Meet me in the Pale Moonlight on the Blues Cruise

Did you miss me, because I certainly missed you, and I missed a week of posting the blog?  We were vacationing in the Caribbean on the Delbert and Friends Sandy Beaches Cruise created, organized and well run by Delbert and his wife Wendy aboard the Oosterdam Cruise Ship run by the Holland America Cruise Line.  On the ship there were 1300 passengers (picture aging hippies, a sea of bald spots atop thin silver pony tails and tie dye for days) while being entertained almost 24 hours a day by more than 30 bands performing on the 6 stages set up from stem to stern on the ship, with adult beverage bars available throughout our stay, seriously good food and tons of fun!  As you would expect, most of the dining was cafeteria buffet style service, but we had two evenings where there was an upcharge to dress up, look at a menu, order ala carte from impressively upscale menu items.  It was a welcomed break from the buffet scene, but we were not on the ship 🚢 for a culinary experience, it was all about the music.  This is an annual event that has been occurring for years, in fact this year was the 25^th year and their big celebratory anniversary cruise.  Our longtime friends Terri and Michael Burke informed us about the cruise and Sara (my wife) and I were very glad they did and we enjoyed lots of laughs with the best of friends on the cruise.  The bands played every day from noon until 2AM.  Most of music 🎼 was R&B with a little bluegrass and pop, even a little standup comedy, courtesy of Jaston Williams aka Greater Tuna.  The music was really great but an added element that was the most pleasing part of all of the performances was watching all of the artists interact with each other on stage.  You have a captive population of performers while on the ship and they each had contracted to do 3 performances and that left them with a lot of idle time and during each and every show, Kevin Russell from Shiny Ribs or Marcia Ball or Bill Kirchen or Carolyn Wonderland or any combination of artists would jump up on the stage and play along, watching them play with and off of each other was so entertaining.  Their joy on that stage was tangible and infectious!  A show I enjoyed the most had 6 keyboards and a Hammond B3 organ in a semi-circle on the stage all headed up by Marcia Ball serving as home room mom of the group of artists.  She would look at an artist and say “you got one?” and that artist would begin playing while the others carefully watched his/her keyboard and quickly learning the runs and it wasn’t long until they all joined in and then she would tag another player and say “you got one?” and again everyone on stage quickly learned a new run.  What talent.  It was a whole lot of spontaneous boogie – woogie happening on that stage.  For the final performance of the Pianorama event, every keyboard player on the ship came out on stage and there were 3 players pounding on each keyboard at the same time. Quite a sight with great sound and a whole lot of love and respect for one another.  The talent was predominantly based out of Austin and Nashville and all of the stages were small, so it created a close and personal audience connection.  A unique experience of close up sight lines mixed with a Caribbean atmosphere, you completely forgot you were enjoying music in paradise until you looked away from the stage and to your right or your left and saw the sparkle of the beautiful blue waters.  There were so many great performances it is hard to say which was the best, different sounds for different people.  My favorite band and the one I most anticipated seeing was Raul Malo & the Mavericks.  Raul Malo is from Cuba and specializes in a diverse blend of rockabilly, honky tonk, Tejano, Cuban and country.  Many of their songs had a Cuban flavor, but they ended one performance with a Beatles classic “Back in the USSR”. Most of the bands sang songs that had a tropical feel, after all we were in the Caribbean.  The list of artists was long and impressive, go to the internet for the complete list, Google Sandy Beaches or Delbert & Friends Cruise.

Mid-week of the cruise, the ship docked in San Juan and we brought back packs filled with school supplies to donate to the school children and/or sent money all to give a little relief after the devastation to the region from last year’s hurricanes.  Delbert and Wendy and crew organized a fundraising concert that we attended while we were in the city and we were treated to a musical history lesson of Puerto Rico, mountain music and a flavor of old San Juan.

Years ago, I was recruited by a Greek boat line to do a cooking demonstration as part of the entertainment.  The ship was doing the Mayan Riviera tour which stopped at Cozumel, Belize and Roatan.  I was standing in line to board the ship when a friendly fellow cruiser said “what are you doing here?”.  Apparently, I didn’t fit the profile of the average cruiser.  He then pointed to a very overweight lady standing in line to board and said “that’s my sister, you gain 5 pounds on every cruise, she has been on 50 cruises”, enough said.  Once I was settled in, I was given a tour of the galley and they proudly showed off all of their modern ways to cook, remember this was 25 years ago.  The ship had a walk-in microwave complete with rack and rolls made out of microwave safe plastic and of course miles of the same plastic sheet pans.  Thank goodness it was not in use when I was inside of there.  They then showed me their coffee unit which was fueled by a block of frozen coffee concentrate.  I did my best to act impressed but it was actually stunning and one of those things you would rather not know, what you have seen can’t be unseen.  Their kitchen staff was doing all the mise en place preparation for my upcoming cooking demonstration so after giving them my list of needed preparations, I high tailed it out of the galley before they turned on the microwave.  Then it came time to do my demonstration and we were in stormy seas and the ship was rocking and rolling, but the show must go on!  The kitchen staff delivered my ingredients for the demonstration, all in individual bowls just as I had requested and I was all set to begin or so I thought.  As I began my show the ship made a big heaving roll and all of my ingredients slid to one side of the tray getting completely mixed up.  With the “show must go on” attitude I carried on with a widening leg stance for balance. To this day I don’t know if I added paprika or cayenne, they both look the same in unmarked bowls.  The cruisers never tasted the final dish so they never knew.  They were entertained and that is all that counts.

I think that one of my favorite seafood dishes is appropriate at the conclusion of a Caribbean story. What say ye mateys?  I have had this or a version of this dish on every restaurant I have been involved with.  It was called Parrot Head Pasta because it was Jimmy Buffet’s favorite dish at our Aspen restaurant.  There is special flavor when you combine seafood with pasta.  This recipe is made with lobster, shrimp, crab and scallops.  But you can use any combination of fresh seafood.  I think anything fresh from the sea is great in flavor.  You could add or substitute fish, octopus or different crabmeat. As long as it’s fresh it will add to the end result.

