The New State of Chilaquiles in Austin, Texas (or, what a long, strange trip it's been).

150+ plates of chilaquiles in Austin, Texas. © Ryan Schierling

As a lot of you know, we've been on a epic, epicurean quest – a grand gustatory gamble with breaking the fast deep in the heart of Texas.

We've been scouring Austin for the very best chilaquiles it has to offer. We've torn apart the town, top to bottom, for almost fifteen years sampling both highbrow and humble versions of this traditional Mexican dish. 

There are no shortage of restaurants offering up their take on what shouldn't really be more than crisp fresh-fried tortilla chips (totopos) simmered with a red or green sauce until just slightly softened, crowned with a pair of properly-cooked eggs. With such a simple preparation, you'd think it would be difficult to screw up this classic.

We weren't looking for haute cuisine a la Mexicana, we just wanted an honest, reliable, simple Sunday morning comfort-food breakfast at a joint where everyone might eventually know us (and our broken Spanish).

There were standouts, certainly, but just as often there were store-bought chips, soggy and swimming in sub-par sauces, eggs that were under-cooked, over-cooked or not even offered as an option. There were some surprises, and there were some disappointments. 

There were also some stunningly brilliant breakfasts. 

If a restaurant presented only one salsa option for chilaquiles, Julie and I would typically order the same dish. If a restaurant had both verdes (green) and rojos (red), we'd order one of each. The majority of the time, we'd order eggs over-easy. If we knew the eggs were hopefully going to be happy eggs (see $14-plus chilaquiles), I'd go for sunny-side-up. Beans, potatoes and accoutrements (if available) were taken into consideration, as was the coffee or aguas frescas. The overall experience was key, but really, it all came down to the chilaquiles. 

After eating 150-plus different restaurant and food truck plates of chilaquiles, I can say we've done our due diligence, and now, we humbly present to you establishments that Julie and I both agreed have the finest chilaquiles in Austin. These are our favorites, the places we return to time and time again. 

These chilaquiles are Austin's best of the best. 

Tijuana Mama corn dogs.

Tijuana Mama corn dogs with honey mustard dipping sauce. © Ryan Schierling

We're no strangers to putting things inside of other things and deep-frying them. It doesn't happen all the time, but when we do break out the Wagner #8 fryer, what goes into it is pretty well-thought through. We've also been to a State Fair or two and have sampled the finest (and freakiest) fried fare, so we have a handle on what's been done and what hasn't.

This recipe is much more simple than the Thin James and pasteurized cheese-product loaded jalapenos, but it does utilize a gas station staple – the homely pickled sausage.

To be more specific, a spicy pickled sausage called the Tijuana Mama that is a sinus-clearing, tastebud-tingling, tongue-puckering treat. Why use plain old hot dogs when you can push the corny dog envelope? Paired with a dip in honey mustard sauce, these are a dangerous dog like you've never seen. They look innocent on the outside, and one bite seems like enough of a novelty, but when you get down to the stick your forehead is sweating and you've got to have another. The pickled sausage innards are fiery, the cornmeal coating is fluffy on the inside with a delicate sweet tooth, and the complementary honey mustard sauce momentarily cools the fires just enough. These ain't no State Fair corn dogs, well... not yet, at least. Big Tex, give me a call.

The 'New' State of Chilaquiles in Austin, Texas.

100 plates of chilaquiles. © Ryan Schierling

(FGHD editor's note: Originally updated March 2016 for the AFBA City Guide with 100 plates of chilaquiles.)

As a lot of you know, we've been on a epic, epicurean quest – a grand gustatory gamble with breaking the fast deep in the heart of Texas.

We've been scouring Austin for the very best chilaquiles it has to offer. We've torn apart the town, top to bottom, for more than two years sampling both highbrow and humble versions of this traditional Mexican dish. 

There are no shortage of restaurants offering up their take on what shouldn't really be more than crisp fresh-fried tortilla chips (totopos) simmered with a red or green sauce until just slightly softened, crowned with a pair of properly-cooked eggs. With such a simple preparation, you'd think it would be difficult to screw up this classic.

We weren't looking for haute cuisine a la Mexicana, we just wanted an honest, reliable, simple Sunday morning comfort-food breakfast at a joint where everyone might eventually know us (and our broken Spanish).

