Smoking, butterflies and Chubby’s

Dear Readers,

It’s been only a fairly busy couple of days.  We are not doing much today (or last in Texas), but we are having dinner tonight at another Michelin recommended place, so there may be blog worthy food porn from that yet.

Over the last couple days, the highlight was probably yesterday’s lunch.  We picked up bbq from a place in downtown Spring (the place with the shotgun houses).  But Corkscrew is in a trailer.  You have to set up your pickup time because they sell out so quickly.  

It is the rare barbeque place in the world with a Michelin rating of distinction.   I checked. :)  If you can imagine, there was a line around the trailer to get in — at 1130!!! Michelin says to get there at 11 when they open or go eat elsewhere (it’s not quite that bad, but you get the idea).  We ordered ahead, so we had our pounds of meat. :). Here’s my plate:

Supposedly, the claim to fame is it is cooked over red oak, and it does have some color to it and a strong smokey taste.  as Michelin said, you can taste the smoke long after you eat it.  So, it was a big hit. 

To go back to Wednesday, we spent the day at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS), which was pretty amazing. 

The highlight was their butterfly area; it had its own waterfall and was 3 stories high.  At the beginning they gave you a laminated legal-size sheet with pictures to identify the butterflies — on both sides!!!  I insert just a couple pictures here. 

I talked to the staff person working the area and she told me about the bird over my head, which was a native of Angola, has a terrible sounding call — between a crow and a dog, she said — and it (or they, there’s a pair) like to poop on the staff.  She was keeping an eye on it — “I see where you are” — because she had yet to be pooped on.  Butterfly room working hazard, I guess. 

The other exhibit we paid to see in the building was of King Tut.  He wasn’t there (they put him back in his tomb in Egypt) and we thought the exhibit was both fakey and hokey.   

OTOH, they had their own huge Egyptian room with lots of good real artifacts from there. 

Dinner was at a place near KG’s called Chubby’s.  It had a good rating on Google; it was supposedly a “seafood place with a Latin flair.”  Right.

Don’t get me wrong, the food was good.  But the experience! :).  So, KG orders a margarita.  Their specialty one.  The waiter immediately says “we don’t have that tequila.”  So, he moves on to the second, their “golden.”  Away goes the waiter.  

K’s drink comes.  But no margarita.  After about ten minutes, the waiter comes back and says “turns out we don’t have that tequila, either.”  You know, a Mexican place without tequila…like a desert without sand.  KG orders the classic margarita with mango juice.  

A bunch more minutes.  A guy (not our original waiter) brings our appetizers and asks how things are going and if KG needed a drink and he says “I ordered a margarita.”  The guy (he might have been the chef) makes him repeat his precise order and says “Okay,” and bounces away. 

Nothing.  

Another ten minutes and finally the first guy comes back with his mango margarita, which he says is good. 

He has only taken like one drink and here comes the waiter to say “we have our alcohol order here and we can make whatever one you want.  If you want it, we’ll give you the specialty one (with the most expensive tequila) on the house.”  KG says “sure…”. 

At one point I said “they really don’t want you to have a margarita, do they?” and he agreed they didn’t seem to want him to. 

But here’s their shrimp tacos, which K had. 

Like I said, food was very good. 

Around the bbq delivery, we ate on KG’s golf club’s veranda, we looked around the golf course.  It’s called Gleannloch (someone named the whole place with that irrational misspelling! 😡) and is in the north and slightly west part of Houston.  There are 27 holes and they own A LOT of property.  

Probably the outstanding characteristic having driven around the course is that it has at least one tunnel on each 9.  Never seen a course with some many tunnels.  We were told that in a hard rain they flooded up to the road above.  :) 

The course looked good, very green for Texas at the end of summer, and there was a fair amount of  play for a Thursday afternoon on an 88 degree day (they think that’s nothing here). [K took all the pictures while I drove]

And that’s about it.  We leave tomorrow as early as we can to head east; we stop tomorrow night in a place I didn’t know existed till we drove by it last week — Evergreen, Alabama.  I suspect it’s a misnomer. :)

Till later…

Stu & Johnson and lots of Food Porn

  Hi readers.

Thank you for reading; I see from the stats that a bunch of you have jumped on and read.  Ironically, one is NOT K; she claimed she fell asleep during composition the other night and forgot the next day!!! Likely story.  OC, since she’s lived them all, it’s hard to get fired up for the dad jokes again. 😂

In order:

I guess this episode will start with food porn, as we began yesterday morning with another French place for breakfast (okay, by the time we got there “brunch” 😁. We begin with my ham and cheese crepe, which was really, really good.  Though the service was slow. 

Crepes multiple days on the menu, in Houston! who knew?

After discussion, K bought one of those multisite passes for seniors (or families with small children) which included the zoo.  So, on a day that was a MERE 92 with a real feel of 97, we went outside to the zoo. 

I kept saying “Stu the cockatoo went to the zoo,” a misrembrance of the Big Bang episode where the bookstore staffer gives Sheldon the similarly named book to help him make friends (Sheldon doubts the author has expertise in the area, and also doubts her owning a cockatoo).  Unfortunately, Stu was gone at the Houston Zoo Monday — the cockatoo area was empty. 😢

They did have a neat penguin area, and both sea lions and river otters who were diving and swimming and having a great time.  

OC, the favorite was probably the red panda.   He was very energetic.  We’ll see if I can load the video. 

There could be a lot more pictures, OC.  It was a good zoo, but we both almost melted. 

