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Colin Allred and Roland Gutierrez democratic senate debateU.S. congressman Colin Allred, of Dallas, and state senator Roland Gutierrez, of San Antonio, two Democrats running to unseat Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate, have largely avoided sparring with each other—opting to focus their ire on Cruz. But for the first time this election season, the two—along with state representative Carl Sherman, of DeSoto, just south of Dallas—will share a stage at the AFL-CIO Democratic primary debate to make the case for their competing visions on how to best represent Texas in an often gridlocked federal arena. While this isn’t the only Senate primary debate that will take place between now and March 5, Sunday’s debate is the only one that’ll feature both leading candidates. Allred, a fund-raising juggernaut who has placed first in every…

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Pastries from Baked bakery in Castroville.“If your croissant is not messy and crunchy and all over the place, it is not a croissant,” said Grecia Ramos, owner of the new Baked bakery in Castroville. She contends that we’ve become too accustomed to the pale, soft, doughy versions from drive-thru windows and big box stores that are engineered for tidy, crumb-free consumption during the morning commute. “You should be finding pieces of croissant in your car three days later,” she added. Baked opened at the end of October on the same day as its sister restaurant, Blu Lacy Smokehouse, owned by the team behind the famed 2M Smokehouse in San Antonio: Joe Melig and Esaul Ramos, Grecia’s husband. The bakery and barbecue joint pairing only sounds peculiar until you dig in.…

The post This Power Couple Proves Barbecue and French Pastry Are a Match Made in Heaven appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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Texas-Bookstores-lawsuit-book-bans-fifth-circuit-rulingIn recent years, book bans have emerged as a significant issue in our ongoing culture wars. In 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, more books were challenged in schools and libraries than in the previous three years combined. Bans have largely been instituted at the local level, on a case-by-case basis, as activists and parents target titles that discuss topics they view as controversial—race, gender, sex, and sexual identity are common themes, though not the only ones that end up challenged—but in the 2023 legislative session, Texas attempted to intervene on the topic in a more comprehensive way. The result was House Bill 900, a law that, among other things, required booksellers to rate the contents of every book they sold to…

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Glenn Rogers and Sid Miller COULD DuelOn Monday, big-hatted agriculture commissioner Sid Miller posted a furious text he presumably received from state representative Glenn Rogers goading him to engage in a good old-fashioned duel. A duel! Like Alexander Hamilton or Wyatt Earp. His grievance? Miller’s endorsement of Rogers’s primary challenger, as part of Miller’s “RINO hunt” campaign to retaliate against lawmakers who voted to impeach beleaguered attorney general Ken Paxton.  The RINO hunt has begun!Join me in taking back the Texas GOP from the double dealers, the backstabbers, the liberals, and the teachers' union shills!DONATE today to help me beat the RINOs in 2024https://t.co/oh4drFQlfQ pic.twitter.com/Y5uxYbV9TO— Sid Miller (@MillerForTexas) December 20, 2023 “You are a bought and paid for, pathetic narcissist. If you had any honor, you would challenge me, or any…

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Jacob's Well Water PumpingAfter sitting dry for 222 days, Jacob’s Well, the iconic artesian spring near Wimberley, has started to flow again. From mid-June through mid-January, the popular swimming hole was a miserable sight: the water level had receded below the lip of the well’s mouth, leaving behind bleached limestone and a dead-looking Cypress Creek, usually the very picture of a healthy Hill Country stream. Hays County, which manages the spring as a park, banned swimming. Today, thanks to beneficial rainfall, the spring is gushing forth again from the Trinity Aquifer, the much-stressed groundwater source underlying much of the Hill Country.“I teared up when I went down there,” said David Baker, an artist and conservationist who runs the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association. “There were all these kids, local…

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Roar of the Crowd: February 2024Hole-y Mole-y! I read the article about Texas caves with great interest [“Deep (Very, Very, Very Deep) in the Heart of Texas,” December 2023]. In 1952 when I was fourteen, my friends and I would ride our bikes all over the West Austin hills. One Saturday we saw an empty lot with boards across a hole. We could see that the hole was deep, but we crawled under the boards anyway and down to the bottom. We realized we didn’t have a way out. We didn’t have flashlights, but I saw a crack on one side and crawled into it. My friend was larger than me but followed. After about thirty feet, it was pitch dark, and I said to him that we should go back. But…

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Ivery Dorsey and the college students trying to exonerate himOver a prison phone in Huntsville, Ivery Dorsey is rapping. At 6 cents a minute, time is money, but Dorsey doesn’t think he’s wasting his breath. Serving his seventeenth year of a twenty-year sentence for a murder he insists he didn’t commit, the 49-year-old Houstonian—who goes by the moniker Hallow (as in “hallowed be thy name”)—hopes to become a hip-hop artist upon release. “I’ve always been a dreamer,” Dorsey explains. Before he went to prison, he was recording a mixtape, Almost Famous, produced by Bruce “Grim” Rhodes, who worked on well-known tracks like Lil’ Troy’s “Wanna Be a Baller.” Dorsey regales me with some bars he’s been working on. “The truth is to be sold and not to be told. See that’s the lies that they…

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A spread of dishes from El Alebrije Oaxacan Streetfood.In 2020, after fifteen years working in restaurant kitchens, Memo Quintero lost his job. His chef position at a Houston restaurant was eliminated as a result of the pandemic. Meanwhile, his wife, Didi Quintero, was finishing her studies at the University of Houston. Their income was dissipating and they needed to do something. They started to sell tlayudas—crispy, fourteen-inch corn tortillas slathered with beans, lettuce, tomatoes, quesillo, and more, from Memo’s native Oaxaca—out of their home. “It did well enough that I began to think how we could move into a food truck,” Memo says. The couple borrowed money from family members and opened their small trailer, El Alebrije Oaxacan Streetfood, in April 2021. To say that year was a memorable one for the Quinteros is…

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TCU Women's Basketball Weathers a Season from HellWhen it was over, TCU women’s basketball coach Mark Campbell gathered his players on the court in Fort Worth Tuesday night to savor a victory so improbable they’re likely to remember it for the rest of their lives. In normal times, a 66–60 defeat of a University of Central Florida team that has yet to win a Big 12 game this season would be just another brick in the wall on the journey to March Madness. That would be especially true for a TCU team that entered 2024 with a 14–0 record and a number 23 ranking in the Associated Press Top 25. That fast start was all the more remarkable considering the Horned Frogs had been 14–45 over the previous two seasons, before Campbell arrived…

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Meats, sides, and the Big Red tres leches from Burnt Bean Co. in Seguin.Texas racked up an impressive 39 semifinalists, including 20 for Best Chef: Texas, in the first of three rounds of voting in the 2024 Restaurant and Chef Awards competition, announced today by the James Beard Foundation. The awards—typically described as the Oscars of the restaurant industry—will have two more rounds of voting. Nominees will be named on April 3. On June 10, winners will be announced at the annual awards ceremony and gala in Chicago.This year will be the third to reflect massive changes in the foundation’s awards procedure. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most restaurants that received nods were fine-dining establishments from large cities. But since 2022, following a massive overhaul of the competition rules designed to improve both inclusivity and geographic scope, lesser-known…

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