Parrot Head Pasta

Serves 6

Ingredients

2 lobster tails grilled to medium rare and chopped to ½”

24 large shrimp (free of head and shell)

12 large scallops

½ pound crabmeat

½ pound spinach fettuccine, dried and cooked al dente and drained

½ pound egg fettuccine, dried and cooked al dente and drained 

2 cups white wine

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

3 tablespoon minced garlic

¼ cup lemon juice and zest

4 tablespoons minced shallots

2 tablespoons minced herbs (basil, oregano, thyme)

2 tablespoons sea salt

2 tablespoons of sun-dried tomatoes, cut into strips

2 cups mushrooms, quartered

1 cup grated parmesan

1 cup tomatoes, cut into strips

1 bunch chopped scallions

2 cups baby spinach

1 stick butter

Method

Add wine to a hot 14” hot skillet and cook over high heat until ½ has evaporated.

Add olive oil, lemon juice and lemon zest, shallots, sun dried tomatoes, fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, Parmesan cheese and seafood. 

Bring to a simmer.

Add pasta and return to a simmer.

Toss in herbs, spinach and butter and again return to a simmer while stirring. 

Serve. 

How far will they drive to eat your food?

Steve went from selling wristras of chilies 🌶 on the side of the road to being a multi-millionaire in a very short amount of time.  Steve Smith was a true-blue entrepreneur and created a long-distance service in the model of the pyramid scheme, it was as close to a pyramid scheme as the U.S.Courts would allow.  He made a healthy living from the sales and then made millions of dollars when he sold his venture to a Canadian telephone company. At the time of the sale, he lived in Vineyard Bay off of Ranch Road 620and being so very close to our restaurant, we were his everyday diner.  Clearly, he spent money like it was water as our prices were categorized as $$$$. 

He and his entourage were watching CNN and they caught a romantic story being aired about the west Texas town of Lajitas.  Steve grew up in El Paso and had a love of the desert landscape, throw in the mountains of Big Bend and Steve was hooked.  The town was for sale and Steve was going to buy it, the rest is history.

Steve and his entourage had majestic plans for the sleepy desert 🌵 town.  Steve’s vision was to create a remote hideaway for millionaires from all over the world with all the luxury that money can buy and this included a long runway for jets with a bunk house for overnight pilots, a championship golf course, a driving range, employee housing, an equestrian center, a superior hotel, a gun/shooting range, a residential area with all underground facilities, great food and drink, a high-end RV park, the list goes on. 

Before WWII the area was alive with miners extracting mercury, which was used for bomb switches, then the transistor was invented and mercury value plummeted.  Mercury was like gold; the miners would follow the veins of ore deep into the earth and then put the ore into giant furnaces to melt the mercury out of the ore. There was a lot of easy money in mining the mercury and it was thought to be harmless, it was the 1960’s before it was proven that prolonged exposure to the mercury vapors caused mercury poisoning which come to find out affects the whole central nervous system and is deadly. Greedy locals made small crude smelters for the mercury extraction in their home ovens and lived and died and went a little crazy while living amidst these vapors.  The origin of the phrase “Mad as a Hatter” is believed to have come to be because hatters really did go mad as the chemicals used in hat making included mercurous nitrate, used in curing felt and furthermore quite often hat bands were sown around mercury and then sewn into the hats because it made the hats very pliable.  Anyhow, mining for mercury is a recipe for population control and you can now visit the ghost towns that were once alive with families, school houses, general stores, etc.  The original settlers may be long gone but,in their wake, there is still loads of that Wild West personality still alive in Lajitas and that feeling has appeal to many.

This small town, Lajitas, is along the Rio Grande River between Big Bend National Park and Big Bend State Park, just down the road from the ghost town of Terlingua, home of the famous Terlingua Chili Cook Off.  When Steve pulled into town,the only thing up and running in Lajitas was an old beat up hotel.  Everything on his list of attractions for the“rich and famous” needed to be built so he proceeded to spend money like he had just won the lottery, you know “build it and they will come”.  He had surrounded himself with people who were “YES” men who would do his bidding and it became obvious to me that many of the people that Steve surrounded himself with were after his money 💰, but Steve didn’t seem to care as long as they did his bidding.   The local population got a new reliable water system because to have a world class golf course you have to have world class grass and that takes a whole lot of water.  He installed a new power infrastructure, i.e. smart building technologies and modern power plant control systems, no expense was spared. 

My involvement was this, Steve owned everything and paid for everything but I was to be paid an hourly rate for my service and I was presented to the press and the public as an owner/investor who was committed financially and in for the long haul in order to add name recognition and some credibility and validation to the restaurant project portion of the property. 

I worked with a new up and coming Austin architect, Ryan Street who was young and eager and his restaurant design caught the eye of Architectural Digest and they did an article on the entire project. 

I had never worked with an open budget but I drank the “kool aid” and got on board with the “money is no object” mindset and built the best kitchen, dining room, and bar that money could buy.  The kitchen had a chef’s table, a dry aging cooler for the beef, and on and on with the frills. 

I created the menu similar to my restaurant in Austin, Hudson’s on the Bend, cook what’s in your backyard, which happened to be Old Mexico and a lot of cowboys, you get the idea.  For the menu development, I began to do research on what lives in the desert and we were 20 feet from the Rio Grande so there was lots of life, deer and antelope among a few of my finds.  I made my share of mistakes, javelinas being one.  When I first saw a family of javelinas, l thought they were a form of desert pig and being a pork lover, I thought what a tasty treat if cooked properly—WRONG they come from the rodent family.  That’s where I draw the line, no cooking rats,“you can put lipstick on a javelina, but it’s still a javelina”.  Bird watchers made Lajitas home base as hundreds of birds would migrate overhead; quail, duck and geese were among wildfowl that were in the area or at least stayed overnight.  Big Horn Mountain Sheep are native to the area and very impressive to watch as they scurry straight up the mountains, but sadly they are reputed to be tough and dry on the plate so we did not add them to the menu.  Any fish that you catch from the Rio Grande is muddy tasting so the only local seafood available was actually pond food, catfish out of the local pond. There was a salty well up around Fort Stockton and they were experimenting with shrimp farming, but I never followed up to see how that turned out.  Sysco Foods agreed to send us a truck delivery with good old Texas beef and such much to our far away and remote location once a week so we were safe opening a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. 

We opened with a fun little menu full of local Mexican and Cowboy influences and desert game.  On a busy night we would cook about 50meals. 

 I staffed the kitchen with a Hispanic couple that worked for me in Austin at Hudson’s and needed no training, Blas and Adelina Gonzales.  Hudson’s “want to be”waiter, Blake Baumgardner was promised a promotion from busboy to waiter if he agreed to move to Lajitas for a year and train the waitstaff.  Blake agreed and my core staff was in place.  John Siebels, the manager and cork dork from Hudson’s went to Lajitas for a brief stint to help with waiter training and to put together our wine list.  He did not have to be enticed to help, it was a little work vacation all rolled into one for him, he loved that part of the world.