There were standouts, certainly, but just as often there were store-bought chips, soggy and swimming in sub-par sauces, eggs that were under-cooked, over-cooked or not even offered as an option. There were some surprises, and there were some disappointments. 

There were also some stunningly brilliant breakfasts. 

If a restaurant presented only one sauce option for chilaquiles, Julie and I would typically order the same dish. If a restaurant had both verdes (green) and rojos (red), we'd order one of each. The majority of the time, we'd order eggs over-easy. If we knew the eggs were going to be happy eggs (see $9 chilaquiles), I'd go for sunny-side-up. Beans, potatoes and accoutrements (if available) were taken into consideration, as was the coffee or aguas frescas. The overall experience was key, but really, it all came down to the chilaquiles. 

After eating 100 different plates of chilaquiles, we've done our due diligence, and now, we humbly present to you ten establishments that Julie and I both agreed have the finest chilaquiles in Austin. These are our favorites, the places we return to time and time again. 

These chilaquiles are the best of the best. 

All hail klobasniky!

Pan sausage, American cheese and jalapeño klobasnek. © Ryan Schierling

There are a few hearty breakfast handfuls that I've come to rely on that just don't exist outside of Texas. Living in Seattle, I never saw a breakfast taco. There were such curiosities as breakfast burritos, but they occupied a space that was an afterthought to most carriers of A.M. comestibles. The closest you could come to a klobasnek is a piroshky, and while delicious any time of day, none were dedicated to breaking the fast. The latter – klobasnek, klobasnik, kolache if you don't know any better – are a Czech savory morsel with the same slightly-sweet dough used for kolaches. Klobasnek filling is usually a little oblong sausage like a pig in a blanket, but Texans have taken to putting all sorts of things inside that luxurious, pillowy dough. My favorite is a piece of pan sausage (breakfast sausage), pickled jalapeño and a nice melty American cheese, which is a klobasnek that's not too hard to find at kolache shops in Austin.

But a beef summer sausage, Swiss cheese and sauerkraut klobasnek? I had to make this combination myself, and recipe testing was not a problem. I think I ate three dozen over the course of a week before I was satisfied with the end result. Hell, I was satisfied with the first round, I just had to keep making them because they're irresistible.

TGICFS.

Chicken-fried steak and eggs at Cypress Grill. © Ryan Schierling

I'm still lamenting the closure of Arkie's Grill, because dollars to dunkers, that was the best chicken-fried steak and eggs in Austin. I've kind of given up on the breakfast CFS here, since no one really does it. Chicken-fried steak is always on proper Southern lunch and dinner menus, with fries or mashed potatoes and 40 other side dish options.

I want it in the A.M., damnit, with fried eggs, crispy hash browns, Texas toast, some badass cream gravy and a stiff cup of black coffee. That's it. This breakfast is Texas birthright.

Cypress Grill does it absolutely right. A pounded-out, tender cube steak, properly hand-battered and fried, topped with andouille sausage gravy, with a pair of perfectly-cooked eggs and a little wedge of buttered toast to sop up leftover gravy and egg yolk. If they had hash browns instead of home fries, we could have had a brunch love affair, and I would have ordered plate after plate until they kicked me out.

Bonus points for their infused Bloody Mary, which is the second best I've had in the city, just behind Cafe Malta's Bloody Hell.

Now, here's your obligatory TGICFS haiku:

A New Orleans brunch
Adept, tender kitchen hands
Soothe my quondam wounds.

Sweet, hot, pickled, beer-battered bliss.

(L) Sweet, habanero pickled onions. (R) Fried, sweet, habanero pickled onions. © Ryan Schierling

Ultimately, this all started on a clearance table at our local grocer with a Texas brand of hot, sweet, pickled onions being blown out at 50-cents a jar. Regularly $5.99 each, we bought four, and were surprised at the simplicity of the sweet, spicy, clean and crisp flavors. They worked on all kinds of sandwiches, were divine in deviled eggs, great grilled, fabulous on top of steak, and they shined in salads. We were a bit distressed that this product wasn't popular enough for the store to keep around and we were afraid we'd never see it again. It's not the first time this has happened with something we really liked (but found out about a little late), so we figured we'd better reverse-imagineer it. 

