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

A 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.

Why would a self-proclaimed “nervous mom,” whose daughter leaves for college this fall, write a novel that involves a parent’s worst nightmare? “What are you talking about?” Attica Locke recalled telling her therapist, who’d raised a similar question. “That’s just the story.”The story is Guide Me Home (Mulholland Books, September 3), the final volume in Locke’s acclaimed Highway 59 crime trilogy. Its plot centers on Sera (which sounds a lot like Locke’s daughter’s name, Clara), the only Black member of an otherwise all-white sorority, who goes missing from her East Texas university campus.The fifty-year-old Houston native admitted that when she writes, “there’s a lot of stuff that’s looking me right in the face that strangely I won’t see until it’s over.” But “over” can be…

The post Why Attica Locke Writes About East Texas While Living in L.A. 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 invention of sliced bread, for all the acclaim it occasioned, offered little more than an ergonomic advantage. It spared mothers’ fingertips and accelerated the proliferation of the PB&J, but the ingredients in the humble loaf remained the same: flour, water, salt, and yeast. The big disruption in dough—the one we will litigate in the culture wars in perpetuity—has been less celebrated. As World War II concluded, 14,000-odd years after humans started eating bread, the industrial-agriculture giants changed the recipe, adding azodicarbonamide, potassium bromate, soy lecithin, and other additives whose names are hard to read and to pronounce. The flavor remained the same, more or less, but loaves became quicker to mass-produce and more resistant to mold. If certain thinkers on the right are to…

The post A Lab at Texas A&M is Part of a Program Studying Insects as Food. Cue Rightwing Conspiracists. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Thank you for reading!

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

The invention of sliced bread, for all the acclaim it occasioned, offered little more than an ergonomic advantage. It spared mothers’ fingertips and accelerated the proliferation of the PB&J, but the ingredients in the humble loaf remained the same: flour, water, salt, and yeast. The big disruption in dough—the one we will litigate in the culture wars in perpetuity—has been less celebrated. As World War II concluded, 14,000-odd years after humans started eating bread, the industrial-agriculture giants changed the recipe, adding azodicarbonamide, potassium bromate, soy lecithin, and other additives whose names are hard to read and to pronounce. The flavor remained the same, more or less, but loaves became quicker to mass-produce and more resistant to mold. If certain thinkers on the right are to…

The post A Lab at Texas A&M Is Part of a Program Studying Insects as Food. Cue Right-wing Conspiracists. appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Thank you for reading!

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

Being an election precinct chair is not glamorous. The neighborhood-level position comes with no salary or official duties. It’s a job typically filled by the most committed political activists, the ones willing to spend hours going door to door to get out the vote before each election. Chosen every two years in the Democratic and Republican primaries, precinct chairs are responsible for microdistricts ranging between 100 and 5,000 registered voters. On Saturday, though, the Democratic precinct chairs of Texas’s Eighteenth Congressional District were given the pro athlete treatment before a packed auditorium at the Young Women’s College Preparatory Academy, in Houston’s Midtown neighborhood. As Beyonce’s “Formation” hyped up the audience, an emcee introduced each precinct chair by name. One by one, the dazed-looking organizers walked down…

The post Who Will Replace Sheila Jackson Lee in Congress? appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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