We were only open a few months when I got a call saying the restaurant was on fire 🔥and it was a total loss.  Everyone wanted the restaurant rebuilt so it was quickly rebuilt.  The fire in Lajitas was started by a cotton mop stored next to the hot water heater. Meanwhile, back in Austin, we had a plumbing challenge in the women’s bathroom at Hudson’s and Sara Courington was on her way to retrieve the kitchen mop to clean up the bathroom and when she found the mop, it was propped up against the water heater smoldering.  Sara found the smoking mop on the very same day as the fire in Lajitas, coincidence, I think not.  It’s like the old restaurant joke“sorry to hear about the fire at your restaurant”, reply “Shhhh that’s tomorrow night”.

One of the reasons Lajitas became popular is the rock ledge in that stretch of the Rio Grande that made crossing in that spot of the river shallow and easy, appealing to smugglers of all types. This was before the world of borders and international travel changed after 9/11 occurred.  Marlboro cigarettes made several commercials there because as we all know, there is something undeniably romantic about puffing cowboys driving cattle across a river. Makes me want to light up.

There is a small town across the river called Paso Lajitas which is where the majority of our laborers came from with a stress-free commute wading across the river to and fro every morning and evening.  You could take a rowboat across the Rio Grande or rent a horse to ride across the river for authentic Mexican experience.

I did my part to be a gringo. Eat your heart out Robert Earl Keen.  The restaurant had a lookout tower and I flew the iconic Texas Independence flag that was an old timey cannon with the peril printed below “Come and Take It”.  One of my favorite Rio Grande memories is looking out at the river and there were two pickup trucks nose to nose in the middle of the Rio Grande with jumper cables going from one truck to the other,problem solving where ever it may be. 

Steve finally stopped throwing money at the project and sold the town at a fraction of what he spent and with that the money flow stopped and everyone went home. That’s the real story. The End.

Below you will find a chicken fried antelope recipe.  The red eye gravy is your standard cream gravy with coffee grounds added. I imagine the trail cook found nothing to flavor his gravy so he threw in a handful of coffee grounds or more than likely it was a culinary accident,the coffee grounds fell into the gravy. Cookie tasted it and approved.  You can use this for ALL chicken fried recipes, i.e. beef, venison, pork, chicken and of course all kinds of wild game.  Use a culinary hammer to tenderize and flatten. Remember the quality of the meat determines the quality of the end result. This recipe is for 4.

Ingredients

4 each 6-ounce filets of backstrap of antelope

2 tablespoons of your favorite rub

2 cups AP flour (seasoned liberally with S & P)

1 cup egg wash (1 egg whisked with 1 cup milk)

I quart vegetable oil (for frying)

 Method

Season the backstrap with your favorite rub.

Place each 6ounce filet under food film  pound/flatten until they are ¼ “thin.

Breading procedure, dust each filet in the seasoned flour. 

Dip the filets in the egg wash.

Dip the wet filets back into the flour.

Heat the vegetable oil to 325 degrees.

Place the filets in the hot oil. 

Make sure the oil maintains heat. 

The breading will absorb the oil and not be crisp if the oil cools below 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Note: if you don’t have an oil thermometer heat the oil till it shimmers like a Texas blacktop road in summer.  Cook only 2 filets at a time to insure the temperature does not drop and become greasy.

RED EYE GRAVY

2 tablespoon light blond roux (equal parts butter & flour)

1 cup chicken stock (good quality)

1 tablespoon Worcestershire

1 tablespoon coffee grounds

2 cup half & half

Several dashes of hot sauce

Sea salt & pepper to taste

Method

In a sauce pan simmer the chicken stock to 2 tablespoons.

Add half & half, Worcestershire, coffee grounds & hot sauce.

Bring all to a simmer.

Thicken with roux, adding one tablespoon at a time.  Keep the gravy simmering as you whisk in the roux.  Keep warm until you serve it.

Remember to spill the gravy on mashers.ENJOY

 

Backyard at Bee Cave 

Flashback to 1991, I was newly sober and I met Tim O’Conner who was also on his own sober journey and looking to make a new life.  At the time that I met Tim, he was searching for some property to purchase with which to create a new live music venue.  Whether you know it or not, if you’ve seen live music in Austin over the past 20 to 30 years, you’ve likely given money to Tim O’Connor.  In the Seventies, he reigned over Castle Creek, in the Eighties, he owned and operated the Austin Opera House, while co-founding Star Tickets and staging hundreds of large-scale festivals and benefits, from No Nukes concerts to Farm Aid, and much later in his career he owned La Zona Rosa and the Austin Music Hall. 

On the corner of Highway 71 and Ranch Road 620 there was a dive of a restaurant, the Branding Iron, that I drove past at least twice a day for all of my many years in the Lake Travis area.  Bud (the owner) and his boys had been serving really bad food for years, if it wasn’t frozen or out of a can it didn’t appear on the menu at the Branding Iron.  They were single handedly giving the Texas staple Chicken Fried Steak a bad name, and that is criminal and very hard to do. I had eaten there only once never to repeat that mistake, but I did return to the Branding Iron once more for Rusty Weir’s birthday party.  Rusty (now passed on) was the original Lake Snake and performed in all of the dives around Lake Travis to fund his libation habit and he was a local celebrity among his fellow snakes and had a huge Lake Snake following.  They all showed up for his birthday party and raised a glass or twenty to his health.  The Branding Iron hosted many local musicians, but Rusty always brought in the biggest crowd.

Anyway, one day they decided it was time to sell and a for sale sign popped up, it was not real estate I was interested in but I notified Tim and the story of the Backyard begins, Tim bought the Branding Iron from Bud and began the planning process.

They had been operating the restaurant with an inadequate septic system and had solved the problem by rolling in an old trailer on to the property to act as the men’s bathroom.  When we removed the smelly old trailer, we found that the bathroom pipes had never been hooked up, this was true lake snake ingenuity, all the waste from the toilet was flushed directly on to the ground and stayed under the trailer until it was washed away by a good rainstorm.  It stunk. 

