Week of November 8th – Texas

"You ‘all can go to hell. I am going to Texas." I’m, of course, quoting Davy Crockett, who after serving three terms as a Tennessee congressman lost his 4th run for the seat and decided to head out west.

Two things come to mind when I think of Texas, beside its size, are football and food. Although a more enlightened individual might say that cattle, oil & aerospace should be at the top of the list. But since the Rams don’t play Dallas or Houston this year and although Mizzou is in the Big 12 with the Baylor Bears, Texas Longhorns, Texas A&M Aggies (W), and Texas Tech Red Raiders (L) they only played A&M and Tech this year and neither game was this week. Out goes the football celebration. Texas isn’t too shabby in the Baseball department with Texas going to the World Series this year, only to lose to the Giants. But, this too, goes back a few weeks.

So that leaves food. Too easy, search on.

The Alamo is considered the symbol of Texas liberty and the state's most popular historic attraction but short of running around the neighborhood yelling “Remember the Alamo” I don’t see a celebration here. (However don’t rule it out.)
A couple of stores that are often familiar stops on my shopping excursions, Michael’s (Irving, TX) and Pier 1 Imports (Fort Worth, TX), are headquartered in the Lone Star state, so for the sake of the project I forced myself to go shopping. “Houston, we have a problem.” Since more wool comes from the state of Texas than any other state in the nation I should have bought some wool at Michael’s but, alas it was too early for my winter knitting marathon. A Tex-Mex style serving bowl was purchased at Pier 1 in honor of this week’s celebration.

Back to food, are we? Not yet.

Austin is considered the “Live Music Capital of the World” so we must have music. It’s true though; there is music everywhere you turn in Austin. We visited this beautiful city back in 2004 when our son was considering U. of T. for college. Between the gate and baggage claim, I think we passed 4 or 5 live music acts. That’s also where I picked up my Texas snowman snow globe which made me LOL in the airport. Besides the scads of musicians trying to break into the music scene on the streets, in the clubs and bars and airports of Texas there are some familiar names. Buddy Holly (Lubbock, TX), Lyle Lovett (Klein, TX) and Kris Kristofferson (Brownsville, TX), to name a few. But I pretty much stopped at Kris Kristofferson, who as a teenager I thought had the sexiest voice on earth and he wasn’t too bad to look at either. So I downloaded 2 CD’s worth of music starting with Asleep at the Wheel’s version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and continuing and ending with a collection of Kris’ classics. Who else can get away with singing “Jesus was a Capricorn”?

All this talk about music and Kris Kristofferson is making me hungry.
OK, they say that the Texas culture is a mixture of Southwestern/Mexican, Southern, and Western/Cowboy influences. And their food isn’t any exception. The St. Louis area has some pretty good Tex-Mex restaurants so during the week (we tried to spread it out a little) we sampled several of them. Of course the house was to be stocked with salsa made in Texas and Mission chips as well as Frito-Lays, headquartered in Plano, TX.

Dr Pepper was invented in Waco in 1885 but since our tastes don’t go in that direction we opted for Margaritas (I did anyway) and Shiner Bock beer, Shiner, TX.

Also in Waco, seventy-five percent of the world's Snickers are produced at the M&M/Mars plant. Sounds like dessert to me.

We had done justice to the Tex-Mex influence but with only 1 meal left we had to choose from Texas-sized steaks, Texas-style Cajun recipes made with Texmati rice or good old fashioned, stick to your ribs, brow sweating Texas chili. And since the official dish of Texas is chili, guess what won. So with the table set with yellow roses and the Silver-Tongue Devil singing in the background, we sat down to steaming bowls of chili with avocado and Texas toast.

Color in Texas with the colors of the Southwestern sky and travel from the Lone Star state to the state where the “Stars” are anything but lonely - California. 51 down, 1 to go.