Behind the Bites

Feast Your Eyes


  • Country Fired Chicken with Pepper Gravy

    What do you do when you get home from a luau featuring a limbo contest and a surf-thrash band? Make a batch of country-fried chicken and a side of pepper gravy is what you do! That’s what I did anyway. I’ve been out and about in Austin lately feeling out…

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  • Cheesy Beef Rotini

    Pasta and cheese go together like yin and yang. Add ground beef and you get shamalama ding dang! I bought a 3-pound package of ground beef on sale that I divided for three meals. The first of which was this scatch-made, hamburger-helper-esk pot of yummy goodness. I made this for…

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  • Eggs over easy

    I can plate up some mean biscuits and gravy and other breakfast favorites, but I had never been any good at making a fried egg over easy. Broken yolks and a glob of egg is how they usually ended up — which in turn would become scrambled eggs. One of…

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  • Nacho Cheesy Rice

    I enjoy making dishes like this for work during the week. It stores well and reheats nicely in the microwave, but most importantly, it really is a tasty dish. I can eat it like a dip with tortilla chips or garnish with chili flavored corn chips for texture. The rice…

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  • Friday Night, Taco Night

    Fresh corn tortilla, steak, cilantro and onion with chipotle ranch sauce. Friday dinner is reserved for tacos. When I first moved to Austin I set aside Friday nights to hit new taco joints in search of the ultimate taco. I didn’t find the ultimate, but I did find the elements…

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  • Chorizo Pork Taco with Chipotle Ranch Sauce

      Fresh made corn tortilla, chorizo, cumin crusted pork, refried beans and red onion — drizzled with a chipotle ranch sauce — a tasty treat indeed! A little snack thrown together with odds and ends left over from weekend experiments. Decided to snap a shot. Scrumptious!The sauce recipe: CHIPOTLE RANCH…

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  • A new adventure has begun

    I’m just getting settled in Austin, Texas! A great opportunity has come my way and for the second time in my life, I decided to pull up stakes and leave the comforts of the Midwest and Northern Indiana. I packed up my place outside Chicago. Spent the holidays with my…

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  • Spaghetti Squash with Special Sauce!

    Squash has been dated as far back as 7,000 B.C. in parts of Mexico andSouth America. According to The Oxford Companion to American Food andDrink, explorers from Europe originally thought squash were melons andwere delighted to find them everywhere they went in the new world. Squash is one of many…

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