There were six ingredients – onions, vinegar, sugar, habanero peppers, salt and citric acid. Based on percentages of sodium, carbohydrates, sugar and vitamin C on the label, we were able to approximate salt, sugar and citric acid components per serving, and per jar. Taste-testing got us pretty spot on with the pickling liquid, though we weren't sure if the onions were originally white, yellow or sweet, so we went with white based on what we had on hand. Of course we didn't hold back on the habanero, because we roll caliente, and they were goooood. 

We tried them quick-pickled, then left those in the fridge for a two-week pickle to see how to texture and flavors would change. Later, we did them properly canned in a hot water bath for longer-term storage. The longer the jars sit, the more the flavors and the heat intensify.

But I couldn't leave well enough alone. I kept thinking about deep-fried pickled things, and how these onions might taste if we beer-battered them using a spicy pilsner and took them to the hot oil-filled cast iron. The result was surprising, but not terribly unexpected – they were ridiculously good. 

Sauceless, these are amazing onion rings. They are crispy, tangy, spicy, sweet and salty without ever seeing a swipe of Ranch or buttermilk dressing, or ketchup/catsup, honey mustard or whatever other crazy things you dip your onion rings in. We made a two-pepper ketchup just in case, and it paired perfectly with the hot little ringlets.

Calamari Provencal.

There's a steak in there. © Ryan Schierling

There are a lot of things I don't understand about the ways of food wording. When a cow is grazing, wandering, giving milk, it's a cow. When it's butchered, it's beef. Baby cow... calf. Unless you're eating it, then it's veal. A pig is a pig until it's pork, a moniker issued upon its demise. Chicken, well, that's just... chicken. A squid out of the water and on its way to your plate is calamari, unless you're Italian. In that case, in whatever state, it's still calamari.

Most people are familiar with the breaded and deep-fried rings of calamari, oft-dipped in marinara or aioli. This chain-restaurant appetizer staple endured somewhat of a scandal a while back. Given the shape, color and texture of calamari rings, some insidious folks had been passing off "imitation" calamari as the real thing, and you don't want to know what the faux calamari was made of. Or maybe you do. Let's just leave it at the fact that "seafood fraud" is apparently a common occurrence in the food industry, and you may have been enjoying a delicious plate of sliced, deep-fried hog rectum. Prepared in a similar fashion, pork bung has a texture that is frighteningly close to calamari rings. Fried and dipped in a sauce that masks most flavor, not many would be able to tell the difference. Hell, after a few glasses of wine, most people would mistake supple Italian shoe-leather for milanese if you breaded, deep-fried and seasoned it nicely.

The horseshoe sandwich.

Springfield, Illinois meets Austin, Texas. Horseshoe sandwich, FGHD style. © Ryan Schierling

I'm sure there are wealthy suburbs of Springfield, Illinois that have more cardiologists per capita than any other city in the United States. I imagine when filling out new patient paperwork, there is a check-box for "Do you eat horseshoe sandwiches? If yes, how many per year?" That information is disclosed to insurance companies, you are deemed "high-risk" and your policy is put under review.

In the summer of 2007, I ate a horseshoe at storied purveyor D'arcy's Pint in Springfield. I was determined to finish it, and after 45 minutes, I did. Moments later, I felt the first tinges of angina. I was told by locals that to thin the blood I needed more alcohol. I ordered a pitcher of Old Style and a cold, wet bar towel for my forehead, and that seemed to do the trick.

Years later, I kept telling Julie I was going to recreate this Illinois staple, and it was going to be glorious. The Texas toast, the hamburger patties, the crinkle-cut fries and that incredible blanket of luxurious, velvety cheese sauce.

She took my braggadocio with a lot of grains of salt, reminding me that the heart never forgets. And yet, I got a crinkle-cutter in my stocking the following Christmas. This week, I finally tied on my apron and took that Springfield regular to Austin-level serious. Honestly, why hasn't Texas adopted this plate? It's right up there with Frito chili pie, chicken-fried steak and eggs with hash browns, and enchiladas Dan Jenkins. 

It's time to make the doña.

