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Ravigote means “reinvigorated” in French. It is usually a spicy sauce served with a bland protein. It can mean a warm seafood sauce, a spicy vinaigrette, or, in this case, a sort of a Creole tartar sauce. I came up with this version of a ravigote sauce while I was trying to write a recipe for shrimp salad. read more Spicy Shrimp Ravigote Salad » 
Those dewberries I bought on 90A the other day got made into jam. I had about four cups of dewberries, but I also had four cups of strawberries that my three year-old daughter Ava brought home from a pick-your-own strawberry excursion she went on over the weekend. So we combined the two and made “Twoberry Jam.” It was a great combination–lots of tartness from the blackberries plus the chunkiness from the strawberries.  
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 [...]
This recipe originally appeared during the rodeo barbecue cook-off. It’s complicated, but the results are spectacular. Borrego actually means mutton in Spanish, but for some reason, Anglos are more comfortable translating it to “lamb.” Which is odd when you think about it, since Anglos are usually squeamish about eating veal, suckling pig, tiny cabritos and other baby animals. Mutton used to be a traditional meat in Texas barbecue and is still found at a few African-American barbecue joints such as Ruthie’s in Navasota and Sam’s in Austin. So call this “Mexican mutton barbecue” if you like.The smoky-flavored, falling-off-the-bone tender meat this recipe yields is even tastier than the the stewed goat dish called birria. Mexican barbacoa is still made in a smoker by a few Tejano barbecue enthusiasts, but commercial pit barbacoa is all but extinct in Texas. Vera’s in Brownsville is one of the last restaurants in the state to use a real pit to make barbacoa. In the old days, Mexican ranch hands used to wrap cow heads up in canvas or maguey leaves and bury them in the coals. (In the movie Giant, Elizabeth Taylor faints when they unwrap the package and show her the head.) But health departments frown on such traditional barbacoa these days.  Writing about food as a freelancer was a tough way to make a living and I was about ready to give up after several years of poverty. My fortunes changed when this article about bumming around the Caribbean looking for new hot sauces was published in American Way magazine and won the 1996 James Beard Journalism Award in the Magazine Feature Writing with Recipes category. The little house looks like it’s about to slip off the cliffside into the thicket of banana plants and herb gardens below. Knocking on the door, I am greeted by reggae on the radio and several loud, simultaneous conversations. “Come in, it’s open!” somebody finally hollers over the din. Inside, seven women are sitting around a kitchen table cleaning herbs and laughing. Out the window behind them, I can see the green squares of hundreds of garden plots covering the steep slopes of Trinidad’s Paramin Hills. Stacked along the wall is the treasure I’ve travelled thousands of miles to find, cases upon cases of “Genuine Paramin Pepper Sauce.” Hillary Boisson is the Parmin Women’s Group’s unofficial leader. She is scrutinizing my T-shirt trying to find some clue as to what this large sunburnt American wants in her clubhouse kitchen. The T-shirt reads: “Austin Hot Sauce Contest, Fourth Annual.” read more Article Archives: “Hot Sauce Safari,” 1995 » This article appeared in Cooking Light Magazine in June 2004, at about the same time that the cookbook Nuevo Tex-Mex was published. Tex-Mex first blazed across American tastebuds in the Wild West of the 1880s. In those days, young Hispanic women with roses pinned to the bosoms of their dresses sashayed around San Antonio’s Military Square peddling tacos, tamales and chili con carne to lonesome cowboys. The Chili Queens, as they were known, were famous both for their flirtatious sales pitches and for the spiciness of the Tex-Mex specialities they sold. The Chili Queens gave Tex-Mex tacos, tamales and chili con carne a pretty exciting reputation. Of course, nobody called it Tex-Mex in those days. It was simply known as Mexican food. In fact, we were still calling it Mexican food some eighty years later when Americans fell in love with crispy tacos and tortillas chips in the late 1960s. The term “Tex-Mex” didn’t come along until the 1970s when Mexican cooking authorities convinced us that this sort of Texan-Mexican fusion cooking wasn’t really Mexican food at all. The name was something of an insult, it divided Mexican food into two categories. Guacamole and tamales were authentic Mexican food. The gloppy, cheese-covered platters, the fast food tacos–and all the other stuff that didn’t get any respect–that was Tex-Mex. Suddenly, one of America’s oldest and most popular regional cooking styles had been demoted to junk food status. read more Article Archives: “Nuevo Tex Mex” 2004 » |
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