All cooking business today

winter lettuce on the deck: a rare gardening triumph

No bobcat for 3 days. Fingers crossed.

I made one last Homesick Texan shopping list, bought one last load of serrano chiles, cilantro, pork shoulder, fire-roasted tomatoes, and limes. Mark thinks we're having a family Super Bowl party tomorrow, but we're actually having a Homesick Texan finale party.

A list of recent Homesick Texan dishes and how they turned out, with links when available:

biscuits. Very good and basic. If you already have a biscuit recipe you love, you probably don't need this one. Not sure what is accomplished by beating the dough with the rolling pin. Recipe here.

tortilla soup. Rust red, cheesy, packed with crunchy tortillas strips, wicked good. Recipe here.

gorditas with picadillo. The English translation of gorditas is "little fatties." You mix a masa dough, form buns, fry, split, and fill with picadillo. Top with cheese, lettuce and salsa. The buns are adorable and have an amazing crispy golden crust. However, the picadillo, a Latin American ground beef hash, was dry and lacked personality. I used to make a Cuban picadillo with rum-soaked raisins and pimento-stuffed olives that I much prefer. It came from a book called Cooking Caribe and if anyone wants the recipe, I will provide. I served it with rice and cornbread and it was one of the staples of baby Isabel's diet. That makes it sound like pablum, but it's an exciting and delicious dish. I served this to the same friends so many times in a row that it was embarrassing.

Uncle Richard's hot sauce. This is Fain's family hot sauce and entails doctoring crushed tomatoes with onion, garlic, pickled jalapeno, cumin, cilantro, chili powder, and lemon juice. The recipe on her blog is quite different from the one in the book. She implies it's an improvisational salsa, one you make differently every time depending on what ingredients you have around. It was good. Not something I'd go out of my way to make again, but good.

black-eyed peas. Excellent and full of bacon. Again, the recipe on her blog isn't exactly the same as the one in her book, but it's hard to mess up black-eyed peas.

  definitely an 8x8 inch pan next time

lime shortbread. Fain says to pat out the dough in a "large baking pan" then cut into squares. This is awfully vague. Maybe she just means to bake the dough free-form? But that doesn't make sense because it's hard to cut neat squares if the dough isn't tightly packed into a pan. Anyway, it didn't fill a 9x13 pan, as you can see. Next time I'd try an 8x8 brownie pan or an 8-inch cake pan and go with wedges. Great, gritty shortbread, perhaps on account of the tablespoon of cornmeal. Not overly limey. Might benefit from a little more salt.

steak tacos. BLOCKBUSTER OF THE WEEK. I saved this for last to reward patient readers who made it all the way to the end of this list  Mix a simple lime juice marinade and let skirt steak soak for 2 to 8 hours. Cook the steak in a super-hot skillet and finish under the broiler. Let rest 10 minutes then slice your tender, juicy, super-flavorful meat and wrap in tortillas or, if you're on a diet, a lettuce leaf. Just as good cold the next day. Make this. It's easy and spectacularly delicious and I couldn't recommend it more enthusiastically. Recipe is here.