Dos brujas – red and green doña sauces (and one frightened mollete). © Ryan Schierling

This recipe is nothing new, especially to Austinites. It certainly didn't originate here, but doña sauce is a bonafide Austin staple, and it has been long-studied, dissected, perfected and repeated by others well before Julie and I ever thought to make it ourselves last year. It is a puréed, pale green, fire-breathing dragon of a jalapeño sauce that was introduced by Veracruz-native Bertha Gonzales to local restaurant Tacodeli 13 years ago. She won an employee salsa contest with it, and it is as important to Austin’s culinary history as Matt’s Bob Armstrong dip, Dirty Martin’s burgers and Franklin’s brisket.

There are varied versions of it in squeeze bottles at taquerias all over town, but Tacodeli made it a locally, fervidly-famous comestible.

The food blogger and bulletin board arguments over ingredients are legend, because the original recipe is closely-guarded. Are the peppers roasted or boiled? Some say there’s avocado, or crema, or raw egg, mayonnaise or even mustard in the sauce. Others swear there’s only a touch of oil, and mostly water so the sauce doesn’t gelatinize in the fridge. Everyone’s got an opinion and a recipe.
 
I was a little baffled though, at why I’d never seen a rojo version of it using red jalapeños. Doña sauce is always green.

Shrimp, grits, gravy and greens.

Fried grit cakes with boudin gravy, dandelion greens and shrimp. © Ryan Schierling

Every Southern cook worth their heritage cast iron pot-and-pan collection has a shrimp and grits recipe that's the best. Of course, it's a recipe that was bestowed to them in hushed tones by their mama, from their mama's mama, and so on and so forth, down a long line of mamas. My mother doesn't have a shrimp and grits recipe and I'm not a southern cook. I rock the cast iron, but there is no lineage that would tie me to a historically time-honored shrimp and grits recipe.

I'm not looking to give you one more traditional (or non-traditional) reinterpretation of what started as a Low Country breakfast dish. It's been done.

While I have a deep and abiding respect for the classics, I wanted a fussy, sassy, gussied-up little Southern belle that was more a complete plate than just shrimp and grits. Call me a Yankee all you want – but when you taste these fried grit cakes and boudin cream gravy, the little pickled green tomatoes, the robust, biting dandelion greens and that rich New Orleans-style barbecue shrimp – you will slap your mama.

Go away, come home.

Seattle band Spanish For 100 at S&S Cafe – Emporia, Kansas. © Ryan Schierling

"It was somewhere near The Crazy Mountains in Montana – day 17 – when I began to lose my mind. The air conditioner had just given up the ghost after 14 straight hours driving out of Denver and the early July temperatures were climbing. I was moist, sticking to my clothes and my clothes were attached to a red fold-out bench seat. I had dim memories of seeing the sun coming up, but that could have been one of at least five other sleepless nights on this summer tour. 

Polaroid pictures secured to an overhead rail with strips of duct tape swung back and forth beneath the blue and brown headliner. A pink stuffed ape wearing a mortarboard sat across from me in the captain’s chair, the butt of a yellow flashlight unceremoniously shoved into a break in the stitching in it's ass. Where was the Uriah Heep that had kept us going for so long? Everyone was silent, a little lost and glassy-eyed, moving in slow motion. The energy drinks for shift-driving were gone. The ice was melted.

I tried in vain to think of some type of candy that has a crunchy exterior and a chewy center. That’s what Horchata, the Spanish For 100 bus, had become – crusty on the outside and moist and tender in the middle. We were bad nougat that was quickly heading south, churning west over mountain passes at 47 miles per hour. I couldn’t think of the damn candy."

In 2007 and 2008, I documented two consecutive summer tours for the Seattle band Spanish For 100. 

I stopped shooting live music in Seattle, for all intents and purposes, in 2005.

Chuck, Charlie®, Charles.

Tuna croquette with plum salsa and jalapeño honey mustard. © Ryan Schierling

In food circles I will never run in, there are Chihuly-blown glass jars of Japanese-auction-sold, million-dollar Pacific bluefin tuna scraps, packed in the oil of olives so extra-virgin they’ve been immaculately conceived and harvested by eunuchs. This tuna detritus – the least of the leftovers of the left-overs from the best of the biggest of the big-bucks maguro – will find their way to children of the nouveau riche for tuna salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off by a butler, or governess or au pair. These children will still turn up their noses. Or so I imagine.

