Popeye vs. Jack Lalanne.

Green and yellow, green and yellow - pineapple spinach agua fresca. © Ryan Schierling

I'll be honest with you. There's a hippie vegetarian joint in Austin that we have just recently, after two years of living here, begun infrequently frequenting. It took a chilaquiles recommendation from a friend to get us in the door. The surprise of the meal (yes, the chilaquiles were solid) was a rich, deep green, pineapple spinach agua fresca bubbling in a Lexan fountain of youth, that seemed to have superlative curative and monstrous restorative properties. We've been back on mornings where the night prior had us tying one on and dragging it around. 

The only problem is, they're closed on Sunday. And Sunday morning comes after Saturday night. 

So, we had some things to figure out. Pineapples, spinach, how hard could it be? Actually, not that hard at all. The wonderful thing about agua fresca is that it lets the fruit shine without much embellishment or added sugar, and it is an incredibly refreshing drink without being cloyingly Kool-Aid sweet. Fresh pineapple is amazing when juiced, and a little fresh spinach adds color and some vitamin C, calcium and fiber, folic acid, magnesium and lutein. 

Ahem. I'll be honest with you, again. I have historically had a problem with green beverages. I have barfed up wheatgrass juice and I'd rather drink compost tea than anything with spirulina in it. Sorry, healthy smoothie enthusiasts, unless I'm pouring an oatmeal stout into a blender with some ice cream, chocolate chip cookies and a shot of espresso, I don't want to have to chew what I'm drinking. But this green dynamo? All bets are off. 

Now, I imagine this restaurant has an industrial juicer that would put the trash compactor on the Death Star to shame. And if you happen to have a bad-ass, solar-powered, brushed stainless steel and polished chrome juicer autographed by Jack Lalanne, well then, good for you. We used a blender for this recipe and strained out most of the solids with a sieve – which is my least favorite thing in all of cooking, ever… pushing solids through a sieve… I sincerely, seriously hate it. But I love this juice.

Picadillo Joe.

A hot mess, no matter what you call it. © Ryan Schierling

A few weeks ago, I got to thinking about soup sandwiches. Not soup or sandwiches, or soup with a sandwich, but a home-cooked sloppy-joe knock-off that I remembered from childhood. There was ground beef, probably some tomato paste and worcestershire, and a can of Campbell's condensed vegetable soup (with the alphabet pasta!), cooked down into a thick, saucy filling and spooned onto cheap, white hamburger buns. It wasn't a Manwich, it wasn't a sloppy joe. It was a soup sandwich, and it was a messy delight. 

I was probably feeling more nostalgic than actually craving a sloppy joe, or whatever you want to call it, but I just couldn't let it go. I stood at the grocery store looking at the cans of Manwich sauce and the generic sloppy joe sauce, and thought that, despite not having eaten a soup sandwich in more than 20 years, I had to be able to do better than a pre-packaged, super-corn-syruped sauce that was basically nothing more than spiced ketchup. I thought about similar ingredients and the textures and flavors I was hankering for. I imagined making a grown-up sloppy joe that, despite a few challenging additions, even kids would want to eat. 

I started thinking about picadillo, and the similarities and differences between the Spanish, Mexican and Cuban versions of the dish. 

I was thinking too much. 

I mean, picadillo is a peasant food no matter which country it comes from, and not much more than a ground meat hash served over rice, or scooped into a tortilla. The list in my muddled head kind of clarified itself after that – I grabbed a pound of 80/20 ground chuck from the butcher and a container of PikNik Original Shoestring Potatoes from the chips and salty snacks aisle. 

Wait, what? 

Herb-ivore.

Sweet basil with wee carnivorous visitor. © Ryan Schierling 

Dried herbs?!? Don't even get me started. Yes, most of us grew up with them – sad rows of anemic, dehydrated, desaturated flakes with long-past-due expiration dates in the seasoning rack. There is a small place for certain dried herbs, sure. But a compact herb garden that can supply 95% of your fresh herb needs always wins as the better-tasting and less-expensive option over fresh-cut herbs purchased from a grocery store or anything in a dusty jar. 

My first "just outside the door" herb was chives. As a kid I LOVED them and would chew them down one-by-one, plucked carefully from the little flower bed tucked along the side of the house next to the kitchen door. This was all cute and adorable until my breath became so punctuated with the onion-y fragrance of chives that my mom started asking me to back off... both in physical presence and chive intake. 

I've moved beyond my chive-chomping "get out of this kitchen with that onion breath" youth, but my appreciation has not waned. I have always had a few herbs around, growing in a pot on the porch or in a patch of dirt out back. Then somewhere along the line, I stopped taking herbs for granted and realized that the benefit of growing them was such a huge asset to my cooking experience that a home without them was unimaginable. When we moved to Austin, it was late fall and our plans to put in a proper raised bed for herbs were delayed by a few months. By early spring of 2010, not having fresh herbs outside our door was driving us bonkers. Planting those first few starts was immensely satisfying and, while we have had a few minor casualties along the way, this herb garden has been the most continuously productive, useful and inspiring patch we have planted. 

TGICFS.

Chicken-fried steak @ Evangeline Cafe. © Ryan Schierling

I would have never thought to order CFS at a Cajun/Creole restaurant. Evangeline Cafe is in our south Austin neighborhood, and no matter how hard I try to order something different on the occasions we visit, my go-to always ends up being an oyster po' boy with fries. I'm a simple man, with simple needs, and Evangeline does a very nice sandwich. 

But the last time we stopped in for lunch I was feeling like a little chicken-fried steak, and man, did they deliver. I thought I was surreptitiously taking a photo at our outside table when the waitress came back and surprised me with some more sweet tea. She cocked her head and queried, "Photos?" I stammered that I, uh, took photographs of all the chicken-fried steaks I eat, and that's not really a weird thing, and I, uh, really really liked chicken-fried steaks, and that this was an especially handsome rendition, and, and (that breading, damn!) trying to retreat a bit from my CFS-fanboy stance, I cleared my throat and in a slightly-deeper voice told her to "uhm, give my regards to the chef for such a... visually-pleasing plate." 

She smiled politely, probably thought to herself that I was a huge dork, and quickly finished refilling my tea. 

The CFS? It tasted even better than it looked. 

Louisiana
and Texas had a fist-fight...
settled to a draw(l).