A farewell can be be bittersweet. Our friends were relocating to New Zealand for a couple years so we decided to send them out in style by throwing a big food party in the backyard.

Pictured is the mise en place for one of my favorite dishes of all time: Red Beans and Rice. Since I was in heavy recovery mode after a Saturday night that featured some very poor decision making as to alcohol consumption, I had to break out the pressure cooker instead of slowly simmering the beans all day long.

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Smoked a giant, bone in ham recently and after feeding everybody we could get stopped for about a week we were still left with a giant ham hock bone with a couple pounds of meat clinging to it.

Time to get out the bean kettle.

While there are few things we enjoy more than slow, difficult recipes that challenge relentlessly and only offer a meal after a solid day of cooking and prep, sometimes simplicity is the order of the day in the scrumptious kitchen.

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Looking back across the vast archive on this site we realized we covered the topic of popcorn quite ably with our "A Guide To Making The Best Popcorn You Will Ever Put In Your Mouth" article wherein we reminisced about growing up in Appalachia and learning the art of growing popcorn as a crop and eating popcorn as an art.

We stand by the piece.

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Sunday being what it is we generally fire up the range, the smoker and the stockpot to get some good work done as we point towards a busy work week.

Yesterday we smoked

a] 10lbs of pig feet for homemade pork stock for a variety of purposes.

b] 5lbs of Cajun chicken wings for eating on for a couple days.

c] A 2lb pork chop from Longhorn Meats for supper last night.

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With night time temperatures dipping down into the 50's it's looking like the brutal Austin winter is now upon us. Which means it's time to make a kettle of chili.

We actually make it year round as it is one of our favorite foods of all time.

With an extensive repertoire of chilis in our arsenal we often have to take the sofa for a spin while we meditate on which chili needs to be implemented on which particular day.

Today, as we put pad to pen, we have a big kettle of pinto beans simmering on the stove top and they are aromatizing the house to good effect. Yesterday at Fiesta Mart we gathered up some chile seca [arbol and guajillo] a pork shoulder, some giant green onions, a big can of ripe plum tomatoes and some pig feet for stock. Yesterday we smoked our shoulder and pig feet and let the stock simmer all night long. Woke up starving as the house was perfumed with the smell of smoky pig meat.

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Leafing through a neglected inbox after 3 days of intense barbecue research in Lubbock Texas we stumbled upon the following press release from Chili Appreciation Society International (CASI).

This year's winner, Larry Walton, who defeated 305 of the USA's top chili cooks has revealed his championship recipe as well as his 5 signature tips for would be chili cook off entrants.

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We have a life long love of gators.

Perhaps this was brought on by old actioners like Alligator [screenplay by John Sayles!], the incredible 80s film wherein a beastly, 36 foot long gator attacks a stretch limo and occasionally erupts out of the Chicago sewer system to devour unwary residents of the Windy City.

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When that first cold spell recently blew into Austin for a few hours we hit the kitchen like a freight train so we could utilize our oven that had lain dormant for lo these many months.

We wrestled our giant Dutch oven out from the cabinet and went into a flurry of motion so we could get our ragu started before another heatwave settled in that would render our efforts naught.

We have a good history of Italian cooking though it does not stem from genetics. Back when we lived in Alabama we had full access to the kitchen of Agata, a Sicilian granny woman who regularly put out feasts that could make a grown man weep with pleasure.

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There's a lot of upstart pork curing outfits in Austin Texas these days and we've tried just about all of them. Results ranged from very good [ Peach Creek ] to pitiful [ the guy is so nice and so widely acclaimed we just can't break the news to him in public ].

So we decided to get in on the action last month, buy a big, fat pork belly and enter the fray with all these young bucks.

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In January of this year we traveled through Madisonville, Tennessee, home of one of the iconic cured meat purveyors in the United States; Alan Benton's Country Hams.

We get by there at least once a year to lay in provisions for our life in Austin, Texas. A life that does not include artisanal, country-style pork meats of this caliber very often.

Alan Benton has been lionized in the media for the last few years as he quietly tends to his craft of salting down raw hog meat, building fires and turning the animals into delicious food for a select group of in-the-know pork hounds.

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