I grew up with tinned tuna that on the good days might have been StarKist® spokes-fish Charlie®. On bad days, it might have been down-on-his-luck Chuck – generic label, definitely not dolphin-safe, extra-mercury-packed, probably not even actual tuna canned tuna. My beloved childhood tuna salad sandwiches always tasted predictably perfect – smashed, flaked fish, heavily-laden with mayonnaise and sweet pickle relish, served on Roman Meal wheat bread (crusts on) by mom.

You can buy whatever tuna you want for this recipe. Maybe you went sporting in the Sea of Japan and got big, fresh and lucky. Perhaps some spendy Italian tonno in oil or just cheap chunky albacore in spring water? Maybe some of that new-fangled tuna in packets. Don't care. We do this recipe fast and cheap, so use whatever you want or feel morally, socially or financially inclined to.

What you will get is a surprisingly bright, nuanced plate. The jalapeño honey mustard is an anti-tartar sauce – sweet, spicy and with a tang that when paired with the plum salsa is a left-right combination punch. The tuna never knew what was coming. We've made this dish so many times with just the mustard sauce, and it's still wonderful. Visually, the now in-season plums suggest a pretty tuna crudo preparation, and paired with Texas sweet onion, jalapeño, cilantro and lemon juice, they'll take you from Chuck to Charles in no time.

Ice, de-ice, baby.

(L) Arapahoe Basin, Colorado. (R) Denver International Airport. © Ryan Schierling

We haven’t been on a proper vacation in eight years, which is longer than this Foie Gras Hot Dog thing has existed and longer than we’ve been in Austin. The last time we hopped on a plane for some adventuring was 2006 when we took a week away in Hawaii – sunning, snorkeling, and sampling plate lunch and proper poke every chance we got. It’s been far too long since we travelled for play, with a side of relaxing, dining and drinking.

Back in November, we thought it might be nice to see some snow and planned ahead for a Colorado trip. I’ve got history there, and though it’s been nearly 20 years since I’ve set foot on and strapped in at Arapahoe Basin, mountain topography does not change. They’ve added a lift on the back bowl that I used to hike, there are a few new beers on tap and lift ticket prices are about $70 (!!!) more than what I remember, but The Legend is, and will always be, my absolute favorite place to ride. 

I spent the better part of the early 1990s faithfully snowboarding A-Basin two or three times a week. What is now called the “Early Riser Lot” was church at 7 a.m. Bad Religion at volume, changing into snow gear and finishing off a travel mug of black coffee before nodding at ski patrol and catching first chair behind them. From mid-mountain, it was just a hard left down to the Lenawee lift and 13,000 feet was minutes away. From there, it was a cruise to the right and a drop off Cornice Run, or left and as far as you could get traversing the East Wall before turning in and churning through powder in Land of the Giants. I rode a Burton Craig Kelly Extreme and that board, on that prominence, made a mountain man of me. Twenty years is too long to have been away.

New Mexico-style green chile stew.

Green chile stew with pork and potatoes. © Ryan Schierling

I am not from New Mexico, and I am not from Texas. I am originally from Kansas, but I understand the reverence held for their respective chile and chili. 

There is no question as to the permanence of Texas red chili being the Lone Star State's one and only. It was declared to be the state dish of Texas in 1977 by House Concurrent Resolution No. 18, with President Lyndon Johnson brazenly declaring that "chili concocted outside of Texas is a weak, apologetic imitation of the real thing."

I wouldn't go so far as to call chili in New Mexico weak or apologetic, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it chili, either. It's chile stew.

Technically, there is no state dish of New Mexico. They do have an official state question which is directly related, and that is "Red or green?" If you can't decide, you just say "Christmas," and whatever plate you've ordered will get smothered in a little bit of both red and green chile sauce. 

The green version of this stew is my favorite, and it's fairly easy to make. My recipe is not "authentic," as I use poblano and jalapeño peppers in addition to the Hatch green chiles, but like I said, I'm not from New Mexico. This is my Old Mexico recipe for New Mexico green chile stew – by way of Washington state, Virginia, Colorado and Kansas – which is a little closer to a caldillo. 

