Back to the real world!
After living a decade in the Aspen/Snowmass area our restaurant, The Wineskin was sold along with the sale of the ski lodge. The sale would have been much more profitable, but the formula to derive the sale price was based on the previous year’s P&L and it didn’t snow the year they assessed until the spring.  So we did not get top dollar, but we still got enough cash to purchase a new car and to live off of in order to stay for our last ski season.  My wife was pregnant so moving forward, I had make responsible choices.  I got a job with R. G. Maxwell’s Restaurant in Dallas. The corporation had restaurants in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. If you ever dined at a Houlihan’s Restaurant, then you know exactly what we were all about at R.G.’s–same menu, food & beverage.  Even the management staff were imported from Houlihan’s.  I quickly worked my way up their ladder.  I started as assistant manager, but worked through the ranks of manager and then escalated on to area director in a matter of two years.  This job title landed me back in Houston.  While I was in Houston another manager and I got restless at work and we started a Willie style herb grow area in the restaurant in a forgotten, no traffic attic. We had grow lights shining on our plants that were growing in used restaurant mayonnaise buckets.  I thought we had all areas of detection covered, wrong.  The home office got wind of our little covert project and destroyed the growing herb.  They fired me for 48 hours and then hired me back but moved me to San Antonio.  I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when they justified my rehiring.

One of my buddies who was an executive in the home office found an old “Black-eyed Pea” restaurant in the Alamo Heights neighborhood in San Antonio.  Steve Davis invited me to partner with him and we scooped it up.  At the closing, just a little sign of the times, Steve, Phil Cobb and myself celebrated with a little pipe o’ hash.  He ran the front of the house and I ran the back of the house.  The idea was to copy the S & D Oyster Co. out of Dallas.  We called it the Broadway Oyster Co. and we served lots of fried seafood along with ultra fresh seafood. Times were tough and we had a very slow start with a small to nonexistent advertising budget.  The “Land Shark” was a big part of the Saturday night live skits at this time.  So I went to a local costume store and bought a large, man sized, foam, very realistic shark costume.   I would get very high and then slip out of my pride and into my shark outfit and arm myself with a sandwich board.  I would stand on the median at Broadway Boulevard and wave at all the cars going by.  I was very popular with kids and even made it on to the six o clock news.  All my advertising schemes did not work and we closed the restaurant.

I headed back to Austin with my tail between my legs, very humbled.  I found an old Hill Country house for sale on RR620 in the Lake Travis area and with a little help from my friends I bought the property.  My old partner from the Wineskin, Gert Rausch had opened several restaurants in Austin. I became a waiter at his restaurant the Courtyard restaurant on South Lamar while we remodeled the newly purchased house and birthed “Hudson’s on the Bend Restaurant”.  There were many folks involved with the creation of Hudson’s and detrimental in it’s long lasting success. I have not named or thanked many folks and for that I apologize. Hudson’s had a 31 year wonderful life with lots of amusing stories. This is where my history stops and the restaurant stories begin.  Hopefully through this blog I will catch up with all of those that I owe big ole “thanks for the memories”!   Enjoy

If you are going to make a mistake, make it delicious.  Our most requested dessert recipe at Hudson’s was a mistake.  Jay Moore was our first Culinary Institute graduate chef (CIA the one in Hyde Park….not in Washington).  Jay and I are both “shoot from the hip” style line cooks and we use our taste buds for measuring while pastry cooks use measuring cups.  Recipes are only guide lines is my thought and you will find that to be true with cooks world wide.
Jay was making pecan pies when the phone rang and he left the sugar filling cooking on the stove just a bubbling away.  Jay was gone for a long time and in his absence the filling had reached softball stage.  Unwilling to start over or throw the over cooked filling out Jay finished the pies and put them in the freezer.  They had runny filling.  The next day he took the pecan pies out of the freezer and sliced the frozen pies into 8 wedges. While still frozen he dipped each wedge in a melted dark Belgian chocolate to hold the filling in when they thawed. The birth of the turtle pie. A chef is like a general, it takes a mishap to reveal his genius.

Turtle Pie

8 servings

Tools
Sauce pan
Parchment paper
2 Mixing bowls
Whisk
Large fork….for dipping
Plastic wrap….film

Ingredients
1 cup light corn syrup
1/2 stick of butter (I prefer grass fed butter)
1 cup light brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
5 egg yolks
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
2 tablespoons of A.P. Flour
1 & 1/4 cup pecan pieces
1 frozen deep dish pie shell

Method
1. Preheat oven to 300degrees
2. Combine corn syrup, butter, both sugars in sauce pan & bring to a rolling boil for 5 minutes. Reduce heat to a simmer & cook for 15 minutes until the color starts to darken
3. In a separate bowl, add egg yolks & vanilla & blend together .
4. Add the hot sugar mixture, a little at a time, to the egg mixture, tempering the egg mixture. Once it reaches 175degrees the eggs are tempered & will not scramble.
5. Whisk in the flour
6. Fill the pie shell with the pecan pieces & then pour in the hot sugar & egg mixture in the pie shell
7. Place the filled pie shell in the oven & cook for 25 minutes.
8. Cool pie & freeze overnight
9. While frozen, cut into 8 even wedges. Jab the top of one wedge with a fork & dip it into the chocolate liquid. Scrape the chocolate off the base of the wedge & release it onto parchment paper…..you can get a rhythm going …. stab, dunk, scrape & release….repeat

Dipping chocolate

Ingredients
1 lb of semi sweet good chocolate (I prefer dark Belgium chocolate)
4 tablespoons of light olive oil

Method
1. Melt chocolate in a double boiler. Whisk in oil (oil tempers/soften the chocolate)
2. Dip the pecan pie wedges into the melted chocolate. It’s OK to warm the chocolate again….if needed