Also, they never threw anything away, they just tossed their junk under the deck of the restaurant, you name it and it was there boats, cars, old restaurant equipment.  We thought we might even find an old Branding Iron waiter as we removed all of the crap from under the deck.  No treasures or bodies were to be found, it all went to the garbage, six rollaway dumpsters worth of it.  The backyard behind the Branding Iron was a natural amphitheater complete with HUGE Live Oak trees. 

I had no intention of becoming involved, but it had good restaurant bones, just in need of a good cleaning and I loved Texas BBQ.  At the end of the day, I did indeed become involved but under risk free terms.  Tim offered me a share of the company for my work gutting the old restaurant and designing and rebuilding the new kitchen and restaurant, as well as managing the operations of the new restaurant. 

Tim gave me the impression that he was down to his last dime and did unsuccessfully attempt to get me to invest in the purchase of the Branding Iron.  It was years later I learned that his family had lots of money, so much money that his mom lent Willie Nelson several million dollars to produce one of his movies.  I’m not sure which movie.  Tim was Willie’s road manager for years. When Tim told Willie that he couldn’t stay sober and work for him, Willie’s reply was a typical Willie comment, “Tim, we knew you needed more medicine than most”.    Bobbi Nelson is Willie’s older sister and his piano player.  When Willie and Bobbi moved to Austin from Nashville, Bobbi needed to find her own money-making gig.  Mike Burke, my lifelong friend who I met and worked with at Lakeway, hired her to do classical runs up and down the key board in the dining room.  She could play anything from country to classical.  I was the maître d in the restaurant and Bobbi and I became friends. 

The dining room had a wraparound deck and the windows were tinted glass that the diners could not see out of when it was dark. The customers never went out to the deck.   John Shipley, the wine steward in the restaurant and I took turns smoking joints on the deck.  It felt odd looking in on the busy dining room while smoking and it took many visits to the deck before I felt confident that I couldn’t be seen.  After returning to the hustle and bustle of the dining room I would say to John “there is a red head on the porch who asked for you”, indicating to him that it was his turn to take a little smoke break.  Bobbi Nelson over heard me use the term many times and I have often wondered if Bobbi was enchanted with the term and plagiarized and passed it on to her baby brother for a catchy album name, “Red Headed Stranger”.  One day a large man all dressed in black came into the dining room, closed Bobbi’s key board and said “come on Bobbi, let’s go”.  I asked a waiter “who was that?”.  The waiter said “that was Waylon Jennings, Bobbi’s boyfriend”. 

Back to the Backyard, we were up and running.  The restaurant was open for business all year long but the amphitheater closed every winter because it was an outdoor venue.  Every Spring, it became tradition that Willie would be the first act Tim booked, reopening the amphitheater.  I was hobnobbing on the side stage with Willie and his band and Tim saw me and came over to me and asked me if I wanted to officially meet Willie and go on the famous “Willie” bus.  I said “of course”, who wouldn’t want to meet Willie in his natural environment and I assumed that Bobbi would be on the bus and I wanted to say “hi” to her.  As we climbed on the bus we were hit by cloud of smoke, enough said.  After meeting Willie, I asked if Bobbi was onboard and told him I knew her from many years ago.  Bobbi appeared from the back of the bus and was happy to see me.  We rehashed all of our old Lakeway memories and before I left, we exchanged phone numbers and I extended an invitation to her to dine at Hudson’s on the Bend and then I went about my business.  The next day I strolled into the Backyard and Tim grabbed me and said “what did you say to Bobbi, she thinks she has a date with you”.  Tim called and explained the misunderstanding.

I opened an upscale BBQ restaurant on a very limited budget.  I soon found out that high quality BBQ, especially brisket, is very hard to prepare and serve in a typical restaurant setting because good BBQ does not hold for the next day.  That is why high-quality BBQ joints all have a “Sold Out and Closed Until Tomorrow” sign in the window.  You don’t want to over prepare because you can’t use it the next day and it results in money in the garbage can at the end of the day, so getting your daily par is super tricky.  At 160 Fahrenheit the connective tissue begins to break down and becomes tender, at 170 Fahrenheit it falls apart and becomes dry.  An Alto Shaam oven does a good job holding brisket at moist serving temperature, some pit masters hold brisket by wrapping it in butcher paper, others use food film.  Ideally you get the best results if you can serve it directly off the pit.  Sausage, ribs and all types of fowl are more forgiving than brisket.  Remember one day you have perfect BBQ brisket, the next day it is shredded into Sloppy Joes.  Each pit is full of differentiations, so you need to become familiar with your pit; all pits have different hot spots and you need to learn where they are.  For me it’s a trial and error learning process.  The best way to really learn the personality of your pit is to tend it all night.  The red smoke ring or pellicle on the outside of the brisket is as far as the smoke penetrates.  After you have smoked the brisket you can move it to your oven, wrap it and use a more controlled environment for holding.  This is heresy in the mind of the purist pit master, but it works well.

In the world of BBQ, “low and slow” is gospel to the pit master.  When cooking brisket, I find that 225 degrees Fahrenheit is the best temperature to reach 160 degrees internal temperature of the brisket. For the best results use Prime grade brisket, Prime is much more forgiving and juicier, don’t go lower than choice grade, just a superior end result.  Remember everyone has their own idea of what perfect BBQ is.

Tim always booked great entertainment at the Backyard and I got front and center up close and personal seating for all shows.  Some of my favorite shows were Little Feat, Willie, Greg Allman, Neville Brothers, Joan Baez, Warren Zevon, Jimmy Cliff, there was a magical night with Leonard Cohen under the purple lights in the Live Oak, and the list goes on and on.  One of my favorite memories is watching the massive Aaron Neville bent over and in a long conversation with my son Andrew.  Andrew and his friend Johnny Mynhier were gainfully employed by me as the burger boys and they operated the outdoor kitchen that fed the concert goers.  They worked hard but had a great exposure to the food industry and the music industry as they had free run of the venue.

