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A Review of the GE Profile Smart Indoor SmokerIt’s surprising how quickly dinnertime rolls around when you know pulled pork sandwiches are on the menu. I was in charge of cooking for my family of three and decided it was the perfect opportunity to test out the Smart Indoor Smoker GE Appliances lent me. I was confident the five-pound bone-in shoulder I had put into the device seven hours ago had sufficiently liquefied collagen and a crusty bark, but I was worried that my family would pick up on the faint but pleasing smoke smell.Then the front door’s knob jiggled to life. My wife asked about the mail and our teenage daughter said lacrosse practice was “fine.” They both saw the smoker on the kitchen island, yet no one did a double sniff.…

The post This Magic Countertop Box Effortlessly Smokes Meat. But Is It Barbecue? appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Closing of the Antiquarian Book Mart in San AntonioFor most of the past half century, avid readers in San Antonio have been able to find Bob Kellel somewhere in the brightly colored warren of slightly tilted shelves in Antiquarian Book Mart, on Broadway next to Brackenridge Park. The used bookstore closed this month, five months after Kellel announced the sale of his property, as well as the next-door building formerly occupied by Half Price Books, to developer Harper/Huddleston. The father-son team has bought up at least 21 properties along this stretch of Broadway over the past two decades and has been an advocate of charming-yet-profitable development: boutique retailers, cafes with sidewalk seating, shops with easy parking (but not too much of it). An urban fabric that’s more merino wool and less polyester.The months…

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Jeffrey "Jeffro" Louis BreakingWhen Jeffrey Louis heard that breakdancing—or breaking, as it is often called by its practitioners—was making its debut at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he emailed the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ask about getting involved.The Houston native wasn’t hoping to compete. In fact, he was too old to participate in the Youth Games, which are open only to athletes fifteen to eighteen years old. He was just looking for a way to participate in the process that would bring the art form to the Olympic stage. At the time, he was on the cusp of graduating from the University of Houston and was trying to figure out how he might apply his degree in sports administration to breaking. Louis never…

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Galleries and shops in Edom.With its rusted metal roof and mismatched wood exterior, the cabin that houses the Blade Bar, a knife shop in Ben Wheeler, in northeast Texas’s Van Zandt County, looks like an exhibit you might encounter at a living history museum. It once belonged to the late Dan Harrison, an internationally renowned knife-maker who created custom knives for Lyndon B. Johnson and Queen Elizabeth II. On the February day I visited, two children, who turned out to belong to owners Johnathan and Rhiannon Sibley, ran around the front-porch swing, sucking on rock candy lollipops. Across the street, diners were enjoying burgers and beers at the Forge Bar and Grill, a restaurant in an old blacksmith shop that now hosts live music in its sprawling outdoor area. My…

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Trey Kistler in the finishing room at Kistler Custom Fishing Rods, in Magnolia, on April 3, 2024.As a child growing up in the small town of Tomball, about 35 miles northwest of Houston, Trey Kistler loved fishing so much that he would illicitly cast for bass in private ponds in his suburban neighborhood. “If they didn’t shoot at me, then I would sneak in,” he recalls with a laugh. Even back then he favored high-end equipment, no doubt because his father, Billy Kistler, was a cofounder of Houston’s All Star Rods, known for its off-the-shelf graphite bass poles. Trey eventually enlisted in the Army and served in the Middle East during the Gulf War. By the time he came home, in 1991, his dad had cofounded another off-the-shelf rod maker, CastAway. He taught Trey the craft. By 1999, Trey had started his…

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texmexplainer hamburgerGloria Perez, who owns 102-year-old Rutledge Hamburgers, in Brownsville, serves the platonic ideal of the hamburguesa mexicana in the U.S. The beef patty (seared on a flattop here as opposed to grilled over the more traditional mesquite coals) is dressed with American cheese, a slice of salty ham, crisp lettuce, and sweet tomatoes and served on a buttery bun. It’s the addition of the processed pork product (and, usually, the mesquite grilling) that makes the result a Mexican burger. It’s not clear when borderland chefs first put their spin on the hamburger, but a 1948 edition of the Brownsville Herald mentioned that Mexican burgers were being sold at a market in Matamoros. The following year a column in the Abilene Reporter-News noted them in a…

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TM Talks Richard Linklater Hit ManOne should never attempt to guess what kind of film Richard Linklater is going to make next. Since 1985, the indie maverick has written and directed movies about everyone from eccentric Austin misfits (Slacker) to Texas high schoolers on the last day of classes (Dazed and Confused) to a young couple who meet on a train in Europe (Before Sunrise). He has tackled genres as varied as the western (The Newton Boys), political satire (Fast Food Nation), and science fiction (A Scanner Darkly). He released a coming-of-age movie (Boyhood) that he filmed over the course of twelve years, using the same cast of actors as they aged in real time, and a black comedy, Bernie, that was based on a Texas Monthly article I wrote…

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texanist dessert bakingQ: The Texanist’s monthly column is my favorite feature in the print edition of Texas Monthly, but I always wait until I’ve read the rest of the magazine to savor it, kind of like dessert. Speaking of which: What are the best desserts in the Lone Star State?Grant Betz, Sugar LandA: Well, thank you very much—for the sweet compliment as well as this sweet query, which the Texanist finds to be very on-brand for a letter writer who hails from Sugar Land.Speaking of which, Sugar Land, as you are likely aware, Mr. Betz, happens to be situated in an area known as the sugar bowl of Texas. And your city of residence is named partly in honor of the famed Imperial Sugar company, Texas’s oldest brand, which was founded way…

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Nick Caster, Noah Green, and Christina Caster on the set of Gus Plus Us, at Caster Studios, in Dripping Springs, on March 18, 2024.When you’re a puppet, the simplest act can get complicated quickly. For Gus, the titular star of the children’s show Gus Plus Us, looking at a road map requires his creator, Nick Caster, who controls Gus’s left arm and mouth, to coordinate with another puppeteer who’s working Gus’s right hand. As the two men iron out their choreography, lying shoulder to shoulder atop a wheeled cart parked below the camera frame, the director notes another problem: the map bears the unmistakable curve of the Texas shoreline, a detail that would seem to place Gus—an imaginary blue-tufted creature of an unspecified forest—squarely in our neck of the woods. As the crew debates the potential ramifications of this reveal, I turn to Christina Caster, Nick’s wife—she also…

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ev Bill Lawson speaks from the pulpit during services at Wheeler Ave. Baptist Church, Sunday. Rev. Lawson conducted his last day of church services Sunday 8/29/04, before retiring from being the pastor of Wheeler Ave. Baptist Church.The Reverend William Lawson, a beloved preacher and community leader known as “Houston’s pastor” who led efforts to desegregate the city, died Tuesday at the age of 95. Lawson was judicious in the fight for social justice, his prudent approach evident from the start. One spring evening in 1960, on the Texas Southern University campus, Lawson—then a lanky 31-year-old who’d arrived in Texas just five years earlier—invited a handful of students from the Progressive Youth Association, which was dedicated to advancing desegregation in Houston, into the den of the Baptist Student Union, where he was director. The group’s leader, a dynamic TSU law student and Army vet named Eldrewey Stearns, had gained some notoriety around campus after telling city council about a police beating he’d recently endured.…

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