Photo by Brooke Viggiano

Note to self: Prickly pears are bright-pink.

​My fiance Dave and I took our first trip to San Antonio over the weekend to celebrate our birthdays (we're a day and a year apart -- luckily, I can take solace in the fact that the old man will always be one year older than me). We left Houston on a rainy Saturday morning for some clear skies in San Antonio and sort of winged our day from there. After checking into our hotel right on the city's famous Riverwalk, we grabbed our sunglasses and headed out for some lunch on the river.

Wanting nothing to do with chains like The Hard Rock, Rainforest Cafe, or Hooters (okay, maybe that last one was just me, but I'm pretty sure my man is partial to Twin Peaks anyway), we settled on Boudros, a Texas-style bistro right on the waterfront.

To start, we ordered two Prickly Pear Margaritas, people-watching while waiting for our drinks to arrive. Before we knew it, two bright-pink margaritas were placed before us (oh yeah, I forgot prickly pears were pink -- my bad, Dave). Welcoming all of the hoots and hollers from the passersby, we sipped on our fluorescent drinks made from tequila, triple sec, fresh lime and prickly cactus puree. The sweet, tangy margs were a perfect way to start the day.

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Double-double, done up "animal style."

​When the first locations of California-based burger chain In-N-Out Burger opened in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, emotions ran high. Perhaps too high. One notable woman wept loudly into her fries as she exclaimed, "Pinch me, it doesn't feel real!"

It felt very real to me as I waited in a line out the door with my extended family to try my first In-N-Out burger on a sunny Saturday afternoon, my rambunctious first-cousin-once-removed (thanks for the ridiculously clumsy nomenclature, genealogists) climbing my limbs like a tree as we waited for the herd of In-N-Out fans to slowly shuffle forward toward the cash registers.

Even though this particular In-N-Out location in Fort Worth's tony West 7th Street development had opened months ago, my cousins told me, the line was out the door every single day. In the parking lot, miniature meltdowns were occurring as frustrated drivers found themselves unable to navigate the filled-up parking lot and snaking drive-thru lines.

Surely, I thought to myself as I surveyed the madness, a fast food burger cannot be worth all of this.

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Head north on Highway 59 to meet this monster burger.

​On the way out to deep East Texas last week for a story, I found myself suddenly starving and in unfamiliar territory: Lufkin.

Unwilling to sacrifice myself upon the fast-food altar when I know that there's great small-town food to be had out here, I turned to the modern-day Swiss army knife, my iPhone, for help. After Googling "best restaurant Lufkin" (why not?), it quickly turned up a short Texas Monthly review for a place called Ray's Drive-In.

"We stopped at this favorite East Texas burger place three times in two weeks," read the mini-review. "No matter how juicy and tasty the burgers are in our memory, amazingly, the reality always surpasses our expectations." It seemed like a no-brainer. My photographer and I pulled off the main highway, found Ray's and pulled up.

Walking inside the dingy drive-in, however, I began to get wary. A table of locals -- all clad in red T-shirts, for some reason -- glared at us, and the women behind the counter barely glanced our way, then set about quickly ignoring us as we waited at the cash register.

Ray's Drive-In was starting to look like a bad idea.

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​Yep, that's the one. If you were driving past it on Highway 259 in Henderson (if, by chance, you found yourself in deep East Texas), you would never know from the road. There are no fancy signs outside proclaiming it to be the oldest Dairy Queen in Texas. It's just a bit of local trivia, and one that's not particularly interesting to the local residents -- even the ones who work there.

"Is this really the oldest Dairy Queen in Texas?" I asked the gray-haired woman behind the counter after I placed my order for a Peanut Buster Parfait. Her nametag read "Norma," and she sighed a little as she answered and corrected me.

"Yep. The oldest continually operating Dairy Queen in Texas," said Norma.

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The meatloaf taco, left, is topped with a sweet Sriracha ketchup.

​This year, Good 2 Go Taco won a Best of Dallas® award from our sister paper, the Dallas Observer, for best menu expansion. Until very recently, the women behind Good 2 Go -- Jeana Johnson and Colleen O'Hare -- were selling their tacos out of a gas station, albeit the green, eco-friendly kind in which you would find things like meatloaf tacos and a chicken taco named after Steve Martin's character from The Jerk.

An appearance on the Food Network's popular show The Best Thing I Ever Ate cemented the pair's need for a full-service kitchen to keep up with public demand for their creative tacos, and they finally opened their own restaurant earlier this year. It was this restaurant that was my grandmother's sole dining demand when I visited her in Dallas last week.

And although I'm loathe to admit it, this is one Dallas concept I'd love to see in Houston.

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Fried sauerkraut balls: a State Fair food that actually makes sense.

