Some Food Really Is Better in Texas
The Tex-Mex and barbecue we can't get anywhere else
We had spent weeks looking for a good place to get take-out Chinese food. During our first six weeks living in Houston, we lived in our camper at an RV park that was just barely close enough to school for the kids and me. Six weeks of camper living while learning a new city was wearing on us, and my husband and I just wanted some good comfort Chinese food from some local hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Every place we tried, the beef and broccoli seemed off and my husband complained that the fried rice tasted like Spanish rice. Our quest seemed hopeless.
I asked my students, most of them born and raised Texans, where we could find some good Chinese food. The nearly unanimous response was, “PF Changs?”
No, I did not want to go out for a sit-down dinner at a chain restaurant. I wanted good, cheap Chinese food that we could eat at the picnic table outside of our camper.1
But I couldn’t blame them for their response. I eventually heard that the best place for Chinese food in Houston (which is known for its international cuisine) was Chinatown, but that was far from my upper-middle-class students’ experiences. And when it came to heaping servings of comfort food, they had been raised on two Texas staples: Tex-Mex and BBQ. Eventually, these would become our staples as well.
Once we finally settled into our house, we made finding the best Tex-Mex in north Houston our goal. Our kids went to a Christian education night at our church on Wednesdays, and this became our date night. We spent weeks on end trying new restaurants and taco trucks in search of the best places to go as a family, eventually finding our favorites that we would return to again and again.
While different at first, we learned to fully appreciate endless baskets of fresh tortilla chips accompanied by warm salsa. I fell in love with creamy white enchiladas and our daughter learned to appreciate tiny street tacos devoid of lettuce that she didn’t need to pick off and throw away. Our local taco truck served up cheesy steak quesadillas that always hit the spot on a weekend afternoon. Taco truck churros were nearly always perfectly crisp on the outside, warm and soft on the inside, and coated with sweet cinnamon sugar that kept us coming back for more.
We learned that Tex-Mex is its own cuisine, which became even more evident when we traveled through New Mexico after four years of living in Houston. Our venture through Santa Fe and Albuquerque demonstrated a severe split between Tex-Mex and New-Mex, and we came home from our trip to Arches with even more appreciation for our local restaurants and food trucks.
In addition to Tex-Mex, we explored the world of Texas barbeque. We tried the local chain restaurants and compared the different cuts of meat. We checked out the local joints and discovered a few that were hard to beat. One of our best experiences was the place that we visited when we went to Austin for a short spring break trip, our plates overflowing with a variety of juicy, smoky cuts of pork, beef, and chicken.
We viewed every BBQ place as a challenge to our own cooking skills, determined to learn from what we ate and eventually outdo them in our own home. Our Traeger became our oven, as we often avoided turning on the indoor oven to prevent heating up the kitchen from May through October. Regular trips to H.E.B and Kroger included sale purchases of pork shoulder, ribs, and brisket that were then stored in our freezer until just the right moment for a barbecue feast. We mastered the art of the slow cook, and I finally learned to just accept that dinner time had to be flexible if we were going to wait for our meat to reach a perfect 205-210 degrees.
And we didn’t just work to perfect our meat preparation. Suddenly everything went onto our grill. We learned to grill chocolate chip cookies, cornbread, soft pretzels, pizza, and macaroni and cheese, each item taking on a small hint of smoke that enhanced the flavor even more than before. Our smoked pulled pork and brisket became staples in other food as well. We stopped using ground beef in our tacos and chili and replaced it with smoked meat that we had frozen for future use.2 Instead of chicken, I started using pulled pork for enchiladas. My husband mastered the art of stuffed jalapenos and fatties, regularly preparing both for our friends and neighbors.3 Our six years of exposure to Texas-style barbecue transformed our cooking, so much so that now our kids usually prefer staying home to eating out at restaurants.
When we moved back to Indiana, we knew that we were going to be leaving some of our favorite food options behind. The only way for us to enjoy those foods was going to be preparing the food ourselves. We’ve tried multiple Mexican restaurants since we moved back, but none have compared to the food we had in Houston.4 The first summer that I returned with our kids, I told one of my friends that all I wanted was a dinner out for Tex-Mex, and we spent more than two hours enjoying enchiladas, warm tortilla chips and salsa, and margaritas. It would have to tide me over for another nine months before we would return as a whole family during a spring break trip. And now I don’t know when or if we will return. I may just have to embrace the memory of the food we enjoyed for a season of our lives.
The thing about living in different parts of the United States is that you learn to appreciate the food as part of the culture. Regions take pride in certain types of food for good reason. When we moved down to Texas, we took our brat and burger-grilling skills with us, and returned to the Midwest barbecue masters. Now we can’t accept churros with filling and hold enchiladas and burritos to a high standard. We love a good food truck and wish that we could visit them year-round.
But despite the food that we miss, I’m happy to have my favorite Chinese place back and I look forward to eventually exposing our kids to Chicago-style pizza, in Chicago. We miss what we lost with a move away from Texas, and we work to embrace the good food where we now live. If there is one thing that can unite people, it’s good food around a good table, and we have to learn to love the food where we are and bring what we can with us when we move from one place to the next.
And our barbecue is pretty good, if I do say so myself.
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We did eventually find a couple of Chinese restaurants that we liked, where the fried rice tasted like fried rice should and the portion sizes usually meant I could get two full meals out of my beef and broccoli.
We also discovered that we had been making Texas-style chili for years. Despite being Midwestern-raised, neither my husband or I have any love for beans in our chili. We fit right in when we moved to Houston and started preparing chili for our friends.
A fatty is essentially fillings wrapped in meat wrapped in a bacon blanket. Incredibly tasty and we tried many different variations over the years. Our old neighbor still calls my husband for advice on how to make one because he misses our grilling.
A Houston friend who now lives back in Valparaiso came to visit right after the new year and we decided to try a restaurant close to our house that my husband and I had been really excited to try. It also got rave reviews from a colleague. Our consensus? It’s okay.
I have been plotting to leave Texas and move back to the Midwest for a couple years now. I also know if I manage to pull it off, I will REALLY miss the food here. Might go get BBQ for lunch today.