I want to start off this article with some old man griping. Let’s take a look at these potato prices from the HEB:
5-lbs of potatoes is $1.77, yet 10-lbs is only twenty cents more. What is not pictured, is the price of a single potato, which is $1.20. So, this is all a lead up to how it is that I walked into the store, intending to buy a potato, but I walked out with ten pounds.
But you know what’s free? Pecans. It’s pecan picking season in Austin.
Every time I try walking anywhere I end up with a pocket full of these tasty morsels.
My food-frakking deputy Julia and I visited the Restaurant Depot last week. You can get great prices on meat in bulk there.
And yes, that bag says "lamb carcass." You can even see its little hoofies up at the top.
A glimpse of some southern-style cooking for you northerners, this is from Austin’s Hoovers restaurant.
The yellow things are "ho-cakes", essentially a pancake made with corn meal. The cup on the side is filled with chickens, dumpling, and gravy.
Taco Cabana, a Texas fast-food taco chain, has been making Mexican street-food tacos.
They’re not much different than the taco cart tacos, except that you only get one meat choice, a marinated beef not unlike suadero. Also, they’re served with a very American-style chips and velveeta-queso side.
I picked up this Mexican dulces sampler at that El Rancho supermarket that I mentioned earlier.
I’m not sure exactly what everything was, but it seemed to be candied pumpkin, fig, and various other squashes. How do they make a piece of vegetable so incredibly sweet? It was like biting into a strawberry jam that was actually a pumpkin.
The big development with my cooking repertoire is the purchase of a crock pot.
So the first thing I did was go down to the store and buy the neck pieces of three different types of animals.
The turkey necks made dam fine soup. It was meaty yet healthy and vegetable intensive.
And after the crock pot had simmered the flesh from the bones, I was left with a pile of turkey vertebrae. They looked like the pieces for some weird European educational toy.
I was tempted to keep them. But then I thought better of it. You have to ask yourself how many carcasses you really need to keep around the house.
Instead, I played with them once and then threw them away.