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 Every year, we wait patiently for the freestone peaches to be perfectly ripe so we can begin making preserves, brandied peaches, and peach pies. Freestone peaches are the best to cook with because the fruit comes easily away from the pit. Cling peaches, the ones with fruit that sticks to the pit, generally ripen a couple of weeks earlier than freestones. There are several cultivars of each kind–some sweeter and juicier than others.
This year, warm, rainy weather across the South has accelerated the growing seasons. The mayhaws, which are supposed to be ripe in May, were all harvested by mid-April. And the cling peaches, which we usually get in June, were already ripening in mid-May.
Looks like the freestones season is about to begin! Please leave alerts about where you are finding the best peaches this year in the comments section!
Peach Pie Recipe after the jump! read more Peach Patrol! »
It’s hard to figure out where Texas cooking is headed right now. There are a lot of different trends going on and they have little to do with each other. In fact, sometimes it seems like the chefs in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin arrived here from different planets. In this series, I’ll check out food from some hot Texas chefs and look for clues about the big picture.
 Chef Matt McAllister
Chef Matt McCallister served lunch at Springdale Farm in Austin during the Foodways Texas Symposium last month. It was the first time I got a chance to sample the Dallas wunderkind’s cuisine. The salad was made from vegetables and flowers picked minutes ago from plants growing in the urban farm where we were seated. “Roots, leaves, stems, soil,” read the menu description.
 I watched as the salads were assembled by McCallister and his volunteer assistants. You sure can’t call this tweezer food–the chef encouraged his helpers not to waste time arranging things, but rather to put the ingredients randomly around the plate. Carrots, kohlrabi and beets were the roots, the leaves included dinosaur kale, chard and lettuce, dill and other herbs were the stems. The soil was an amazing blend of brown powders including sumac (a Middle Eastern ingredient sometimes used in zaatar), cocoa powder, nuts and spices. Olive oil powder was sprinkled here and there among the vegetables–it turned slippery when you reconstituted it in your mouth.
read more TexChefs2: Rootsy Radical: Matt McCallister »
My first foray into making Lousiana pepper sauce started with a search for red chiles. Tabasco chiles were introduced to Louisiana in the 1800s and became the favorite chile for bottled pepper sauces. The recipe included the elaborate step of fermenting the ripe red peppers in oak barrels. Pepper pickers carried a stick painted with the shade of red that the peppers needed to reach. The ripeness was important because you need a decent level of sugar to get the fermentation process going.
read more Hot Sauce at Home: Fermented Pepper Sauce, Part 1 »
 Sacred Heart Past President, Dominic B. Cuccerre Skinner Pasta will be donating a couple of hundred pounds of spaghetti to the Sacred Heart Society Spaghetti lunch this week. I’ll be there on Thursday March 8 signing my new book Texas Eats and telling spaghetti lovers about a contest Skinner is sponsoring.
Skinner Pasta started selling spaghetti in Texas in 1912. For most of the last hundred years, it was the only brand widely available in Texas grocery stores. To celebrate their anniversary, Skinner has hired me to help publicize the “100 Years of Mealtime Memories” Essay Contest. The writer of the winning essay gets a Grand Prize of $10,000. Four “First Prize” winners will receive $1,000 each. You’ll find the contest rules here.
$10,000 is a nice chunk of change. But there’s another reason you might want enter Skinner’s “100 Years of Mealtime Memories” essay contest. After the winners are announced, Skinner will share the essays that describe Lone Star food memories with Foodways Texas. Collecting stories about Texas food history is what that organization is all about.
 Foodways Texas won’t make the essays public, but the oral history group will sift through the entries looking for information about Texas food traditions that might be worth exploring further. So even if you don’t win, your essay about your grandpa’s spaghetti sauce might end up changing food history. It’s a pretty cool contest. Skinner Pasta is giving away fourteen grand in prize money for family food stories and helping Foodways Texas at the same time. I’ll be giving a portion of the money Skinner pays me to Foodways Texas to help fund the oral history projects.
read more $10,000 for Your Spaghetti Story »
 Local food lovers, Democratic and Republican state reps, the Houston Press and the Dallas Observer, and home bakers groups all pulled together to pass The Texas Cottage Food Bill, a change in the law that allowed Texas home bakers, canners and artisans to sell their homemade foods directly to the public without having [...]
 My daughter Katie Walsh writes for a food blog called Whisked Foodie She called me the other day to ask where to get edible roses. (If you have a source, please share it under “comments.”) This question seems to come up once a year around this time. I used to grow organic roses so I could cook with them, but growing roses without chemicals proved too be to big a challenge for my modest gardening skills.
Still, the question brought back fond memories of Valentine’s Day cooking projects.
This article and the recipe for Quail in Rose Petal Sauce ran in column I used to write for Natural History Magazine “A Matter of Taste.” The story was published in May of 1999. (story and recipe after the jump)
read more Eating Roses »
Food TV would be a cool thing to do. Mess around in the kitchen–take a few videos. Eat good. What could be better?
Meet food TV mega-producer Irene Wong. After Irene Wong produced half a dozen hits for the Food Network, she went independent and started her own production company, IW Productions. These days, she spends nine months a year on the road shooting 6 days a week for a grueling 12 hours a day.
Irene and her crew came to El Real Tex-Mex on Saturday to shoot a segment for Unique Eats on the Cooking Channel. Irene and company got there at 4 AM! That’s one hour after we close on Friday night. Chef Bryan Caswell and I were asked to arrive at the leisurely hour of 6 AM. Irene’s gang had already lit the entire kitchen and were testing equipment when we got there. They had Caswell wired up with a microphone before he got a cup of coffee in his mouth.
read more Irene Wong Shoots El Real »
 Release date March 6, 2012 Preorder from Amazon
“Food writer Walsh (The Tex-Mex Cookbook ; Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook) is a three-time James Beard Award winner and an authority on Texas culinary history. His latest is primarily organized by region, with chapters that focus on either a popular dish (e.g., Chili con [...]
From Ten Speed Press, release date March 6, 2012 Preorder from Amazon
Many thanks to Eater.com’s Spring Cookbook Preview for the kind words about the new cookbook!
The Eater Spring 2012 Cookbook and Food Book Preview Monday, January 9, 2012, by Paula Forbes
American Regional: Texas Eats: The New Lone Star Heritage Cookbook, [...]
 The RobbWalsh.com “Texas Eats” website was down for more than a week due to technical difficulties. If you tried to find us while were out of commission, we apologize.
It seems our server got raided by interweb evil doers. We ended up with the “WordPress Pharma Hack.” Every time we tried to send [...]
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Every year, we wait patiently for the freestone peaches to be perfectly ripe so we can begin making preserves, brandied peaches, and peach pies. Freestone peaches are the best to cook with because the fruit comes easily away from the pit. Cling peaches, the ones with fruit that sticks to the pit, generally ripen a couple of weeks earlier than freestones. There are several cultivars of each kind–some sweeter and juicier than others.
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