FYI we found a “good” place for ice cream thereafter (“lunch”) — the local variation on Coldstone.  I had a mix and K had an ice cream sandwich with coffee ice cream in the middle. 🤷

K found dinner “near him” in downtown Spring, which is old-looking, with what looks like the original shotgun-style houses.  The place was a “saloon” (not a term you see often in Pennsylvania) and was supposedly haunted. 

I failed to feed my phone before we ate, so the only picture is of my dessert — that’s their variation on pecan (you can pronounce it either way) pie. 

Yes, it has a funky color: it’s made with buttermilk, NOT Karo syrup!!! That’s what intrigued me.  But it wasn’t a good substitute. 😟

The highlight of the meal was the wait person, Olivia.  At one point K said she was “cute.”  KG and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.  

But she was chatty.  She said she was studying at mortician school and I said that must be deadly.  She laughed.  🙄 I had a couple more.  She knew quite a bit about the business and the building — built in 1900, for a long time it was a brothel (her word), too.  There was a joke about how it was only a brothel on Thursdays now. (Not mine :))

Today we started with a donuts and kalatsches breakfast.  Then we went way to the southside of town to the Space Center Houston.  It was on the multi ticket, too. 

It’s a sprawling place.  But I kept noticing the “Space Center Houston” signs and realized that they’ve “background” the Johnson Space Center name.  I had not heard this, but specualtion on the ride home was rampant.  :)

We got on the tram to the astronaut training facilty and they old guy (and I say this with care :)) next to K starts chatting.  He’s from Mexico City and he’s a ball of fire.  He embarassed her with the fact she spoke no language other than English — he spoke four, he claimed.  It is maybe the first time ever that some stranger talked more than she did. :)

Here’s on pic:

That’s one of the American sections (the living quarters) from the space station. 

As we were getting ready to leave the astronaut training facilty, weather hit the area and we were to take cover in place.  We were standing in the hallway, overlooking the huge “toybox” as it is called.  A lot of staff must have been on lunch.  So, we were bored and not comfortable.  It wasn’t long before we were allowed to get back on the tram — which was open — in the rain and it was leaking, so we were all pretty wet by the time we got back to home base.  Wet in a different way than the zoo. :)

We stopped at an international grocery store on the way back and I repeated multiple times “we are retired on a fixed income…” and was ignored, mainly.  To her credit, she didn’t buy more than we can carry home in the car, just more than we could afford. 😥

Dinner tonight was Italian.  I will share only the picture of KG’s osso bucco because it’s unusual (I had chicken parm; K had carbonara). 

As we finished dessert, I said “we have a funny story to tell you.”  The punch line was that his sister told us to bring something fun from the international grocer.  His response: “I’m still waiting for the knee ( “-ny”) part.”  😂 The kid made a dad joke.  We laughed and laughed. 

And, on that note, I go.

PS. I feel we have gotten to know Houston, staying beyond the north side and today going beyond the south side, with stops between.  The one thing I’ve learned is that congestion is a given.  As is indigestion…as the two go hand-in-hand.  

Night. 

We’re retired, so we drove (there’s food porn)

 Hi, dear readers.

Yes, we’re back travelling and, having heard from some of you we can’t travel without a blog (forgive us, for we have sinned!), here it is.

We are in Texas to see KG’s new environment.  He move to Spring, Texas, a northern suburb of Houston, in mid-July.  K hadn’t seen him since January, so we decided to take the time to drive down, dividing it into three days.  It was 25 hours of driving.  At least. 

First stop was Statesville, NC, where the in-laws moved last October.  They just bought a house there.  It’s nice.  It was “flipped,” so the inside is clean and new with refinished bathrooms and kitchen. 

We hung out on Thursday, with J and I playing golf with one of my college roommates at CC of Salisbury, which was very nice. 

We got to “Houston” early enough yesterday to get to the baseball game.  We bought the tickets weeks ago, before we could know the series with the Mariners would be for first place.  We had great seats (requisite photo) and saw what turned out to be a pretty good game, after the Mariners got off to a 6-0 start. 

The personal highlight was the guy behind me screwing around and spilling his beer all over KG and under my seat, leaving me to spend the night in a nice pond of Bud Light. ):  

But we enjoyed the game. :)

Today was chill and eat today (no one said it officially, but it’s what we did), so there is food porn. The brunch place was Paulette’s in Conroe (halfway btw the kids’ and our lakeside condo) — it claimed to be French.

The stafff were all wearing black and white horizontal stripes — it was clearly a theme — and I said they had all recently gotten out of prison (I was asked, not for the last time, if I had been working on that one :))…

In the end, the food was great.  We all ordered the same thing, though I had different egg preparation — here’s is their “country farm breakfast”

The kid said he could’ve had “regular food,” and he was told we were prepping him for the December trip 😁. I told him he could get an American flag in his dinner.  Again, “have you been thinking of that since we sat down?”  

FYI the small bowl in the center was parmesan mousse (insert large antlered animal joke here), which none of us could identify without asking.  That’s a small pancake with creme brulee on top.  It was delicious.  Hard to top the rest of the week.  

After a long day of watching football, it was decided we needed a steak place for dinner (as the antithesis of the French, I think).  We found one in the Woodlands, the Capitol Grille, which seemed to be straight out of central casting for steak places — dark, woody, with some reds thrown in.  

The waiter, Mel, was quite amusing. 

We ordered two filets and a strip with gorgonzola.  I give you two pics.  No dessert (creme brulee cheesecake from the French place sits in the fridge):

And that, as they say, was that.  

I’m going to keep these short (this took me almost half an hour) and not necessarily daily.  So, eyes open for the link. 

Welcome back!