Each artist has a list of supplies, called a rider, that they expected us to have available to them in their dressing room.  Most requests were simple such as a bottle of tequila, sometimes it was more involved.  One artist’s manager requested that there were no smooth surfaces in the dressing room in order to avoid any chopping and snorting cocaine.  I only lost my cool once when Warren Zevon had requested a piano on the stage.  We rented a piano and hired a piano tuner.  Warren took one look at the piano and said “that will never do”.  I called my friend at the Four Seasons Hotel and arranged to borrow their Baby Grand Steinway piano, the best.  I got a crew, rented a box truck and fetched the piano. Once the piano was on stage, I had the piano tuner tune it.  I then showed it to Warren and he played a few notes and quickly rejected it.  I was out of patience with the diva and I told him we were out of options and we would have no choice but to cancel the sold-out show.  Warren saw that I was serious and agreed to use it and the show went on.  I was giving Jimmy Cliff the 10-minute stage call and found him jumping rope after drinking 5 vials of ginseng.  His comment was “the older I get the harder it is to get stage ready”, it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

Close and easy access parking is essential for a successful restaurant.  Tim and I did not secure enough parking for both the restaurant and the amphitheater.  Tim, being a good music promoter always booked the music venue on Saturday nights.  As a result, the music crowd filled all of the parking spaces and made the parking for a dinner at the BBQ restaurant nearly impossible.  All restaurant folks know if you can’t fill up the restaurant on Saturday night you are doomed, it’s the money maker.  I lost interest and sold my part in Direct Events and I was gone.

It was best for the Backyard to be solely focused on being a live music venue.  People will walk a ½ mile for live music, not for BBQ. 

Below is my favorite BBQ sauce recipe. Chefs are known to taste a product and replicate it in their kitchen.  It is not considered stealing.  Our Chipotle BBQ sauce is a combination of several tastes.  Going with the thought that if you change three ingredients it’s now your recipe.  You can use different peppers, add apple cider vinegar, the list goes on.  Make it thinner or thicker. Be fearless.

 

Ingredients

4 ounces of applewood smoked bacon, diced

4 ounces chipotle peppers in Adobo sauce (1 can)

½ cup white onion, diced

2 tablespoons minced garlic

¼ cup apple cider vinegar

2 tablespoons course black pepper

½ cup dark brown sugar

3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

1 tablespoon hot sauce (2 if you like it spicier)

1 cup ketchup

1 cup water

1 tablespoon sea salt

 

Method

Cook bacon half way.

Add and sauté onions, garlic, chipotle peppers, Worcestershire, water, hot sauce, black pepper,

vinegar and sugar. 

Sauté on medium low until the onions are translucent.

Add ketchup and simmer 10 minutes.

Add sea salt and adjust.

Every Saturday morning during my Hudson’s life, I would go to the Sunset Valley Farmer’s Market to get fresh local seasonal ingredients for the restaurant.  Through the years I did find a bevy of locals that would and did deliver their product, such as longhorn tenderloin, Katz Coffee, Round Rock Honey, local lettuce and lots of locally grown vegetables.

While at the Market, I befriended a young German named Ackheim, who cooked for an upscale fishing camp along the southern coast of Alaska during fishing season and Ackheim suggested I bring a group and do a week long Alaskan Cooking School.  The original idea when we started this discussion was to bring a group of foodies from Austin and the trip would be focused on the food in Alaska, not the fishing.  The direction one takes may be completely different than first thought. I never believe a good idea should be rigid, let the path tell you what direction you should take so I try to remain flexible and go with the flow, stay open to possibilities and float.  When Frank Lloyd Wright designed public places, he didn’t draw the sidewalks into his design, but later when the dirt paths appeared, they showed him where the sidewalks should be.  I tried to use this inspiration throughout my life and the Alaskan fishing trips became just that, started out as a cooking expedition turned into a fishing trip.  My first trip as a fearless leader to Alaska we used the fishing camp that Ackheim cooked at and it was very remote and had bare bones spartan accommodations.  The only way to get to the fishing camp was by plane which was a dramatic entrance and introduction because we flew in so low that we could see bears, moose, etc.  During our stay, there was a National Geographic study group camped on a nearby glacier observing this glacier because it was melting a foot a day.  They found some prehistoric seeds on the glacier that were not yet sprouted and I have often wondered what those seeds turned out to be.

I soon discovered that all of my foodie companions were as passionately into fishing as they were into cooking.  There are seven kinds of salmon in Alaska but sadly our timing was a bit off and the salmon were not coming out of the ocean except one, the silver salmon.  They were just starting to make their way back from the ocean heading upstream to spawn.  So, it was time to readjust and determine what to do during an Alaskan trip that was offering no fish but lots of wild berries?  We took the “make lemonade out of lemon” approach and made delicious wild berry jam.  I saw my first grizzly bear while picking berries.  I’ll always remember when one member of our group asked the guide, “can I wear my 45 revolver for protection from the bear?” The guide said “you should file the sight bead smooth”.  “Why?”, asked the revolver owner.  The guide said “it won’t hurt as much when the bear sticks it up your ass”.  Enough said, we never saw that revolver again.  We weren’t the only ones missing the fish, and beware the grizzlies are looking for any food when the fishing is slow.

The fishing lodge and kitchen were limited and inadequate and the cabins were also disappointingly spartan to say the least and soon were named “tool sheds”.  Pam and Mike Reese were among the roster of folks on this trip and they kindly gave me a seat on their plane and flew me and my ice chest with my foods and seasonings from Austin to Alaska.  When we landed in our fishing camp, it was quite a culture shock going from their luxurious jet to the rugged accommodations at the fish camp.  After getting a belly full of the sparse accommodations, Pam and Mike flew to another fish camp that reputedly was more along the lines of what we had been expecting.  They liked what they found, approved of this new camp and kindly returned in their plane to our camp of disappointments to get me and take me back with them to Rapids Camp Lodge.

Pam and Mike knew this fish camp would be more appropriate for our group and conducive to cooking and it was indeed but there was one catch, I would have to book the entire lodge.  Back in Austin I got busy promoting, I sold the idea to our guests at our monthly cooking schools and advertised it on our daily menu at the restaurant and we successfully filled the fishing lodge.  The Rapids Camp Lodge provided so much more for our guests than we had experienced on our first trip to Alaska the year before.  They had about a half dozen float planes available to transport hither and yon and they used them to transport us to their saltwater fishing boat that was anchored in nearby Geo Bay.  The flight into Geo Bay was a beautiful flight over smoking volcanoes and once in the boat we were further entertained by the jumping whales and barking sea lions.  We caught huge halibut which is great for ‘hot & crunchy’ and if you find yourself in the middle of almost nowhere without a Central Market, know that you can use Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes to pull off the hot and crunchy breading.  The fish camp was located just outside of the tiny town of King Salmon, population 300, which has an Air Force Base, a bar and a general store.  If you happened upon a female while strolling the street of King Salmon, you could compliment her by saying “nice tooth”, you get the idea.  The pilot and our guide were cleaning the halibut on a remote shore we had beached on while my group and I remained in the boat.  A huge grizzly smelled the halibut and appeared on the beach for a shore lunch of sushi.  The pilot and guide knew when to fold ‘em and left the halibut behind for the bear’s pleasure and jumped back in the boat.  No halibut for us!  On another occasion we had caught sockeye salmon and I was preparing a smoked salmon lunch on the river bank in my trusty stove top smoker.  I had 6-ounce fillets in the smoker when a grizzly appeared 50 feet downstream from us.  It was his lunchtime.  Our guide said don’t run, just enjoy your lunch and the side show while the grizzly catches his own fresh lunch.  And sure enough, the grizzly caught and ate 8 sockeye’s nose to tail while we looked on and then happily, he returned to the forest for his afternoon siesta.  And we thought we had overeaten with our lovely 6-ounce lunch. On another occasion I was fly fishing and turned around to see a large grizzly observing me.  But not to worry because bears are friendly when their bellies are full.

