Snow's BBQ in Lexington, Texas

"Barbecue" in America, as a verb, means different things than it does in other places. In America, there are two methods of cooking meat that are generally designated "barbecuing". Proponents of one method call the other method--where meat is placed on a grate over hot coals--simply grilling; while "grilling-as-barbecue" folks call the other-to-their method--where meat is placed in a chamber away from direct heat and cooked by means of hot smoke--simply smoking the meat.

Probably could have made that more confusing...Method 1 for American Barbecue: meat on a grate over hot coals; Method 2 for American Barbecue: southern style--in a chamber being slowly cooked by smoke and other vapors.

With this post, I'll be focusing on Method 2, mainly because where we live now Method 1 is considered "simply grilling", and these folks take their barbecue serious.

Now, in the world of what I call Method 2 barbecue there are different regional variations; Memphis: mostly pork ribs and pulled shoulder, sweet/spicy tomato based sauce; Carolinas: pork mainly also, dry rub, but vinegar sauce used while in smoking chamber; Kansas City: variation on the meats, but the main identifier is the sauce, based on tomato and molasses, what you normally think of as "bbq sauce" comes from KC.

Then there's Texas. Texas barbecue, by BBQ heads, is considered something else apart from the rest of the barbecue south. Texas BBQ itself is broken up into regions, but one characteristic of Texas barbecue is it is heavier on beef than most other southern barbecue styles. Brisket is one of the most famous cuts of meat that get used here, but they also do pork ribs and half chickens.

I'm not sure if the contest is held every year, or every other year, but, as you might be able to guess where this is going, a winner was declared. The magazine "Texas Monthly" holds the contests, and I remember reading an article about the Best BBQ in Tx contest in "The New Yorker" a while back...both the TM and the NYer articles have had the effect of blowing the winner up from a local secret to an institution.

The most recent winner was a small place called Snow's in a less-than-1200 person town called Lexington. Lucky for us, Lexington is about an hour away from where we live. We decided to make the trip while Tony was still here--we thought it would help with our motivation. Motivation needed to be piqued since Snow's, while relatively close, is only opened on Saturdays, from 8 am until they run out of meat, which can be anywhere from 11 to 12:30...

So, maybe this becomes clearer...up and out of the house early on a Saturday morning, driving for not too long, then eating a bunch of meat for breakfast. You had to be committed to the idea of getting the best barbecue in Texas just to consider this plan. But we did it...and we got Rachel to come along as well...

I'll post some pictures, but first let me say that the brisket was outta this world, the pork ribs were just okay, but the pork sausage was also fantastic. The experience alone was worth it. When we got there, there was one lady in front of us, she finished up, and I started our group's ordering. I remember asking, "I thought there'd be a line?" mostly to myself, but once we sat down outside, we looked back, and of course, a twenty person line had formed that never dissipated during our entire time eating up until we left. We just happened to get there at the exact right second.

Here's a shot of the exterior of Snow's BBQ, along Main Street, between 2nd and 3rd:



Here's the back seating area...eagle eye's can see Tony and Rachel sitting on the left side of the frame, and even more honed eyes can see way in the back, on of the pit workers holding his Miller Lite...remember, it's about five minutes after 11...



Here's three of us chowing down...I love the sauce in the water bottle:



Here's Corrie by the sign. She posed as we were leaving.

Hamilton Pool

Imagine you're an eight-year-old boy, the son of German immigrants, out exploring your parents' newly purchased property. Out hiking, keeping track in your brain about the animals you might spot, and you come to a creek that looks like this:



Pretty neat, I'd think if I were the kid, and then you follow it back, and stumble upon this:



This is known as Hamilton Pool, named for the previous family that owned the land before selling it to the Reimers, the German immigrant family who's eight-year old son re-discovered the waterfall and grotto during a hike. The phenomena was created through millennia of erosion. It is now a state park, and swimming is allowed as long as the bacteria count isn't too high to make anyone sick. It's a little under an hour away from us, and we took Tony when he came out to visit.

Spectacular kinda describes it...

Here's a photo for scale...my computer at home, when a picture from my blog is clicked, blows up the picture big...if yours at home does the same, I'd suggest clicking this one; Corrie can be seen close in the foreground, without magnification, and Tony can be seen off in the distance near the right side. The grotto's ceiling is so tall that you feel as if you shrink walking around inside.



Here's Tony enjoying a refreshment near the underneath shore.



It looks like these turtles are contemplating the sign...



I'll post some more pictures from this site in a little while, since there's more natural history, beauty, and nature to deal with...

