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

Silvia Hernandez, with her hair pulled back into a long ponytail, is visible from the kitchen only when she comes to the metal-framed pass, where the server grabs plated dishes to run to customers. Her glasses are precariously balanced on the lower bridge of her nose, but she snaps them back into place as she turns to attend to the cooking at her restaurant, Taqueria Gael, in Andrews.Crossing north five years ago was the easy part of her life’s journey, Hernandez says. Growing up in El Salto, a small, quiet town in the northern Mexican state of Durango, she worked long hours hawking street food and cooking in her parents’ restaurant. She opened her own business, a hot dog cart, as a teenager, and got…

The post This West Texas Taqueria Is Serving Some of the Best Mexican Food in 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.

In his beloved Chronicles of Narnia series, novelist and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis writes of the Dark Island at the end of the world, a place where dreams can come true. To readers and the novel’s voyagers alike, this sounds like paradise, until a man who has been trapped there explains to them, in terror, that this is a place where any dreams might come true—including nightmares. For the past few years, Texas has in some ways resembled that  Dark Island, where architects of dreams and nightmares alike are bringing outsized consequences to life. When Texas attorney Jonathan Mitchell filed an amicus brief on behalf of Texas Right to Life in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, few knew he was enshrining a vision of…

The post The Overturning of Abortion Rights Is a Religion Story Set in 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.

I’m a firm believer that most Texans always have extra stomach space for banana pudding, no matter how much barbecue they’ve eaten. A good banana pudding is a perfect balance of cool and creamy, and achieving it is about getting the ratios of the ingredients right. But why should bananas get to have all the fun? What if we traded them out for that ultra-Texan stone fruit, the peach? This summer, consider using your U-Pick haul for a cool, creamy peach pudding.Swapping the fruit provided an opportunity to exchange another ingredient: the cookies. I tried traditional Nilla wafers, gingersnaps, and Biscoff cookies. The Nilla wafers had the best texture, so they’re an option here, but the gingersnaps gave the pudding a fun spice and brought out…

The post Peach Pudding Is Summer’s Version of This Famed BBQ Dessert 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.

A few weeks ago, I was working outside my Austin home on a rainwater-catchment system—I’m one of those incorrigible weekend warrior DIYers who keeps Home Depot in business—when I noticed I was completely drenched in sweat. It was midmorning in May, in the shade, still hours away from the peak heat of the day. I was just tinkering with little irrigation parts, not doing anything as laborious as the ditchdigging and stonemasonry that had occupied my winter and spring. Yet the air felt as if it could be wrung out, a soupy, hot mess you might expect in Dubai—or Houston. Not that I was surprised. The sticky heat now seems inescapable for long stretches of the year. Biking around town, picking tomatoes in the garden,…

The post You’re Not Imagining It: Texas Is Getting More Humid 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 Texas Medical Board on Friday adopted guidance for how doctors should interpret the state’s new abortion laws, reducing paperwork requirements some saw as overly burdensome but declining to provide a list of cases in which an abortion would be legal.The board unanimously approved the new guidelines after making revisions in response to concerns raised by doctors, lawyers, and people who say they were denied medically necessary abortions. The changes included removing a controversial provision that appeared to encourage doctors to transfer patients who might need an abortion.Board chair Dr. Sherif Zaafran acknowledged Friday that, even with these edits, this guidance doesn’t address all the concerns the board heard during this process.“There are certain things that we can address and there are certain things that…

The post Two Years After Dobbs, the Texas Medical Board Adopted Rules Clarifying Abortion Ban Exceptions appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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