than wild ducks.) And a sweet potato is traditionally eaten with this gumbo along with the rice. My friend Jim Gossen also suggested the additional of a couple of shucked oysters to the bowl just before you ladle in the hot gumbo.

I put a few of these ideas into practice when I made my second wild duck gumbo, the one in the photo above. We went duck hunting again this year and I ended up with twenty ducks. I used five ducks and one large chicken in the broth and served the gumbo with baked sweet potato in the middle. I put a bowl of rice on the table too–but I loved the sweet potato variation. I used some smoked venison sausage instead of andouille. And I did add some oysters to the bowl. This was a gumbo that served about 15 people.

My roux didn’t come out right and I had to add more flour, so there was a tiny bit of raw flour flavor. And I got carried away with the smoked venison sausage–the smoky flavor kind of took over. Don’t get me wrong–it was an excellent bowl of gumbo. But I see room for improvement.

Luckily, I’ve got a lot of ducks in the freezer.

Watch for more information about this Texas foodways group in the making.

Most people make masa from powdered instant mix these days. Real nixtamal is getting pretty rare–but if you find it, buy it. It makes the best tamales!

In their year end round-up, Sex, Death & Oysters was named one of the top food books of 2009 by the Eat Me Daily blog

Best Food Adventure
Sex, Death, and Oysters by Robb Walsh
Walsh, a Houston-based food writer, goes on an oyster adventure, eating the bivalves on two continents. The book would be too sodden with facts and figures if not for Walsh’s light, journalistic style. Warning: this book will make you want to go out and consume massive quantities of oysters, as well as whatever alcohol is locally traditional to consume with them. –PF

Here’s Part One of my recipe for Wild Duck Gumbo:

First shoot yourself some ducks.

Cut open a bag of Fritos corn chips, ladle some hot Velveeta over top, add a scoop of chili con carne, some raw onions and chopped jalapeños. Voila!