Fire-Roasted Hatch Chile Salsa Recipe
All year-round Texas produces fruits and vegetable ripe for baking, cooking, and canning. Tomato season is just around the corner, and after picking up a few bushels at a farmers’ market or stand, you’ll want to have this salsa recipe handy. Roasting the peppers and tomatoes first adds some toothsome char and also makes them easier to peel. Hatch chiles mingled with jalapeños to bring some smoky depth to the heat; just make sure to either wear gloves while working with hot peppers or plan to wash your hands thoroughly afterwards. Canning the results ensures that your salsa is delicious and fresh-tasting for the next year. Read More »
For Presidio, the ‘Middle of Nowhere’ Is a Fine Place to Be
Big Bend wanderers, celebrities drifting down from Marfa, and other end-of-the-liners have officially discovered the border town of Presidio. They’re late by about eight centuries, though: People have lived for so long at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos that the valley surrounding Presidio is thought to be the oldest continually cultivated farmland in Texas, if not the United States. “It’s funny,” says John Ferguson, the mayor of this dusty town 60 miles south of Marfa. “Presidio is the oldest town anywhere in the entire Big Bend area, but so little of our history is truly known, even to those of us who live right here on top of it.” Read More »
Four New Trailheads Lead Hikers to El Paso’s Wild Outdoors
Four new urban trailheads opened this March in El Paso, providing stunning views and helpful amenities for hikers and mountain bikers trekking from the city’s streets into Franklin Mountains State Park, the largest urban park in the country. Read More »
The Surrender of Santa Anna
In 1886, 50 years after the Battle of San Jacinto, Austin painter William Henry Huddle set out to interpret a critical scene from the conflict with his painting, The Surrender of Santa Anna. Huddle’s oil-on-canvas work, which has hung in the South Foyer of the Texas Capitol since 1891, depicts the morning after the April 21, 1836, clash as Texian fighters presented Mexican Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, dressed in the white pants of a private, to Texas Gen. Sam Houston, who is reclined with a battle wound to his leg. The decisive victory secured the rebels’ independence from Mexico, a turning point Texas honors annually on April 21, known as San Jacinto Day. Huddle’s painting includes more than 30 historical figures, among them scout Erastus “Deaf” Smith (seated on a log), Secretary of War Thomas Jefferson Rusk (to the rear left of Houston), and Col. Mirabeau B. Lamar (left of Rusk). Read More »
Photo: Lightning Over Sweetwater
The wide-open spaces and generally flat landscape make the plains of Texas a prime location for wind energy production. With nothing to block the view for miles, the environment also makes for some spectacular storm viewing. The two combine in this electric image of a storm passing over a wind farm near Sweetwater. Read More »
A Palo Duro Canyon Community Offers More Than Meets the Eye
Your first time in Canyon, you’ll be forgiven for wondering where this Panhandle community of about 15,000 gets its name. Heading into town, you pass beehives from a local honey farm, the sprawling campus of West Texas A&M University, and tidy brick houses. What you won’t see is anything resembling a canyon. Read More »
Hike, Fish, and Play—but Watch Out for Bigfoot—at the Mineola Nature Preserve
Past the sign for a wastewater treatment plant on the southern edge of Mineola, one of the largest municipal parks in the nation awaits. The Mineola Nature Preserve sprawls 2,911 acres across garden trails, forests, wetlands, grassy fields, and river. More than 193 species of birds roam here, as well as delicate butterflies, roly polies, thundering buffalo, and Longhorn cattle. Read More »
Indie Record Stores Are Turning the Tables on Texas Music Sales
For some time now, prognosticators have been predicting the total demise of records—you know, the old-fashioned discs that play musical sound—as well as the brick-and-mortar establishments that sell them. And yes, it’s true that CD sales are down, and more than a few record stores have shut their doors. But there’s good news for those of us who can’t imagine life without flipping through bins, admiring the physical objects for their creative covers, and listening to the tunes imprinted in their grooves. Read More »
Say Hi to the Llamas When You Stay at This Historic Blanco River Ranch
Despite the newness in the name, time seems to stand still at New Tracks, which is how David and Shyrle prefer it. “I often wish I had grown up in the 1800s,” says 85-year-old David, who remembers riding into the small town of Kyle as a child and finding dirt streets and hitching racks for horses in front of the general stores. Read More »
Houston’s Antone’s Po’ Boys Go Statewide
Jan Norris remembers when customers sat on fig and olive barrels when they dined at Antone’s Import Co. in Houston more than half a century ago. Norris moved from Vivian, Louisiana, in 1957 and ordered his first Antone’s po’boy at the location on Taft Street a few years later. Read More »
Jefferson’s ‘Diamond Bessie Murder Trial’ Plumbs 19th-Century Mystery
It was the O.J. Simpson trial of its day. Reporters descended on the northeast Texas town of Jefferson to chronicle the tragic tale of Diamond Bessie with black ink and purple prose. Nobody recognized the dashing young couple Annie Moore and Abe Rothschild when they checked into a local hotel in January 1877. But when Moore’s body was found in the woods two weeks later, a bullet in her head, the mystery of Moore, aka Diamond Bessie, catapulted Jefferson into the national spotlight. Read More »
Photographer Captures the Evening Light of Texas’ Blackland Prairie
On most evenings, as the sun sinks below the horizon in the Blackland Prairie, photographer Andy Sharp is in his aged Honda chasing the light somewhere on a country road or in a small town. Sharp has rambled about for 10 years, since he and his wife moved to Taylor in Williamson County. Read More »
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