Back at the lodge every night for dinner we (the participants) convened in the lodge kitchen and prepared hors d’oeuvres and a 4-course dinner and shared the stories of our day.  Not surprisingly, our menu always included salmon.

It stayed light all night which was great for our guides because once they were done with us for the day, they would go out to do their own fishing at 10pm.  This Travel with Chef Jeff Alaskan Fishing/Cooking Journey became an annual event and we had many people that returned year after year.  As the years went by, I began to take our executive chef, Robert Rhoades, along on the trip because it added another dimension to what we could do in the kitchen during the trip, took the menu planning to a whole new level and it certainly made my job easier.

On one of these trips, Robert Rhoades and I were fishing for sockeye.  Our guide explained that salmon didn’t feed once they began their journey upstream to spawn.  They swim in large visible groups called waves so when you see a wave, you cast your line with a bare hook in front of them.  The sockeye swim upstream with their mouths open because the fish absorb oxygen from the water and the water is taken through the mouth, flows over the gills, and then exits through the gill openings. Anyway, because of the gaping mouths, you feel your line slipping through their mouth, jerk your line into its mouth and voila it’s time for dinner.  This is called flossing for fish, my kind of fishing.  Talk about abundance!  Robert and I had reached our legal limit in one hour.  The Forest Service was in charge of keeping the eco system healthy and that means keeping the salmon population strong.  They employed “fish counters” whose job it is to sit in a tower and count the salmon going up stream.  When enough fish have gone upstream to spawn, the commercial fisherman is now allowed to net salmon in the bays.

My favorite adventure was to fly to Brooks Falls and watch the bears feed.  The only way to get to the falls was by float plane.  After you graduated from bear school (run by the Forest Service) you would follow the path to a deck to observe and photograph the bears as they were feeding.  The largest grizzlies being the “king of the mountain” due to their size and power would stand on the top of the 5’ falls and catch the salmon as they were jumping up the falls hoping to continue their journey upstream.  The smaller grizzlies would feed in the water below the falls.  I always felt “less than” when taking pictures with my camera at the Falls while surrounded by pros with their tripods and 3’ lenses.  Any time you see videos or photos of bears catching fish at a waterfall, it was documented at Brooks Falls.

Flying over the Alaskan wilderness will always be on the top of my list of favorite experiences.  It is breathtaking and awe inspiring; the virgin land is completely untouched by modern times and technology, beautiful scenery peppered with the sight of bears and moose roaming around just looking for a meal.  It doesn’t get better than that.

Below you’ll find a recipe for a compound lime butter.  Compound butters are full of flavor.  They can be frozen in a Ziploc baggy and defrosted in 8 minutes for a fast meal.  The recipe can be adjusted for grilled chicken or beef.  Just add beef stock or Worcestershire sauce to the recipe. It is prettiest when half dollar size dollop is formed out of a pastry bag with a large star tip.  Cool in the refrigerator before freezing.  This is a simple tasty butter atop grilled salmon.

 

Lime Wine Butter

Ingredients

1 cup wine (wine you would drink—not in college)

1 tablespoon minced shallots

1 tablespoon minced garlic

3 limes-zested first and then juiced

2 sticks organic butter-1” cubes and chilled

1 bunch of minced cilantro

1 teaspoon sea salt

½ teaspoon white pepper

 

Method

Combine wine, shallots and garlic in sauté pan. 

Cook over medium heat and reduce to 2 tablespoons.  Cool.

Add lime zest and juice.

Add butter, cilantro, wine mixture and salt-pepper into a food processor and blend.

Place mixture in a pastry bag with a star tip and squeeze out dollops on a plate.

Chill and then freeze if appropriate.

 

Place unfrozen compound butter on top of grilled fish.

 

When I was in high school one of my after school and summer jobs was working in the Rice Hotel and the hospitality industry with the wacky people and the hustle bustle atmosphere was very appealing.  When it was college time in my life, I chose Oklahoma State University to attend the Hotel and Restaurant School.   

In 1968 the only hotel school in the region was at Oklahoma State University and it was brand new.  Michigan University and Cornell University were the only other schools that I was aware of that offered hotel and restaurant education but they were both too far away. All three of these university’s hotel and restaurant programs were predominantly focused on the hotel side of the industry with a quick run past the restaurant teaching.  If you wanted to focus on the food side of the hospitality industry there was and still is one school, The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, just up the Hudson River from New York City.  It was a trade school not a college. It still is. 

 Chefs began to get a lot of public and media attention and were being elevated to a celebrity status about ten years after I went to school, it was “The magic white coat” effect.  This attention to chefs and the magic they created with food began in the late 1970’s, until then the only upscale American cuisine was Steak & Ale Restaurant.  You could find fancy dining via French, Italian, Mexican etc. but nothing American.  The American food revolution was about to arise.

 A year after we had opened Hudson’s on the Bend, Gert Rausch and I were looking for a way to create more income.  Gert had been doing cooking schools at his restaurant, The Courtyard Restaurant (Lamar and 12^th in Austin) on and off for years as the public interest in food preparation was increasing.

 We started our first cooking school at Hudson’s in 1987.  They were offered on Sunday mornings once a month and the performances were in our kitchen at the restaurant.  We had to do a thorough top to bottom cleaning at closing time on the Saturday night prior to cooking school to be ready for our guests.  I had this reoccurring nightmare that I would arrive on Sunday morning and the kitchen had not been performance level cleaned, luckily that nightmare never happened.  Our cooking school format was strictly observation with the opportunity to ask questions however not hands on for the guests.  Each guest was given a booklet with all of the recipes of the day and a pencil so they could ask questions and take notes.  The hot line in the kitchen physically blocked their view so to say the least it was not an ideal set up.  The pass-through window to the dishwasher area was very close to the hot line and we used to refer to it to our guests as the “Magic Window”, where dishes and pots and pans went in dirty and magically came out clean.   At every class at least one of our students wanted to know where they could get a “Magic Window”. 