It is as far away from the Midwestern red chili of my youth as can be, which was a thickly-tomato sauce-based, ground beef and kidney bean-filled bowl, heavily-spiced with ground chili powder and cumin. This green chile stew is thinner, tangier and focuses the flavors of the roasted chiles themselves. The tender pork adds a hearty sweetness and complimentary texture to the stew. It is a fantastic winter meal.

FGHD editor's aside/note/distraction: I spent my formative years in Kansas, and just so you know, there's no official state dish of Kansas either, but The Kansas Historical Society has a recipe for Mr. White's Famous Tossed Lettuce Salad, which legendary, storied newspaperman William Allen White – who was born and died in my hometown of Emporia – apparently prepared at the table "in a rite he stood up to perform." Now, no matter how much pomp and circumstance you're bringing, the tossing of a head of lettuce, a bowl of minced onion, vinegar, oil, salt and curry powder seems a bit unlikely for a state dish contender. State Dish of Kansas – Tossed Salad? No. I will defer to Joe from Oklahoma, and his pork ribs and fries on the Kansas state line side of Kansas City. Now, that's a state dish.

Smoked salmon chowder with salmon bacon.

Smoked salmon chowder with salmon bacon. © Ryan Schierling

There are so many brilliant smoked meats in Texas it's a shame that no one really pays much attention to the fishes.


Granted, this is bovine country and the nearest salmon, be it Pacific or (heaven forbid) Atlantic, is an ocean away. Wherever you hail from, there’s always something sacred about cooking with smoke. Brisket is the gold standard by which barbecue joints are judged in the Great Republic, and if you've got a line out the door for beef, then pork ribs and chicken are pretty much a gimme.


Geographically, barbecue in this part of the country has never had a reason to be about the fish. Southern barbecue is beef and pig and yard bird. About the only ocean-sourced thing you’re likely to see on the grates of a Texas smoker are gulf oysters.
 

Salmon has a little less real estate to work with than most things that end up in the smoke. If someone could engineer and farm a salmon the size of a cow, you'd have cheap sides of salmon cluttering up everyone's offset, and apple trees would be shaking in their boots, err... at their roots. But salmon are not the size of cows and they're a little harder to catch than cows, pigs and chickens, so their most delicious parts are at a premium. 

Huevos ahogados mas fácil? Nope.

Huevos ahogados with crispy masa nest. © Ryan Schierling

Historically, on New Year's Day, we make a big deal out of eggs. Anyone can scramble, fry and boil. If you're adventurous, you can sous vide or smoke, or just straight up Rocky Balboa it, and swallow them raw. 

For the last decade, we've prepared Scotch eggs on the first of January, which are hard-boiled eggs, peeled and wrapped in heavily-spiced breakfast sausage, breaded, and deep-fried. They are ridiculously satisfying, delicious dragged through tangy HP sauce, but so intense and heavy we could only justify eating them once a year. So we've been thinking about this since... last New Year's eggs.

Maybe it was time for a change?

For 2015, we adapted a Mexican poached egg dish, huevos ahogados – drowned eggs – with a pair of sauces and a fried masa nest. It was so simple when we concepted it months ago. It ended up absolutely ridiculous when we were trying to figure out the nest. It was silly, and better than it had any right to be once we figured it out, prepared, brought everything together and ate it. 

2014: The Year of Chips, Dips and Dorks v2.0.

(L) Hot meat dip. (R) Hot meat. © Ryan Schierling

2014... whew. You were a challenging year. We slowed down a bit, opting to spend some much needed time with close family and putting a renewed focus on home, but we still managed to get a few things done.

We defended our 2013 East Austin Salsa Shootout win at Tamale House East and were unfortunately defeated. Sigh. You can’t win them all. But we did have a great time and put a few more faces to names that we'd only read on the pages of food blogs and restaurant "About" pages. Matt Taylor of Swift’s Attic took home the hot sauce crown, and hats off to the man, the mettle, the restaurant, the recipe.

“Ryan and Julie of Foie Gras Hot Dog, in a giant fuck you to convention, returned to defend their title with a new recipe. Eschewing last year’s formula took some serious guts and we salute them.”  - RL Reeves, Jr. 