Mount Bonnell

One of our major cross streets goes by many names, Koenig, Allandale, et. al, but generally the number designation holds throughout the city of Austin: Ranch Road 2222. About ten minutes away along 2222 is a left turn for Mt. Bonnell Way, and in another five minutes a driver will be able to park and walk up a tiny hill to the top of the eponomous mountain and get some nice views of Austin. For those of us that used to take a subway to "our" nearest bar, a quick drive (less in time than Basswood to Sunrise Mall) that takes you to a mountain top overlooking the entire city you now live in is pretty damn spectacular.

Our old pal Tony came to visit last week, and we went up to Mt. Bonnell early on during his visit. That day was cloudy and slightly crappy out, and I forgot the camera, but I just went recently and snapped some pictures that I thought I'd share.

First, I thought it was funny when you have to put up a sign saying what appears to be "No Dynamite Throwing" (probably just fire crackers)...



...but then you see that there is a sheer cliff down to a rich neighborhood along the Colorado River (one of the few Colorado Rivers in the States...)



From the top of a picnic table you can see the skyline of Austin...the tower on the left is the UT tower, where the dude set up shop and sniped a bunch of students in the '70s. The Capital Dome is mostly obstructed, but if you know where to look, it's slightly visible.



Here's another shot of the bend in the Colorado River as it heads towards the heart of the city, getting a name change in the process to "City Lake" before winding away from town and reclaiming "Colorado River" as a name...



And here's one last shot opposite the previous one...the Route 360 bridge is visible in the distance, as well as the rich neighborhood beneath the park that doesn't want to be pelted by rocks, bottles, or dynamite.

Upside Down Tree

For New Year's this year, we just wanted to take it easy, but Corrie and the girls got dressed up ("If you don't get dressed up it's just like any other night spent at home"), and they convinced me to put on a suit, ideal wear for lounging around the house enjoying some beer and avoiding the champagne. Here's a picture from the night...



I put this picture here because it highlights the upside-down tree that Rachel had put up in her house...the base was lost or tossed, so Rachel affixed it to the ceiling, Corrie put up the drapery, and every guest thought it was just the kittens mittens. When we had Daniel and Lola (niece and nephew) over one evening, we got inspired to pick them up by their legs, place them "standing" on the ceiling, and flip the camera upside down, yielding the main thing I wanted to share in this post: a silly bit of photography (the photshopping-adults-out project is behind schedule).

Interesting Presents

For the 12/25 present day celebration this year I found something that I knew Corrie wanted and would most likely enjoy; the Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water Lego set. Denmark's toy giant decided to add some FLW projects to their Architectural Collections, and since Falling water is one of his best known works, and the most complex Lego set, and one of Corrie's favorites, I decided to get it for her. Here she is working on it while a raging bender was being had by dozens of people all around her. (I went to bed moments later.)



Here's the finished project:



In the vein of cool three-dimensional building projects, my mom got us a 3D globe puzzle as a gift. It comes from a German company that prides itself on jigsaw puzzles and their line of 3DJP (three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles, if you couldn't get that acronym). On the 2D side, they had an 18,000 piece puzzle available on their website...The pieces for this globe, as it was a rendition of earth complete with swanky little paintings on each continent showing characteristic cities or animals, were numbered as well as arrowed, letting the person putting it together know which way the next piece goes. Contrary to the inserted information, we were missing a piece...we had enough total, but one a double, and couldn't be crammed into the hole in Australia. Here's a picture of Corrie working on it (I organized the pieces, and she put them together):





And the finished product:

San Antonio

On January 2nd Stephanie, one of our new roommates, took Corrie and me to San Antonio. It was my first trip ever and Corrie's first trip in at least a dozen years. The main entertainment opportunity for us on that day was the availability of extra tickets for the Alamo Bowl, which was being played at the Alamodome.

Stephanie's brother lives virtually in the shadows of the Dome, on the southeast side of otherwise flat-and-ugly San Antonio. Other people were visiting her brother (more siblings and family friends) down from Lubbock, where they lived...Lubock is a college town, and it seemed like everyone at the House in the Shadow of the Dome went to the college in Lubbock, otherwise known as Texas Tech. (Stephanie is the only UT grad in her family.) You might imagine that one of the teams to play in this year's Alamo Bowl would be Texas Tech. The Red Raiders opponent were the Michigan State Spartans.

I mentioned earlier that San Antonio was flat and ugly, but that characterization disregards the sprawl. Austin is north of San Antonio by about ninety to a hundred miles, but, with the sprawl of both cities, the time it takes to get from the most southern point seen as southern Austin to the most northern point of San Antonio is about twenty-five minutes...

Plus, "flat and ugly" totally disregards the surprisingly beautiful tourist zone: The River Walk. San Antonio revitalized their river front area into a "river walk" zone of commercial interests and lax open container laws. It was quaint and bustling simultaneously, reminding me of New Orleans with a touch of Venice. We probably would have enjoyed it more had the walkways not been packed with competing red/black (Texas Tech) clad vs green/white (Mich. State) clad drunken yahoos and their kids, but, it was still mostly fun. We were still in Texas, obviously, so the backers of TT were in the majority, and during our walk along the river we'd here the clarion call: "RAIDER!" would come from one side, expectant of it's rejoinder and answer, coming from everywhere, "POWER!"