 I was always promoting the health benefits of using local honey, saying that the bees were making honey from the same pollen that was making you sneeze and it is a cure for allergies to ingest the local pollen.  One student was taking copious and thorough notes and looked up long enough from his note taking to ask “where do you purchase low cal honey?”.

 At the conclusion of each class the students went out to the dining room in the restaurant and we served them the four-course meal that they had just observed in our demonstration.  We could pack a maximum of twenty guests/students into the kitchen space and our monthly registration was always maxed out which was cozy but stressful to say the least. 

We advertised our cooking classes on our nightly menus and we got a surprising response, filling the class to its maximum potential every month.  People wanted to be part of Hudson’s and watch us cook and be able to replicate our dishes in their own kitchens and it was of great interest to them to observe how our minds worked in relation to food and entertaining. 

 We created a unique and strong cocktail for every class and we greeted them at the door with our beverage of the month, it was always fun to observe a group that generally were sober types become first time day drinkers.

 Culinary class evolved organically at Hudson’s, as all things did.  The cooking schools were beneficial to the restaurant on many levels and they set us apart from all of the other restaurants.  These classes became a great way to develop positive word of mouth advertising, and because the guests were up close and personal with the chefs, they became fiercely loyal guests, and we used this platform to develop and test new menu ideas for our menu at the restaurant.

 For an item to make to the cooking school platform it had to meet several criteria, it had to make it past me and the chef, it had to sound tasty in order to draw in the crowd and it had to have the ability to be cooked in a restaurant kitchen.  Each recipe that was taught at cooking school went through a pretty thorough process before it was ready to exhibit.  We generally did not count and measure when we cooked but in order to share a recipe to the general public, we had to have those measurements.  We would cook the recipe determining and making notes of measurements so that the recipes could be written for the guest recipe booklet.  If needed we would rewrite the recipe.  For each recipe we would measure out each of the ingredients and put on a tray in readiness for show time, Mise en place (French pronunciation mi zen plas) is a French culinary phrase which means “putting in place”.  We would prepare the recipes in front of the guests and then cook the recipes again for the group of 20 for feeding them.  By the time all was said and done we cooked the items three times and worked all of the bugs out, it was chef approved and customer approved and ready for the nightly menu.

 Cooking School also wrote the two cookbooks, “Cooking Fearlessly” and “Fired Up” but that’s another story.

 Cooking school really evolved and met its full potential when I built the house on Hudson Bend Road.  Our maximum limit went from 20 to 40, so there was that.  I built an outdoor kitchen complete with bleachers and a view, the backdrop behind the chefs while cooking was a stunning view of Lake Travis so if we got boring there was the glistening of the lake just beyond our heads.  If it rained, we would set the school up inside the house and the indoor kitchen layout was equally well planned out for a performance situation. My home and cooking school were a mere two-minute drive from Hudson’s on the Bend Restaurant so we would send the guests to the restaurant at the conclusion of the cooking school and there they were seated in a private room to finish their evening with the fabulous 4 course meal we had just demonstrated.   

 Our cooking schools became an interesting way for local companies to entertain their business clients.  What started off as a serious business get together got a big ole serving of loosey goosey and fun once we started our cooking show.  Throughout the years the chefs and I all got really comfortable with performing and we served a little food with a lot of stand-up comedy. 

 I always had a “the show must go on” attitude and over the years I noticed a unique phenomenon, if I did not feel great at the onset (sick, hungover) I always felt better once I began cooking school.  I assumed that it was a divine sign that cooking school was truly my passion and the proper direction for my life.

 One of our most frequent groups was the pharmaceutical companies who would invite doctors to a cooking school and they would present information to the doctors regarding their drug du jour during the dining portion in hopes of future prescriptions prescribed.  I used to screw with the drug companies when they sold mood drugs (benzodiazepines), I would tell the group of captive doctors that I would bite a jalapeño if I was down or blue because it was proven that heat (capsaicin) in hot peppers released the natural feel good drug serotonin.  The drug salesman didn’t like it, but the doctors did. The drug companies quickly found out the only way to get good attendance was to have us entertain their clients with food and BS.

Merrill Lynch, law firms, banks and many others businesses brought their clients regularly to be entertained and well fed and some even learned a few culinary tricks.

It was a gold mine; new clientele was being introduced to Hudson’s and it was not only free advertising it was profitable advertising.  The guests really got a kick out of coming to my house and seeing my world up close and very personal, it really created a special bond between me and my patrons.   

If you were to compare our cooking school performance format to football play by play announcers, I was the color commentator and the other chefs explained and demonstrated the recipes.  This was all happening in the time when interest in food preparation was at its peak, just add bottomless wine glasses to the crowd and you can entertain anyone. 

What no one really knew, I was actually the one learning the very most at the cooking schools because I was surrounded by well-trained chefs that were assembling the recipes and through the years, I learned so much from every chef that entered my life.  The majority of the executive chefs at the restaurant came to Hudson’s via the Culinary Institute of America.

They were all very well trained and taught me a lot.  You can never learn too much about food.  Many thanks to Jay, Becky, Robert and Kelly. 

The recipe below is one of my favorite desserts, Tina Turner Mousse.  It was named after Tina not only because she is deliciously talented, but she has world famous legs of fudge.   

The trick with this dessert is to have the fudge the correct viscosity or thickness.  If the fudge is too thin you will know because the legs of fudge will run down the glass and not be opaque. Whisk in more cocoa until the consistency is somewhere between yogurt and heavy cream.  Add more cream if it’s too thick.  A two-ounce ladle filled with warm liquid fudge can be poured into a 10 oz. wineglass.  Once the liquid fudge is in the wine glass tilt the glass sideways to allow the warm fudge to run down the glass forming the leg.  Return the fudge to the bottom of the glass.  Rotate the glass and repeat until you have three or four legs, it depends on the size of the bowl in your glass.  This can be done 3-4 days in advance and store the glasses in the refrigerator.  If you have extra fudge it will also hold for weeks in the refrigerator and it’s great on a spoon at midnight. 

