Cooking With Texas Highways

“Reflects the great ethnic diversity of the contemporary Texas table, offering everything from Sauerbraten . . . to Crawfish Etouffee.” —The Austin Chronicle Whether you’re hungry for down-home barbecue and Tex-Mex, or you want to try more exotic dishes such as Paella Valenciana and Thai Pesto, Texas Highways has long been a trusted source for delicious recipes that reflect wide-ranging Lone Star tastes. The state’s official travel magazine published its first Texas Highways Cookbook in 1986. Responding to the public’s demand for a new collection of the magazine’s recipes, the editors compiled Cooking with Texas Highways, a collection of more than 250 recipes that are as richly diverse and flavorful as Texas itself. Cooking with Texas Highways samples all the major ethnic cuisines of the state with recipes from home cooks, well-known chefs, and popular restaurants. It offers a varied and intriguing selection of snacks and beverages, breads, soups and salads, main dishes, vegetables and sides, sauces and spreads, desserts, and more. A special feature of this cookbook is a chapter on Dutch-oven cooking, which covers all the basics for cooking outdoors with live coals, including seventeen mouthwatering recipes. In addition, you’ll find dozens of the lovely color photographs that have long made Texas Highways such a feast for the eyes, along with tips on cooking techniques and sources for ingredients and stories about some of the folks who created the recipes. If you want to sample all the tastes of Texas, there’s no better place to start than Cooking with Texas Highways. “Texas culture in all its multi-ethnic variety is well represented.” —Texas Cooking

A culinary tour of Texas, featuring approximately three hundred recipes for appetizers, soups, main courses, chili, salads, desserts, and other dishes; and including photographs of foods and locations throughout the state.

With layer upon layer of rich, dense cake and delicate buttercream subtly flavored with fruit, chocolate, or nuts, classic European tortes crown the pinnacle of Old World baking. Make them with the freshest produce of the fields and orchards of Texas--oranges, peaches, pecans, raspberries, blueberries, plums, apricots, figs, strawberries, and kiwis--and you will discover the New World's ultimate desserts. In this cookbook, Master Baker Arthur L. Meyer presents forty-three original, kitchen-tested recipes for fruit, nut, and chocolate tortes, cassate, tarts and pies, cheesecakes, and other classic European desserts. The recipes take advantage of fresh Texas ingredients, and each recipe contains clear, easy-to-follow instructions that demystify the processes involved in creating these desserts. In addition to the recipes, Meyer guides the home baker through the basic steps in producing tart and cheesecake crusts, fillings and icings, and other standard components of special desserts. Throughout the book, he gives tips on proper techniques and equipment drawn from many years of experience.

The definitive book on Texas cooking-which has been influenced by cuisines around the world, including Eastern Europe and Mexico-by distinguished food writers Cheryl and Bill Jamison, who traveled for two years around the state talking with home cooks, chefs, barbecue experts, fishermen, and farmers. Chapters include "Real Pit-Smoked Bar-B-Q," "Tamed Game," "Farm-Fresh Vegetables," "Eye-Popping, Heart-Thumping Breakfasts," "Football Food," and "Y'All-Come-Back Desserts."

In a short line of Texas Highways distinguished photo editors, J. Griffis Smith has been described by a fellow photographer as a "galactic force," reveling in taking pictures of everything Texas wherever the magazine's assignments took him, all with the goal of inspiring "folks to travel." Celebrating the roaming life of a professional magazine photographer, Texas Highways has joined with Smith to assemble a collection of signature images from three decades of work, including memorable pictures of Texas icons, landscapes, people, and historical and cultural destinations. An essay by E. Dan Klepper conveys a sense of how photo editors have worked at Texas Highways and how Griff Smith's quirky, creative nature has helped to shape the magazine's style and message.

In 1790, Xavier de Maistre was 27 years old, and a soldier in the army of the Sardinian Kingdom, which covered swathes of modern-day Northern Italy and Southern France. He was placed under house-arrest in Turin for fighting an illegal duel. It was during the 42 days of his confinement here that he wrote the manuscript that would become Voyage autour de ma chambre. Inspired by the works of Laurence Sterne, with their digressive and colloquial style, de Maistre decided to make the most of his sentence by recording an exploration of the room as a travel journal. de Maistre’s book imbues the tour of his chamber with great mythology and grand scale. As he wanders the few steps that it takes to circumnavigate the space, his mind spins off into the ether. It parodies the travel journals of the eighteenth-century (such as A Voyage Around the World by Louis de Bougainville, 1771), and could be read today as an early take on the modern vogue for “psychogeography” — each tiny thing that he encounters sends de Maistre into rhapsodies, and mundane journeys become magnificent voyages.