German for “best pancake ever.” When you go to order this at the Magnolia Haus in San Antonio, the friendly wait staff are trained to spot you trying to say “Munk-nih–” and they finish pronouncing it for you, so quickly you want them to say it three more times. It’s really German for “Munich Apple Pancake” and it claims to be “an authentic taste of Bavaria” translated from Oma’s cookbook. I believe it. If you don’t feel like waiting in line for an hour to get a seat in one of MH’s hard little wooden gingerbread booths (is this authentic German too?) to eat this, you can make it at home, in your pajamas, with a pot of coffee. This place was featured last…
Posts tagged “san antonio”
In San Antonio, we eat flour tortillas, as previously noted. This is because when refined (or de-germed) flour was invented during the industrial revolution, it flooded the market as a cheap grain with a long– too long– shelf life. The original Mexican tortilla is a corn cake. I live about a mile from the oldest gristmill in Texas (Mission San Jose), which predates white flour by about 150 years. I also live near the C. H. Guenther Mill, where workers have been on strike since last spring. But clearly this is the type of strike that has few plays in the playbook– pretty depressing considering their union reps make almost six figures and yet dont seem to know what a fight-back looks like even if it came served…
Tagged: amaranth, aztecs, flour tortillas, food, food industry, mill workers, recipes, salsa, san antonio, strikes, watermelon radish, whole grain
Some people cannot stand to know how a story ends until they experience it for themselves. I am that way with movies, books, and dinner parties. This is the learning-by-doing side of me that fuels this blog and the cooking that goes with it. (Yes there is pedagogy in all my projects, it seems, but we wont let that ruin all the fun.) Along the way, it is useful to engage the other more refined side of me– the planning backwards “school marm” control-driven side. The side that is currently starting an argument with my other side about cleaning out the refrigerator this morning and doing a complete kitchen inventory before shopping for our Thanksgiving meal– instead of just walking every aisle of the…
Categories: restaurants, travel
We just came back from another successful visit to the Rio Grande Valley—and quite a tour it was—Edinburg, Elsa, Weslaco, Harlingen, La Feria. We visited some of Tlacuache’s ancestors—recent and ancient. We pawed pumpkin empanadas, breakfast tacos, and other portable homemade goods. The outside of the empanadas in La Feria were lighter than any others I have had, so very tearable, and the filling was the most pumpkiny and least sweet. It was intense, earthy, and delightful. The food of South Texas and the region of the border known as the Rio Grande Valley, (RGV or just “The Valley” to locals) is a regional cuisine best understood by forgetting most of what you have ever heard about Tex-Mex. The term has been widely misused,…
I learned to say smurf in Spanish this week, and I think it will come in handy on the first day of class this year. When used as a verb, the word “Smurf” typically means “to make,” “to be,” “to laugh,” or “to do.” When a word is replaced in a statement, that same replacement is made in every repetition of it, even by other Smurfs: as an example, the statement “A dragon that breathes fire” becomes “A smurf that smurfs smurf”, no matter which Smurf says it. -wikipedia In the mean time, I am the kitchen pitufa. I made one of our favorite dishes from The Liberty Bar. It has a whole cone of piloncillo. This is a solid cone of dried sugar…
Categories: recipes, vegetarian
The shortage of decent french bread in this town is what you might expect from South Texas, land of SOFT white bread, the kind you cant help but squeeze into a ball for fun. Up until now, I basically didn’t bother with baguettes down here. I was momentarily excited by the prospect of Bistro Bakery, where the ambience included people in the kitchen arguing in french. But the baguette seemed a little pale, and too soft and without air bubbles inside. The menu seems more focused on various puff pastry things filled with ham and cheese. I was a little surprised to find an almost empty round dessert case blocking the menu, filled with one tart tatin, and these frightening macarons that seem…
Categories: restaurants
These lovely pink rings are perfect garnish for spicy dishes, on salads, in salsas, even with crackers and a soft cheese. They make the onion flavor less hot and overpowering. I am using them in potato salad, and nopales salad (recipes coming soon). You won’t want a raw onion after crunching one of these beauties. I found the big grilling fork to be the best tool for moving them around and getting them into the jar. This is not formal canning, so you just need to make sure the jar is clean, not sanitized in boiling water. You could even put them in a dish for storage, but don’t let them dry out. Pickled Red Onions inspired by David Lebovitz, who was inspired by Simply Recipes and…
Categories: recipes, vegetarian
The garden is giving out personal eggplants. At least, they are on the small side—you couldn’t put them in your pocket—but you could maybe in your purse… I just was thinking how BIG everything is at the store. And then there are those small round “personal” watermelons I see at HEB. Not sure why we need those. I still couldn’t eat a whole personal watermelon, as it is about half the size of a regular oblong watermelon. I think there is a conspiracy to produce very large specimens at the grocer. Small and sometimes odd-shaped is how things look when you grow them yourself, so be wary of larger-than-life poor tasting (but good looking) produce. We have six eggplant bushes this year, thanks to…
Categories: recipes, vegetarian
Tagged: babaganouj, cooking, dip, eggplant, garden, olive oil, recipe, san antonio, tahini
You know seafood is really fresh when it has no fishy smell or taste. It releases a sweetness when you bite into it, even when breaded in salty breadcrumbs and deep fried. I remember experiencing this intensely for the first time in Maui visiting my brother years ago. We had sushi at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, which at the time had this amazing deal where locals got half off their bill on a certain night of the week. I had never had such fresh fish, buttery textured sweet tuna and shrimp. It made eating it raw a really good idea. I never used to eat fried fish until I moved to Texas, and met MG, who loves fish. I always ate scampi and baked…
Categories: restaurants
Tagged: fish friday, oysters, restaurants, san antonio, seafood, shrimp, urban spoon
