Peppery pinto beans with sausage

I love beans. Soupy beans, refried beans, beans in a dip, or beans in a salad—it doesn’t matter how you serve them, I will eat beans and be happy. Like most Texans, they’ve long been a staple on my family’s table and I make a pot at least once a week. Matter of fact, I love them so much that I once preferred a side dish of pinto beans over some world-famous barbecue.

It happened last year. I was at the annual Foodways Texas symposium and renowned pitmaster Aaron Franklin served us dinner one night. Yes, his brisket was indeed exceptional, but it was his peppery pinto beans that I wanted to brave the line for yet another round. I know this may sound strange but I couldn’t stop eating them! And actually, I wasn’t alone in this opinion as others agreed his beans were superb. For me, it was the beans that were worth the long wait.

Without access to a smoker or an outdoor space, I knew that I couldn’t even begin to replicate Aaron’s barbecue, but I figured his beans were probably more doable. So after dinner, I went up to Aaron and asked him how he made his addictive beans. He shrugged and said it wasn’t anything complicated—he just threw into a pot some pinto beans along with some chopped brisket and a few shakes of pinto bean spice and let it simmer for a long time.



Well, I decided it was probably his smoked meat that took his beans over the top. Yet there was certainly no reason why I couldn’t at least try to make a similar pot, especially since most of his ingredients—save for the brisket—I always have on hand in my kitchen.
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Spicy chocolate pecan cookies

Valentine, Texas is a squint of a town in far West Texas. If you’re heading to Marfa from El Paso, then you’ll drive through it as you head to your destination. Though if you’re not paying attention, you could very well miss it.

While Valentine is indeed small, it is large enough to have a post office. And every year people send their valentine cards to Valentine, Texas to get a special postmark. That post office, however, is the only business around. So, for instance, if you’re hungry then you’ll have to keep on driving. But that’s okay, as Marfa is only a few more miles down the road.

Now Marfa isn’t large either, but it does have a fair number of places to eat. You’ll find Mexican food, American food, Italian food, falafels, grilled cheese sandwiches, a Dairy Queen, and pizza. There’s also a quirky cafeteria, which has delicious proteins, sides, sandwiches, and homemade cookies for dessert.



The last time I was in Marfa, I ate lunch at the cafeteria, which is called Future Shark. It was a fine meal and after a week of stuffing my face with nothing but cheese, tortillas, and chili gravy, it felt good to get some fruits and vegetables (besides chips and salsa) into my system. As good as my meal was, however, I declined grabbing one of the cookies on display because I was too full.
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chile colorado con carne (red chile beef stew)

One recent Sunday after a hearty beef stew dinner, my family sat in my grandma’s living room taking the New York Times dialect test. It was interesting to see how the paper judged our way of speaking, though it was a little surprising to discover that several Native Texans who had never lived outside the state supposedly had accents from Jackson, Mississippi. How did that happen? We decided that the test was perhaps flawed.

What the test did successfully reveal, however, was how many words there could be for one thing. Take my grandma’s beef stew, for instance. It was slowly simmered beef in a broth rich with tomatoes and vegetables. Now, most people I know would agree that this dish was indeed stew. But someone with Eastern European roots might call it goulash, and someone from Latin American might say it was guisado. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone just simply said it was a bowl of soup. Clearly there are many ways to label an object.

So, what do you call a slowly simmered stew made with beef and red chile peppers? In most parts of Texas, you’d automatically assume this was chili, especially if ancho chiles—either in the form of powder or whole chiles—were involved. But in Far West Texas, when you encounter beef stewed with red New Mexican chiles, which are sometimes known as chiles colorados (the word colorado colloquially means red in Spanish), the dish is known as chile colorado con carne. And yes, while Texas chili and chile colorado are related, the two are not exactly same.



So how do they differ? Well, besides the different chile peppers used, Texas chili is traditionally made without tomatoes, though you will find them in chile colorado. Likewise, fillers are verboten in Texas chili yet potatoes are welcome in chile colorado. And while Texas chili is usually all beef, people often cook their chile colorado with pork instead.
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