Green Mustang Grape Pie

Since I sometimes get requests for this pie recipe, I thought I would publish it for the world here. This is a selection from a guidebook in progress called “Central Texas Urban Foraging” which I’ve been writing with Kim Hill of KimCovers512.com. Of all the pies we’ve made, this one has the most enthusiastic fan

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Rolling the tamale

Homemade Tamales

The great thing about tamales is that they’re the gift that keeps on giving. With a couple of dollars worth of low-grade pork, and pennies worth of spices, cornmeal and corn husks, you can make a pile of tamales which will keep in the freezer forever. The trick to making a really good tamale, is

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prickly pear sorbet

How to Make Prickly Pear Sorbet

About mid-summer here in Austin, the prickly pear get ripe. They bloat purple in the punishing sun, sprouting with tantalizing juiciness from the middle of daunting thickets of thorns. I pass by a lot of these prickly pear groves on my daily bike commute, the nopalito cactus flourishes in the poor soil and neglect of

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Chicharron Preparados

I haven’t stopped exploring the menus of the fruit cup stands down on Riverside. One of the standard options on the non-fruit side of their menus is chicharrones preparados. Reading the name, I initially thought that this food would be a pile of fried pork skins topped with beans, cream, and other delicious garnishes. But

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pig skin with tattoo

Pig Skins at Home

There I was at the Fiesta Mexican food market, standing at the meat counter and I thought, “There’s really nothing keeping me from buying a pound of pig skin.” The pig skin was cut into perfect pink squares. There was some dimpling, apparently from someone having hit it with a tenderizing hammer at some point.

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Frozen Coconut Banana Leaves Cake

Sometimes you have a serious sweet tooth late at night and you go to the freezer to find the makings of whatever dessert had previously been too much of a hassle for you to bother with previously. My freezer just happened to have some frozen banana-slash-rice-pudding with a secret core of red beans and wrapped

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