Please excuse the late posting. I got back from Texas at the very end of August. It is now approaching the end of September, and life has been a whirlwind of mostly positive experiences. Let's start back in my home state, Tejas (Tay-hahce).I traveled there from New York to visit my family before heading back to school: most of my mother's and father's families are from and are still located in TX (with few exceptions). It's not easy to get down there, mostly for financial reasons, so I don't see them often at all. In fact, it had been a year and a half since I had seen my dad, which is FAR too long. This was a much needed trip and I enjoyed pretty much every minute of it! It was one of the very few times in my life I've been sad to leave Texas, and all of those times were for leaving some of the most important people in my life behind. Texas itself is simply a force to be reckoned with, and I do not currently possess the power to do so. Maybe in the future.
On to the food! Although many people surely think of rattlesnakes, cacti, tumbleweeds and other such symbols of the southwest, I am from the Gulf of Mexico. This extremely humid, sometimes even marshy area is much more akin to Louisiana than to say, New Mexico, Arizona, etc. Enter here my obscene love of seafood, particularly shrimp and these delicious little monsters referred to by us as "crawfish." I ate as much shrimp as I possibly could while I was there, and I loved it all. As you can see in the photo, they're pretty sizable! And the taste certainly matched the size. The fried items (I tried to limit my intake of these) are hush puppies and... fried pickles. I did not eat the fried pickles! Now if they were okra, it would have been a different story. However, pickles they were and I stayed away. I did enjoy a couple of hush puppies. People from North Carolina might be taken aback by the more savory Cajun hush puppy with bits of jalapeño inside; it's quite a distinct taste from one puppy breed, if you will, to the next. Both delicious, of course!
Part of the title of this post is "Seafood out," which means seafood at a restaurant. Before driving to Austin to visit a dear friend from my adolescent years, I dined with my dad, my uncle David and my aunt Linda. I used to see them quite a lot while growing up. Interestingly enough, I was able to squeeze in a short visit with one of their daughters who lives in Austin! That will be another post. It was such a great part of my trip, sharing food with the people who are so very similar to me (biologically). After so much time apart, it amazed me to find how alike we still are. It never surprises me to realize this about my father, who, it seems at some times, might have actually cloned himself to make me. Just kidding; I am actually very much like both my parents, naturally, but when I spend time with my dad it just couldn't be any clearer that we are cut from absolutely the same cloth in almost every way. And when talking to my grandmother who is a few years shy of 90, I realized we were incredibly similar as well. Hopefully I will have inherited her longevity! What a woman.
There will be more posts to come about my food adventures in Texas, perhaps in a more timely fashion than this one ;)
