When I was contacted by Heather, the blogger presently known as Girlichef to take part in a cookbook cook off experiment I almost bought a plane ticket to head on over and mess up her kitchen.
Back up she explained as this was a virtual cook off and proceeded to tell me how I would receive Lisa Fain's shiny new cookbook, The Homesick Texan courtesy of those generous people from Hyperion, in the mail and to wait for further instruction on what recipes myself and eighteen other lucky blogger's would have to make over a three week period and blog about.
Well the book was delivered and I grabbed it from the nice lady who drives the white and purple truck and started to salivate at all of the great pictures and recipes that I wanted to make but I had to wait for instructions from my sensei! Finally we were given the go ahead to make the first dish, It was pork tacos in the style of those sold at the gas stations in Dallas and Austin-style black beans.
Just in case anybody doesn't know I live in Southern California and I could eat tacos from many different restaurants every day of the week if I wanted to. I have some favorites and was a little skeptical of how tacos from Texas might taste.
They look great in the book and after reading through the recipe list my skepticism started to fade. These tacos have crept into my top three favorites list, wait they didn't creep they strode right on up past all of the other tacos.
The recipe requires the pork to be marinaded in a chile puree for 8 hours but I ended up being a little side tracked and instead of cutting that time and rushing to make them I decided to postpone and have them for dinner the next night so my pork marinaded for almost twenty four hours.
In no way did this detract from the olympic gold winning taste and I was very happy when I sat down and devoured them alongside my side of black beans.
I must admit I rarely, nay never make beans from scratch so I was excited at being prodded into making these Austin-style black beans. It was very easy with time being one of the most important ingredients when cooking the beans and a little help from my wife.
Cooked very slowly with some great additional ingredients thrown in made me realise that it doesn't always have to be re-fried and I have a great respect to all of the bean makers out there stirring quietly over the stove. A few hours later I stole a spoonful and loved the taste of the smoky and spicy flavors.
This is an awesome book and like many of the other blogger's taking part in this extravaganza I have bookmarked many other recipes which I am yearning to make. I can't wait until our next cook off post so stay tuned.
This post is part of The Homesick Texan Cookbook Spotlight and Cook-Off sponsored by Hyperion and hosted at girlichef.