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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.

German Village Factory MuralI got an amusing mix of responses when I told friends and family I was visiting Muenster, which sits about 15 miles south of the Red River, 65 miles north of Fort Worth, and 5,000 miles west of its namesake, in Germany. “I thought Muenster was a cheese.” “Is that where Eddie Munster lives?” And my favorite: “That’s near Rednecks With Paychecks!” from an enthusiastic cousin. (RWP, I would soon learn, is a biannual off-roading festival held outside the neighboring hamlet of Saint Jo.) This tiny town of about 1,600 may not be on every Texan’s radar, but it’s a hidden gem for those in the know. And there are a lot of them: Metroplexers looking for a weekend escape; oenophiles eager to sample North…

The post Meet Muenster, the Fredericksburg of North Texas appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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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.

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time driving around El Paso in my friend Bianca’s Corolla. We were in her car because I didn’t have one, and she was driving because I didn’t yet know how. We did standard Texas teenager things, like spend a weird amount of time in the Sonic parking lot. On the weekends, Bianca drove us outside the city, where the streets gave way to desert, and we’d park and wait for friends with cars more terrain-friendly than hers to pick us up and drive us over the dunes until we found the bonfire everyone was gathered around. I remember how at night the sand looked almost like water, and I remember how distinctly young I felt…

The post With a New Reissue, Spoon Reminds Everyone They’ve Been Doing This (and Well) for a Long Time appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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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.

Texans You Should Know: Don BakerTexans You Should Know is a series highlighting overlooked figures and events from Texas history. As a just-out-of-college reporter for the Dallas Morning News in 1979, I watched a landmark event in Texas history unfold, though it would be years before I understood its significance. That November, a former sixth grade teacher from Dallas named Don Baker filed a class action federal lawsuit (Baker v. Wade) challenging Texas’s notorious “Homosexual Conduct” law, known throughout the state’s gay communities simply by its state statute number, 21.06.Gay activists across the country had made strides in the seventies, as twenty states repealed their sodomy laws during that decade. But Texas went the other direction by passing the homosexual conduct law in 1973, making “deviate sexual intercourse” a crime punishable by…

The post The Dallas Teacher, Navy Vet, and Devout Christian Who Fought to Overturn Texas’s Sodomy Law appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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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.

Cedric DarkCedric Dark believes violence is a disease. Sometimes it manifests in quiet, private ways; other times, it’s public and deafening. As a mosquito transports malaria, a gun delivers violence, Dark says—making death an all too likely prognosis.For Dark, a bookish and unflappable 45-year-old, this isn’t just a matter of semantics. Like millions of Americans, he’s lost a loved one to gun violence. But it’s his job, as an emergency medicine physician in Houston, at one of the state’s top level I trauma centers, that gives him a close-up view of what a bullet does to the human body. Nearly every day, he and his colleagues dig their hands into the wounds of gunshot victims to try to stop the bleeding and prevent vital organs from…

The post A Good Guy With a Gun vs. the National Rifle Association appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Smoked jerk chicken, crispy onion strings, and a wedge saladThe smoked chicken at Mimsy’s Craft Barbecue, in Crockett, about two hours north of Houston, needed an overhaul. For two years after the 2020 opening of their restaurant, owners Kathy and Wade Elkins heard complaints from a few customers that their marinated and smoked half chicken seemed undercooked or that the skin wasn’t crispy enough. The couple had a hunch that a deep fryer might solve both issues. Proof that their theory was correct lies in the juice that collects on your plate once you break through the new-and-improved chicken’s crackling skin.“It really revitalizes the product,” Wade says of the bird’s hot-oil bath. The preparation begins long before that step. Forty-eight hours before the poultry goes into the smoker, the cooks submerge it in a…

The post Brisket Prices Getting You Down? Jerked-and-Fried Chicken Comes to the Rescue. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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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.

The Detours series celebrates lesser-known locales worth visiting across the state. The crusted peaks of the Christmas Mountains have stood for about 42 million years, the Terlingua Ranch Lodge for about 50. You’ll find them both at the end of a winding sixteen-mile road that cuts through some of the 190,000 acres of the Terlingua Ranch, with its hundreds of cinder block houses, rustic adobes, shacks, sheds, tents, and trailers. This is where the desert rats live, escaping civilization. The lodge, which offers 32 guest rooms across eight cabins, boasts the only pool for miles around—a sparkling blue rectangle surrounded by ocotillo, yucca, boulders, and mountains. After a swim in the cool water, lie on a plastic deck chair and stare at the surrounding slopes and crags…

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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.

Steve SarkisianFor all the recent “The Longhorns Are Back!” talk, the revitalization of the University of Texas’s football program might be the second most intriguing comeback story of Steve Sarkisian’s time in Austin. Just a decade ago, Sark, as friends and fans call him, was regarded as a wunderkind, having energized a dormant University of Washington team and then taken the reins at the University of Southern California, in 2014. But at USC he flamed out spectacularly, showing up drunk to athletic department events before being fired in the middle of his second season.Sarkisian got sober, and University of Alabama coach Nick Saban offered him a lifeline: a $30,000-a-year job as an offensive analyst. From there, Sarkisian rebuilt his reputation and, as Saban’s offensive coordinator in…

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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.

Anjna O'ConnorAnjna O’Connor first visited Big Bend National Park five years ago, on the back of a motorcycle driven by her boyfriend, who worked there at the time. They rode to Boquillas Canyon, where they hiked along the Rio Grande and into the rocky gorge, in scorching heat. She learned a couple of things that day: One, she loved the region, where hillsides bristle with ocotillo and prickly pear and a sky island of mountains rises from the desert floor. Two, she underestimated the heat, which left her dehydrated and exhausted—and armed with the knowledge of how quickly visitors can get in trouble if they’re not prepared for the park’s rugged conditions. Despite (or perhaps because of) the challenges, Big Bend beckoned her back, just as…

The post Big Bend’s New Superintendent on the Park’s Big Revamp, Extreme Heat, and the Christy Perry Rescue appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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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.

pastries from Comadre PanaderíaA yellow door in East Austin leads into the minuscule space of Comadre Panadería. A glimpse through the Dutch door on the right shows staff in the kitchen sliding pastry trays into tall racks. To the left is the small glass case that displays the day’s pan dulce. There might be crumbly, powdered sugar–dusted polvorones (what some call Mexican wedding cookies), made with pecans and mesquite flour; tacos de piña, rectangular puff pastries with pineapple jam; mole croissants; or candy corn conchas. The spongy pastries—a fall specialty—convert even the most stalwart candy corn hater. I watched it happen as a friend and I were eating them off the hood of his car: one moment, he was spouting hateful words; the next, he didn’t want to…

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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.

Striped Bark ScorpionTexas is home to some of the creepiest, crawliest, and otherwise oddest animals on the planet. We introduce you to them in What in Tarnation?!, an occasional series. Every true Texan has a scorpion story. My first one happened 25 years ago, when I was a naive new Austinite, having recently moved from the West Coast. I saw one climbing the wall in our bedroom, panicked, and sprayed it with an entire can of lemon-scented Pledge. I then bravely vacuumed up the arthropod, now shiny and smelling like the world’s worst limoncello, threw the vacuum cleaner outside with the creature still wriggling inside, and told my husband we were moving. He didn’t agree, which is why I have a second scorpion story. More on that later.There’s just…

The post It’s Scorpion Season in Texas. Here’s What to Do if You See One. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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