We were truly surprised and delighted when the Austin Chronicle named us one of the top ten local food blogs of the year. I can’t remember the last time we blushed this much... so many gracious things said, and they called us young!

“This charming, iconoclastic blog presents the foodways and recipes of Julie and Ryan, a young Austin pair with a laudable amount of style and confidence, not to mention excellent taste.” - Kate Thornberry

Beer, billiards and bisque.

Tomato mushroom bisque with bread and butter. © Ryan Schierling

I moved from Emporia, Kansas to Fort Collins, Colorado in 1991. I was 19, and the little college town was blowing up with micro-breweries crafting incredible beer. If my parents are reading this, I certainly did not partake of alcoholic beverages until the day I turned 21. If you're anyone but my parents reading this, spending the previous year on a University of Kansas dormitory floor of brilliant art majors made creating fake IDs far too simple. Mine was used regularly until the day it was taken away by an overzealous doorman at a Fort Collins bar that shall not be named, and has since shuttered. No hard feelings.

New Belgium Brewing Company had just opened up shop with a dubbel named Abbey and a great little amber called Fat Tire. They only came in 22-ounce bomber bottles, and were unlike anything I'd ever had. O'Dell's Easy Street Wheat and 90 Shilling (still one of my favorite beers of all time) were of the same era, Left Hand Brewing started up in Longmont with their Sawtooth Ale, and soon it seemed you couldn't walk around the block without a new brewpub or home-brew store opening up.

CooperSmith's Pub & Brewing was in Old Town Fort Collins, and a short walk from my first apartment. A few years later, it was a short drive down College Avenue from my second apartment. 

Give thanks for the unlikeliest of seven-layer dips.

Seven layers of Thanksgiving classics, served on toast points. © Ryan Schierling

It's the last day of November and your Thanksgiving leftovers, if there are any left over, are languishing. 

Every turkey-day legacy recipe has already been searched for and modified. There's nothing new or interesting under the waning Fall sun, and you're about to dig the remains out of the fridge and drop them into a pet dish. It's the feast he/she/it has been waiting for all along – so many hours of preparation and work, the vestiges dumped into your dog's bowl on the floor and devoured in large, breathless, indiscriminate gulps in a matter of seconds. 

Though sometimes disturbed, I am not weak and/or unimaginative in the kitchen (see this, this or this.) Chez nous, these pets, our cats, are absolutely not getting my leftovers, my legacy. Cranberries and dressing probably aren't even good for them.

If you're lucky, you should have at least a wee bit of six of these seven layers already. There is dressing, mashed potatoes, turkey gravy, sweet potatoes in some form or fashion (this year we had sweet potato gratin in poblano cream), green bean casserole and cranberry sauce. The odd man out is turkey liver pate, which both utilizes some of the giblets and provides the backbone for this spread. 

King Ranch Salmon.

King Ranch Smoked Salmon Casserole. © Ryan Schierling

I've been threatening to do this casserole recipe for a while now, and I'm kind of surprised there's nothing like it out there on the whole wide world of internets. Searches for King Ranch Salmon turned up lots of hits for "King Salmon," "Used F-150 King Ranch edition in Salmon, Idaho," and "Carole King's ranch on the Salmon River for sale." The internet – insultingly enough – even asked me "Did you mean King Ranch Chicken?"

King Ranch Chicken is the only casserole that matters in Texas and there are rules. There may be as many subtle individual adaptations and family variations as there are Junior League cookbooks, but most will concur this is a dish best kept simple – with shredded chicken, cans of cream of this-or-that soups and Ro*Tel®, corn tortillas and a ton of cheese. 

This, however, is not King Ranch Chicken.

There is no condensed soup, no Cheese Whiz, no crushed-up nacho-flavored tortilla chips or tins of tomato and green chile. There is no chicken. This is the king of Texas casseroles meets the king of all cold-water fish. It is SXNW. It is smoky, creamy, rich, and as satisfying as comfort food gets. Great Republic purists will inevitably call this just another sensationalist bastardization of a classic Texas dish, but they can go put a sockeye in it. 

This is my King Ranch Salmon.