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

When Hurricane Beryl made direct contact with Houston as a category one storm on Monday morning, more than 2.2 million residents were left without electricity. Days after the storm, CenterPoint Energy, the utility monopoly responsible for delivering that electricity, remains under fire from Houstonians who’ve been frustrated with the company’s response time and lack of communication. CenterPoint’s own public communications have stayed relentlessly positive, however, providing details of the customers they’ve restored power to by this point—roughly 60 percent of them at press time—and touting the company’s charitable giving to local organizations in affected areas. None of those things, of course, give the 860,000 Houstonians without power access to, say, an outage tracker built for the mobile devices that they rely on for information, or updates…

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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.

Terrance Smith was good enough with a grill to make some spending money while attending Texas A&M-Commerce. He sold chicken and links from the parking lot of his dorm, and when he went back home to visit his parents he’d normally grill them some steaks. One day he decided to level up and try to smoke a brisket. “I got too big for my britches. The brisket was so tough, I couldn’t cut it,” Smith recalled with a laugh. Even worse, his mother, Odell, called him out. “You’ll be a real barbecue man when you learn how to cook brisket,” she told him, and he took on the challenge.Smith didn’t smoke a brisket he was happy with until after getting his degree in psychology. He…

The post This DFW Joint Is Truly Original, Down to the Lawry’s Sprinkled on the Wood 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.

Shelley Duvall, the actor who starred in classic films ranging from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to Robert Altman’s live-action version of Popeye, died Thursday at her home in Blanco. She was 75.“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us,” her longtime partner, Dan Gilroy, said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. “Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley.”Duvall died in her sleep due to complications from diabetes, Gilroy said.The actor recently celebrated a birthday on July 7 with Sarah Lukowski, an Austin woman who was an avid fan and became her friend over peach cobbler at a restaurant in the Texas Hill Country, where Duvall lived away from the spotlight after a 32-year career in Hollywood.“She said it…

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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.

It had been three days since the children had eaten more than a few mouthfuls of beans from the last can she had salvaged out of the mini-mart. She knew she’d need to find more but this was not a time of abundance. The highways were choked with men like the ones who had taken the parents of the small brood she’d acquired. She was left to amble down country roads, three children whom she guessed now were hers following behind like ducklings. In the three days since she opened the final can of beans she had seen the vast expanses of prairie yield to what had once been the manicured lawns of the suburbs before the Collapse. She worried about the children’s hunger, about the…

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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.

Barbecue has become one of Texas’s most popular exports, but an important aspect of meat market–style barbecue is too often lost in translation. I support the brisket evangelists who choose to set up shop from San Diego to Portland, Maine. Most of them understand the value of sausage-making, cooking with all wood, and serving barbecue sauce on the side. Those who take their cues from Central Texas sell smoked meats by the pound like the meat markets of Luling, Lockhart, and Taylor. Some of them, though, need to familiarize themselves with the power of their scales.When eating barbecue alone, which is often when I’m on the road, I ask for a couple ribs, a single slice of smoked turkey, and maybe a slice each of…

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