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

Quick: ask someone who they think of when they hear the term “Texas music.” We bet you get “George Strait” or “Willie.”Country music may be the first genre that comes to mind for many, but historically, Texas is as much a blues state as it is anything else. The genre’s early greats Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and T-Bone Walker were all born here. Lead Belly and Robert Johnson may not have been native Texans, but they got here as fast as they could; Johnson’s only two recording sessions took place in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937), before his death in 1938. Blues music has helped define Texas music ever since—from Albert Collins to Edgar Winter to Stevie Ray Vaughan.The appearance of ZZ Top’s Billy…

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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.

According to legend, the cowboy cookie originated as a kind of midcentury breakfast bar: a mash-up so packed with high-calorie, energy-generating goodies like pecans and coconut flakes that it could sustain even the most grizzled of cattle ropers on a long day’s ride. And while the origins of this cookie are difficult to pinpoint, it is perhaps most closely associated with Texas, in large part thanks to Laura Bush.Bush submitted her recipe to the election-year First Lady Bake-Off contest put on by Family Circle magazine when her husband, George W. Bush, was running for president in 2000. Her competition was a recipe for ginger snaps submitted by Al Gore’s wife, Tipper. Magazine readers baked the recipes and voted; Bush won in a landslide, with Marian…

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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.

Dirty Al’sSouth Padre IslandIt’s hard to decide what’s most charming about this restaurant near the southernmost tip of South Padre Island—the friendly service, the marina setting, or the delightfully crude murals of mahi-mahi and mermaids and, above the entrance, Alfonso “Dirty Al” Salazar himself, astride a bucking marlin, schooner of beer in hand. Far from the touristy spots that seduce the sun-addled hordes with neon-colored cocktails and fresh-from-the-freezer fare, Dirty Al’s, which opened as a bait shop in 1986, serves locally caught seafood, grilled, blackened, or fried. Families, in-the-know tourists, and local teenagers gather around plastic tables on the porch or inside a dining room festooned with nautical oil paintings, rods and reels, taxidermied fish, and all the other flotsam and jetsam a joint like…

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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.

As I peer through binoculars from my kayak, watching a great blue heron promenade through a tangle of mangroves along the Aransas Channel, I hear a ripple of water and a puff of air. A bottlenose dolphin has surfaced no more than six feet from my boat, its shiny dorsal fin catching the morning light. The creature dives, then reappears even closer, again exhaling with a loud, declarative huff, before taking another breath and returning to the depths. Then it swims toward its pod of maybe eight or ten others in the distance. I turn back to the heron in time to see it snag a silver minnow in its beak, toss back its head, and swallow the fish in a single bite.So plentiful are…

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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.

Outside of an incoming hurricane, few threats discourage Texans from plunging into the Gulf of Mexico more than the dangerous fecal contamination frequently reported along our coastline. Last year a widely publicized study from Environment America, an advocacy group that focuses on pollution, revealed that 90 percent of Texas beaches exposed swimmers to at least one day of potentially unsafe fecal contamination—well above the national average of 55 percent. Does that mean you should burn your swim trunks and cancel vacation plans? Thankfully, no. Outdated testing methods, for starters, can yield unreliable results. They may fail to detect when unsafe levels of pollution are present, but they may also create an outsized sense of danger.  The waters consistently deemed potentially unsafe are still a relatively small…

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