Often, for Sean and I, eating out is an occasion. And especially since we've been watching our budget, it's something we've saved for special occasions. But what if you just want really excellent food without all the fanfare and expense. For that, I would suggest Foreign and Domestic.

Continue reading "Getting Tongue"

I don't know why this didn't occur to me sooner. I bitch and moan about the heat here every summer, and yet I rarely make frozen desserts of any kind. It took my friendly neighborhood CSA and an excess of basil along with some suggestions from my Twitter friends to convince me that I needed to try my hand at popsicles.

Continue reading "A Popsicle by Any Other Name"

The definition of a guilty pleasure. That's how I've been referring to the food at The Trailer at The Gibson Bar. And I refer to it often. We were recently invited to experience firsthand the wonder that is the Trailer Burger (a burger whose bun is a Round Rock dough-nut), but let me assure you, that wasn't even the most decadent item consumed.

Continue reading "Guilty Pleasures"

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.

Continue reading "Texas Two-Sip"

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.

Continue reading "Optimistic Tomatoes"

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.

Continue reading "The Other Grilled Cheese"

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.

Continue reading "Bites of Sunshine"

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.

Continue reading "Tonight We Dine in Hell"

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).

Continue reading "Our Meeting with the Green Fairy"

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.

Continue reading "Surviving SXSW 2010"