Boots in the Oven

Radishes, Eggs, and Misdemeanors

Nothing gets a lovely spring Sunday kicked off quite like a bit of thievery. It’s true. I’m extremely incorrigible with very little social conscience.

If you, like our friend Kristi over at Austin Farm to Table, happen to put up an extremely delicious sounding recipe and blithely leave it unattended, I will jack it post-haste with no regrets.

Mwahahaahah!

This particular heist involves radishes.

I’ve eaten them raw off and on for years (mainly off to be honest) but in the last few months I’ve really come around to the spicy, earthy, slightly sweet little guys. They’ve been flooding our local farmers’ markets, so I’m always on the lookout for some new insight in preparation and consumption.

Barefoot and Boots in the Kitchn.

What do David Leibovitz, Epicurious, and us here at Boots have in common?  Gold chiffon evening wear? 

No. We're all on the latest What's the Most Delicous Thing You've Seen (Lately)? on Apartment Therapy! The Kitchn to be specific...

Yup.  It's all about cookies and strawberries and beets.  Nothing wrong with that.

Check out the between seasons good time.

And just for fun, how about a little more beet porn...

Thanks guys!

Lucky J's Chicken and Waffles.

Chicken and waffles is a great gift to the culinary landscape. The unintuitive combo blends a perfect combination of sweet, salty, crispy, savory, fluffy, gooey and succulent. Add some hot sauce and magical things can happen.

Unfortunately, Lucky J’s isn’t a great gift to chicken and waffles.

I have every reason to want to love this place.

It’s right down the street from my house. It’s in an adorable pinkish-red trailer with picnic tables and flowering plants. You can get real honest to goodness maple syrup and they offer a dozen varieties of spicy condiments to tweak your meal. Their motto is “Chicken for Strength, Waffles for Speed.” Heck, they even recycle their fryer oil into biofuel.

So what’s the problem?

St. George and His Little Green Monkey.

Who wants to talk about booze?

Ooh, ooh! I do! Me me!

More specifically, I want to talk about delicious booze. Delicious, homegrown ‘merican booze.

Their nifty entryway mural.

A short while back, during our California escapades, we made a side pilgrimage to track down the fantastic craft distillery St. George Spirits. St. George is not easy to find. There are bridges and tunnels and miles of deserted warehouses as you weave your way through the old Alameda Naval Air Station. At one point there's not even a road, you just drive through hundreds of yards of undifferentiated parking lots.

NAS is a surreal place with such claims to fame as having a terminal for the first transcontinental railway, hosting key scenes of The Matrix Reloaded, and being designated as a Superfund cleanup site. Wow. The grey skies and incessant drizzle enhanced the creepy vibe.

This forlorn and overgrown sign ominously led the way.

Just when I thought we were definitely in some B-horror flick, about to meet our overly gory demise, we rounded one last corner and came face to face with the starting point for so many memorable evenings of my past.

Potlucks and Pig-Pickinses - Welcome to Texas!

Wow.  With Logan taking such good care of the blog, feeding and watering it and teaching it to do little photographic tricks, I had no idea that it's been almost three months since I'd written anything here.  

Welcome back, me!

After a Saturday that was overflowing with much-needed pouring rain (which didn't keep Tasty Touring and TacoJournalism from putting together a taco truck bike tour), Sunday was cool and sunny.  Perfect for a series of outdoor parties centered on eating, eating, eating!

First, we went to the Casa de Soup Peddler for the second of a hopefully continuing foodblogger potluck series.  As before, the food was varied and invariably delicious, from a perfectly cooked vegan potato and corn salad all the way up to a whole brined ham boiled with hay.  Our contribution was strawberry and pea shoot tea sandwiches, based on a bit of gastronomic insanity Logan learned about at Apicius.

Our other contribution was our college friend Jackson, newly arrived in town from South Carolina.  I'm completely thrilled that she and her man are starting a blog (Austin By the Horns link here), most especially because I loved keeping up with her doings during her three and a half years in Japan, which she blogged at Japan by Storm.