I thought the game itself would be nice--our first Bowl Game--and since we didn't really care about the teams (er, schools), we'd have no emotional attachments and enjoy a carefree game. The game, which Texas Tech eventually won, and covered even, was close for the first three quarters, even after the Tech head coach was fired the week before the game for locking a student in a closet. It took too damn long, though. American football is a game that counts-down fifteen minutes a quarter for four quarters...an hour of game clock, right? Fans understand that turns into about three hours of real time. This game started at 8 pm (we thought is started at 7), and the fourth quarter got started at about 11:25. It finished up around ten minutes after midnight. Yikes.



The first thing we did when we got to San Antone was check out the Mercado, where we took this weird picture.



The Mercado is the site of the old 19th century market where the latinos and the whiteys used to meet to sell their respective wares, and now a street fair and market live on the site, reviving the spirit.

Soon enough...

...Isn't soon enough...

More Later...

Firstly, I apologize for the small font...I'm having some trouble with my blog server. Also, I have some more good pictures coming, and some tales of my first trip to San Antonio to see the river walk and our first college football Bowl game. Last night we yelled at the television as the Longhorns lost, today we got our little hot-wheel verified and legitimified in our name...

Interviews coming up as well, but that cookie crumbles in all directions.

I'll figure this blog site out soon enough...

Mom, if you didn't notice, I answered your remark question (sort of) in a follow up remark...

Not-so-Full Pictures

I'm too old for...for waking up on December 25th with a headache. Later on in the day, while I was talking with my cousin Liz (and actually feeling much better, after a steady diet of tepid water and aspirin), I was pulled into the house, prematurely ending my phone call, for the following picture.



I'm going to put up some weird pictures here from the past few weeks. The one above is a rather good one of many of Corrie's siblings and cousins...

Here's one I was told to take for Norm specifically...



On the 27th many folks from Corrie's family went on a picnic to a beautiful green zone called Zilker Park. It was sunny and brisk, and we ate sandwiches under the gnarled limbs of an old oak tree. Later, as we walked, we decided to take a group picture. Corrie's cousin, with a brand new (gift) SLR camera had trouble finding the timer function, so I ran over and set mine up, and snapped the picture. My camera is no SLR bad-ass, but it is pretty bad-ass on its own merit, and takes pretty good shots. The picture came out pretty good, only because you can zoom in or blow it up big.



One last random shot I had Corrie take as we rolled through Arkansas, a reminder of the south's status among the bible belt. I kinda laughed when I saw it originally...check out the billboard...

Catching Up

Corrie and I made it out the day after the Winter Solstice. We left Brooklyn the day directly after the first snow storm. I tried to take a picture of the snow, but my camera had the flash on, and this is how it came out.



This was our truck the next day:



After digging out the truck, I drove carefully to Flatbush, across Brooklyn to the Manhattan Bridge, over it, through Chinatown and into Jersey. From there we took I-78 all the way to I-81, somewhere in Pennsylvania, and started south, spending the night in Roanoke, Virginia.

All along the way, the entire first day and halfway through the second day, into Tennessee, but before we got to Knoxville, snow from that huge eastern seaboard snow storm had blanketed every tree and square foot of rock and dirt within eyesight of the highway. There was a near car collision, where I was almost run off the road by a semi trying to let another semi onto the freeway, and by the time I shot the gate, so to say, jumped out in front and got back over to the slow lane, there wasn't any more snow. Bizarre.

The second day was the drive from Roanoke to a while past Nashville, which reminds me: Tennessee is a long state. The third day we drove through some of the South's metropolises: Memphis, Little Rock, Arkadelphia, Texarkana...eventually we decided to just finish off the drive, and go straight to Austin. Later that night we skirted Dallas, zoomed through Waco, and sailed into Austin a little after midnight.

Here's a shot of Little Rock.



Tux liked his seat...

Happy (belated) Birthday Mike!

I lagged yesterday and couldn't get to the bigger laptop with all the photos that I try to put up for my birthday wishes. Yesterday my cousin Mike turned 25, which makes him eligible for a run at a Senate seat. Mike is one of my favorite people in the world.

Rock on, cousin, happy birthday! Love you.

Happy 2010

So now we officially use the phrase "twenty" when referring to the year. Pretty cool.

I've been lagging in the few days since we've been out here. My apologies...I have some pictures I'll be putting up here soon enough along with descriptions of the drive and the crush of family waiting for us when we arrived.

Enjoy the new year everybody; I know I will.