​This year marks the 125th anniversary of the Texas State Fair, held every fall in Dallas at the wonderfully art deco Fair Park. I honestly had no idea until I went to the fair late last week, however. You'd think there'd be some more momentous foodstuffs to mark the occasion.

Alas, the biggest news this year was fried beer. Served with nacho cheese. O Texas, our Texas...

To be fair (no pun intended), fried beer has more or less been the Holy Grail of Texas State Fair food since the fair started giving out Big Tex Choice Awards in 2005. Texans -- especially those in attendance at the yearly State Fair -- love beer and love fried crap, so finding a way to combine the two has been on every competitive food vendor's brain for the past seven years.

The first tough little pellets of "fried beer" showed up at the State Fair last year, where the Dallas Observer's Alice Laussade documented the judges' disgusted reactions to the lager-filled ravioli in "Okay, Who Put Food In My Beer?":

The Dallas Observer's own food critic, Hanna Raskin, takes advantage of the opportunity to try a free fried beer with the same eagerness I had. She bites in and warm beer spews all over Maki's judging table. It's a beautiful fried-beer spit take, complete with bitter-fried-beer face. It reminds me of that fair vomming scene in Stand By Me, only it's fried beer barf-o-rama instead of blueberry pies.

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Courtesy of Midtown Lunch

The Deep, only in New York City (or your nightmares).

​"Deep In the Heart 'Attack' of Texas" is a new sandwich from Cer Te, a restaurant in Manhattan known for its sandwich options and their occasionally clever names: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Godfather. But this latest sandwich was designed by a customer of the restaurant, a man only known as "Jeffrey," and features enough calories to fell a steer.

The Deep, as I will refer to it for short, contains a piece of chicken fried steak covered with cream gravy and macaroni and cheese, all between two pieces of Texas toast. All that's missing is a little Lone Star flag sticking out of the top.

But is this truly representative of the kind of cuisine in Texas? Combining The Deep somehow with Cer Te's BBQ Brisket Sandwich might get us closer to a more traditionally Texan sandwich -- and a few steps closer to killing you in the process.

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Photo by John Suh

Beer-battered zucchini, mussels, basil dressing

​In order to continue riding the wave of culinary creativity, sometimes we have to think outside the box. Sometimes we have to look outside the city. What is going on in the restaurants up the interstate? What ingredients and techniques are the chefs next door using? How do the dishes, drinks, and ambience all factor into a diner's emotional experience?

This past holiday weekend, I found myself in Austin, home to Bryce Gilmore, named one of Food and Wine's best new chefs of 2011. Perhaps best known for his Odd Duck Farm to Trailer food truck featured on a 2010 episode of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, Gilmore's mission is to provide local, organic, sustainable foods as accompaniment to libations in a relaxed setting.

Just days before the new year, Gilmore carried his mission from the trailer to a brick-and-mortar storefront which, as an homage to beer and pork, is aptly named Barley Swine. With newfound freedom that was previously stifled in a trailer kitchen, Gilmore's creative brilliance is now launching into new gastronomic territories.

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​The gas station food trend is sweeping through Texas. Last week, Katharine Shilcutt tried gas station sushi on the corner of Jefferson and Hamilton. This week, we tried gas station chicken in Austin, Texas. The El Pollo Regio we visited is on the Northeast side of town near 290. It consists of a small window next to the Shell gas station. Our friend had sworn it has some of the best chicken in Austin, but we weren't sold. How can chicken sold from the window of a Shell station be good and not poisonous? She is a chef, so we went anyway.

The day we visited, the outside of the building was being remodeled, so there was no sign. Only a partially open window marked the spot. Our friend had warned us that we may have to order in Spanish. Well, we didn't have to order in Spanish, but we did have to order from a disgruntled lady who didn't looked too pleased to be there. All we could mutter was "one-and-a-half chickens" before she started flying around the kitchen throwing things in a bag. That was it. The ordering was done with five simple words.

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​I put the car in reverse and started backing up through the drive-through lane at P. Terry's in Austin. The guy behind me honked his horn. My traveling companions screamed, "Watch out!" But I didn't care.

​"These fries are cold," I told the guy in the drive-though window, handing him back my sack. I don't know whether he gave me new fries or just threw the cold ones back in the hot oil, but when I got my sack back, the fries were piping hot -- and very tasty. He apologized for the inconvenience.

P. Terry's hamburger stand in Austin came highly recommended. A friend described it as an "In and Out" knock-off with thin patties of freshly ground meat, good buns, organic tomatoes and great fries. So we drove through the cute little location at Barton Springs and South Lamar. There was a stack of Idaho potato boxes on the ground outside of the window where you order -- proof that fresh potatoes were used.

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