Texas! How is it?

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Xantippe said:
HEB baklava!!!

That is probably a big city thing.
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Without being too specific, suffice to say that I’m not in a big city and am about 40-60 minutes out from Houston. 😉 However, we have had a huge local uptick in Middle Eastern/North African immigrants of late*, probably due to everything going on over there, and I suspect that management is, very sensibly, catering a bit to the changing customer demographics’ taste.

Try looking for a very small table in the bakery area. It’s generally not a very big display, just a few boxes (pinkish in color), but MAN is it good!

*This based on my entirely 😉 scientific observation that three years ago, when I moved here, it was rather unusual to see a woman in a hijab, niqab, or burkha at the grocery store, but now it’s equally unusual not to see several during the course of my weekly HEB trip.
 
UbiCaritas said:
Without being too specific, suffice to say that I’m not in a big city and am about 40-60 minutes out from Houston. 😉 However, we have had a huge local uptick in Middle Eastern/North African immigrants of late*, probably due to everything going on over there, and I suspect that management is, very sensibly, catering a bit to the changing customer demographics’ taste.

Try looking for a very small table in the bakery area. It’s generally not a very big display, just a few boxes (pinkish in color), but MAN is it good!

*This based on my entirely 😉 scientific observation that three years ago, when I moved here, it was rather unusual to see a woman in a hijab, niqab, or burkha at the grocery store, but now it’s equally unusual not to see several during the course of my weekly HEB trip.
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We do have pumpkin cheesecake in the bakery right now.

Yay!
 
UbiCaritas said:
I would consider a small tactical nuke a perfectly reasonable use of force against even a baby copperhead/cottonmouth/rattler/coral snake
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Not sure this will help you identify a coral snake:

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
I’m near H-Town, too! 👍 The kids at my local high school love to buy the Flamin’ Hot crunchy Cheetos and then pour the ballpark nacho cheese sauce all over them. ICK for the cheese sauce; YUM for the Cheetos!!
 
Speaking of food, we live in an area where the Venn diagram of the Sweet Tea Zone and the Mexican Food Zone overlap. So, you can order sweet tea (a Southern specialty) in Mexican restaurants in our area. However, my husband was once in San Antonio with a native Texan colleague who made of fun of him for doing that in a Mexican restaurant there–that was apparently out of the zone of overlap.
 
1ke said:
**In the US **(not universally true for coral snakes in Central and South America):

red on yellow, kill a fellow
red on black, friend of Jack
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You must have had boy scouts in the family.
I remember this identifier from the little boys in our school.
 
Sugabee43 said:
I’m near H-Town, too! 👍 The kids at my local high school love to buy the Flamin’ Hot crunchy Cheetos and then pour the ballpark nacho cheese sauce all over them. ICK for the cheese sauce; YUM for the Cheetos!!
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Lays Flamin Hot Potato Chips FTW! 😉
 
Sorry to come late to the party.

We are northeasterners but we LOVE Texas, so much so that we would often visit every year. We would often spend Easter in a different city in Texas; San Antonio has a most wonderful cathedral where we would do Easter morning mass followed by brunch on the riverwalk.

Houston is a great city for commerce and we also love the gulf coast/Kemah area, although we found it surprisingly bayou-like (not a bad thing; just not expected). We also enjoyed the Galveston area.

To this day I’m offended that space center Houston was not awarded a space shuttle.

The only thing I didn’t like is that the whole state seems so new & growing that it seems very heavy on the chain restaurants/shops without the more distinctive family-run establishments ubiquitous to the northeast - but I admit that could be because we’ve spend more time in large cities & just haven’t found more family-owned joints.
 
Erich said:
Not sure this will help you identify a coral snake:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/snakes.png
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Identification’s not the problem. 😉 I’m a nerd. What I fear, I research. I could give you a very long and boring lecture on the identification of local poisonous snakes, their families (did you know that coral snakes are ellipids, like cobras?), and the relative effects of hemotoxic (viper) venom vs neurotoxic (coral snake) venom.

I’ll refrain, however. (And the forum breathes a sign of relief.)

The problem is their very existence, and the fact that even Texas’ relatively relaxed weapons laws won’t let me own either a fully automatic machine gun or a shoulder-fired missile setup to deal appropriately with the resident snakes. 😃
 
PolarGuy said:
Sorry to come late to the party.

We are northeasterners but we LOVE Texas, so much so that we would often visit every year. We would often spend Easter in a different city in Texas; San Antonio has a most wonderful cathedral where we would do Easter morning mass followed by brunch on the riverwalk.

Houston is a great city for commerce and we also love the gulf coast/Kemah area, although we found it surprisingly bayou-like (not a bad thing; just not expected). We also enjoyed the Galveston area.

To this day I’m offended that space center Houston was not awarded a space shuttle.

The only thing I didn’t like is that the whole state seems so new & growing that it seems very heavy on the chain restaurants/shops without the more distinctive family-run establishments ubiquitous to the northeast - but I admit that could be because we’ve spend more time in large cities & just haven’t found more family-owned joints.
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One of Houston’s gems is the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, which puts on a G&S operetta every year.

The patter songs are often altered with appropriate localized lyrics.

The year that New York got a shuttle and Houston didn’t, the G&S Society did “The Mikado.” Included on the “Little List” patter song was “The idiots who gave the shuttle to New York.”

The singer and orchestra had to pause and restart several times because of the resultant standing ovation that kept interrupting the song…
 
UbiCaritas said:
The problem is their very existence, and the fact that even Texas’ relatively relaxed weapons laws won’t let me own either a fully automatic machine gun or a shoulder-fired missile setup to deal appropriately with the resident snakes. 😃
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A good old fashioned hoe always does the trick.
 
PolarGuy said:
The only thing I didn’t like is that the whole state seems so new & growing that it seems very heavy on the chain restaurants/shops without the more distinctive family-run establishments ubiquitous to the northeast - but I admit that could be because we’ve spend more time in large cities & just haven’t found more family-owned joints.
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Some of the chains are a result of growth from the family restaurant: Pappas chain, Landrys, Gringos. Speaking of Gringos, that was started by the cousin of someone local to my town. To this day, I still hold that the best Tex-Mex is El Toro, the orginal Tex-Mex here.

Pearland has two gems:King’s Biergarten and Killians steakhouse (rather pricey). Also, Frank’s in Pasadena is a nice diner; good atmosphere, all food made from scratch, decent pricing and quantity.
 
pnewton said:
Some of the chains are a result of growth from the family restaurant: Pappas chain, Landrys, Gringos. Speaking of Gringos, that was started by the cousin of someone local to my town. To this day, I still hold that the best Tex-Mex is El Toro, the orginal Tex-Mex here.
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Yes, lots of what are now national chains started in Houston, or somewhere in TX.

Chuy’s is national now, they are from Austin and have been a Houston staple for over 30 years.

Carrabba’s is a national chain now, but Johnny Carrabba is a local boy who still goes to my former parish.

Chili’s is a Texas chain.

Abuelo’s is a Texas chain that started in (I think) Amarillo and is now national.

Pappa’s restaurants (Pappadeaux, Pappasito, Pappa’s Seafood, Pappa’s BBQ, and more) started as a restaurant supply business in Houston and then grew into restaurants.

Jason’s Deli started in Beaumont and is now national.

We can’t help it if TX has good food!!!
 
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