Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Two beloved snapping turtles were taken from a creek outside a Houston bar by one of its customers, who was planning to turn the animals into soup before outraged commenters on a social media post by the bar prompted him to return them.A portion of Interstate 635 in Dallas was shut down after a truck belonging to a company that collects restaurants’ used cooking oil and meat by-products lost its load, spilling debris that included chicken and alligator parts across multiple lanes.The mayor of Colleyville went viral online for suggesting that a nuclear bomb be thrown at Hurricane Milton to “see if we can stop the rotation.”When a school resource officer accidentally shot himself in the leg while sitting in a parking lot at Marble…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

“I used to be embarrassed to say I sold firewood,” Javier Sanchez said. He and his father, Joel, own and operate Chief Firewood, in Smithville, an hour southeast of Austin, and supply wood to restaurants and barbecue joints as far away as Houston and Dallas. Sanchez grew up in the business his father founded in 1990, but he saw it as a last resort when he went searching for a career of his own.He was constructing metal buildings with his cousin when a chance conversation with a friend changed his mind. The friend asked why Sanchez was wasting his time working for someone else when he could be preparing to take over an established family business. “Those words hit me like a ton of bricks,”…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

This has been a hell of a week in MAGA land. The movement’s leader is, once more, president-elect of the United States. Former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz has been announced as Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Justice, the very agency that recently investigated Gaetz on allegations of sex trafficking. Democratic congresswoman turned MAGA loyalist Tulsi Gabbard has been nominated to be the new director of national intelligence; a Fox News host is a Senate confirmation away from leading the world’s most powerful military, while anti-vaccine crusader and former brain-worm haver Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Elon Musk is just kinda hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, sitting in on phone calls Trump is…

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A WNBA team may come to Austin, thanks to a multimillion-dollar bid led by former Texas Longhorns basketball champion Fran Harris. The women’s pro hoops league has already formalized plans to add franchises in Portland, San Francisco, and Toronto over the next two seasons, with room for one more city to join the league and bring the WNBA’s total number of teams to sixteen by 2028. Harris, a Dallas native who led UT women’s basketball to a national championship in 1986 and played for the WNBA-champion Houston Comets during the league’s inaugural season, told Texas Monthly she’d been dreaming about an opportunity like this for more than twenty years. “My first thought about ownership was the first day of the WNBA, in 1997, walking on that…

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There are always indicators when a small Texas town is destined for something great. Duck confit pops up on a restaurant menu. A technology start-up moves in. And, at least in the case of Luling, the largest convenience store on the planet opens its doors.  Sitting at the confluence of Interstate 10, U.S. 183, U.S. 90, and Texas Highway 80, this farming-and-ranching community celebrated its 150th anniversary this year, and its nickname—the Crossroads to Everywhere—feels particularly apt. Most tourists venture to Luling in pursuit of classic Central Texas barbecue or world-class watermelons, which, born of a fortuitous combination of loamy soil and unrelenting sunshine, grow here in motley abundance and have been celebrated for more than seventy years by townspeople—and now around 30,000 visitors—on the last…

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