Below you will find the recipe for hot fudge.  I have found that extra fudge is great on top of ice cream. 

Fudge for Legs 

Ingredients

2 cups of cream

½ stick of butter

1 cup light brown sugar

1 cup granulated sugar

¼ teaspoon sea salt

2 cups cocoa (sifted)

 Method

In a heavy bottomed sauce pan simmer cream and butter.

Add both sugars and simmer.

Remove from the heat. 

Whisk in salt and cocoa ½ cup at a time. 

Keep fudge warm while you make the legs in the glasses. 

Cover the prepared wine glasses with food film if legs are formed days ahead.

  

Chambord mousse

 Ingredients

½ cup Chambord

4 ounces dark chocolate (chips)

2 cups cream

½ cup granulated sugar

1-pint fresh raspberries

 Method

Melt chocolate in a stainless bowl above simmering water.

Whip the cream to soft peaks in a chilled bowl.

Add the sugar. 

Then stream whisk in the Chambord (raspberry liquor).

Slowly stream whisk in the room temperature chocolate.

Load mousse into a pastry bag with a large circular tip.

Fill fudge leg prepared wine glass ½ full with the mousse.

Garnish with fresh raspberries.

Cover with food wrap and place in refrigerator.

 

Serve cold and enjoy

Hudson’s early years. The early chefs

 

In the 32 years we were open, Hudson’s was always a springboard for aspiring chefs and we saw so many of them venture out and open their own restaurant with the hands-on experience they acquired in our kitchen.   

It was later in Hudson’s life that we were able to have apprentices from the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), not to be mistaken for CIA in Langley, Virginia. 

 Once while visiting New York, we had dinner at Per Se Restaurant and at the end of our meal we were given a full kitchen tour.  As we entered the kitchen, I noticed that there was an assembly line of chefs, eight crisp white chef coats carefully putting the final touches on each and every plate before the dish left the kitchen, i.e. a final wipe, a flower garnish, a squeeze of lemon or a sprinkle of sea salt.  Then a parade of waiters would pick up the plates – no trays – with each waiter carrying no more than 2 plates per waiter.  How could they afford so many cooks, eight cooks simply to garnish?  It was years later that I discovered their secret as it was told to me by a Per Se cook that the entire assembly line of staff performing the final touches on the plates were all apprentices from the CIA and these apprentices were not only not on the payroll, but even better, they paid the restaurant $1000.00 per month for the privilege of the job and the honor of putting Per Se on their resume.  No wonder Per Se could afford such a heavily populated kitchen.  And there I was, so proud of myself, I thought we were getting such a great deal on labor by paying minimum wage to all of our apprentices. 

 Not just any restaurant can get CIA apprentices, here is how it works.  A student at the CIA initially does their classroom study at the Institute and upon completion of this portion, they then seek an internship for practical application of the book learning in a CIA approved restaurant.  To be on the list of approved restaurants first and foremost the restaurant needs to have a chef that graduated from the CIA and the restaurant chef must agree to do a monthly report and evaluation of the student to the supervisor at CIA.  It is on the student’s shoulders to reach out to restaurants on the approved list and find a restaurant that is interested in having an apprentice.  The great benefit of sponsoring these young uns in your restaurant is that you get a very productive, eager and professional employee at minimum wage.  We timed it so that as one student completed their internship, we had another student rolling in the kitchen door on their heels so that 90% of the time we had an apprentice on the payroll.  We had several employees that did their internship at Hudson’s return to us after their graduation from CIA and become sous chefs and cooks on our full-time kitchen staff.  I knew that Hudson’s had an “in” at the CIA when they published their new textbook and our “Hot & Crunchy” recipe was printed in the textbook. 

 Stage (pronounced “staj”) is a German word that means to follow or shadow and we had tons of cooks who wanted to do a brief period of stage in our kitchen.  There were a lot of highly successful people out in the work force that had a passion for cooking to the point that they had a romantic idea of changing careers and becoming a creative chef in a restaurant, wouldn’t that be a fun job?  Jay Moore, who was one of our best chefs for many years had more than a few burned out engineers come and shadow him. He would always be sure to explain that there would be years of backbreaking work with very low pay along with mountains of veggies to clean before they earned and learned the skill to be a creative chef in a restaurant kitchen, he made it crystal clear so that want to-be chefs didn’t get a false picture of the glory and glamour in that white coat.

A restaurant needs to survive, shine and grow in the early years and when the owner/chef (me) keeps disappearing for 30-day trips to rehab the odds of surviving are very low.  Somehow Hudson’s not only survived but it thrived and I am ever grateful to the chefs of this period of my life for keeping the fires lit while I was cleaning up my act.  The chefs in the early days of Hudson’s were not classically trained, but pure in heart; Jeff Courington, Hal Sapadin, Steve Warren and John Cheatam all played an important role in Hudson’s early years.

 Hudson’s had its share of undocumented cooks from south of the border that were invaluable in the kitchen.  We also had a group of restaurant employees migrate from Germany via Gert Rausch to work in the kitchen and the front of the house, they all added an international flare to the restaurant.  Gert’s influences were all very important to Hudson’s, to say the least!  Thirty-five years ago, Harald Katzenberger, Reiner Schmitt and Fredrick Bauer came over from Germany on a tourist visa but fudged a bit and actually came to work and over stayed their welcomed and approved timeframe.  They had friends from Germany come to Austin, Texas, USA to visit.  Harald, Freddy and Reiner wanted to show their friends some of America while they were here so, they headed out on a road trip to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas.  Their American tour ended quickly when they drove through the immigration checkpoint just before you enter El Paso and their expired visas were discovered.  I got a phone call from them asking for money because Immigrations had put them in jail and were not going to release them until they could purchase airplane tickets for their return to Germany.  Just like that they were gone from our lives!  It is important to note that this occurred nearly forty years ago when labor laws were relaxed and oh so much different.

 The state food of Texas has to be a bowl of red, aka chili.  On a winter day nothing sounds better or tastes better than a bowl of chili.  You can serve it as a first course or a main meal. There are chili cooking contests across Texas.  Most are more about the extracurricular activities than about the chili.  I have judged many, so I am somewhat of an authority.  The thing that happens at all contests is after the winner is announced all the other chili cooks taste the winner’s chili and try to discern the ingredients that made them stand out and win.  Funny thing, after several contests everyone’s chili tastes very similar.

There are several rules about Texas chili, you never add beans or use ground meat.  Most chili cooks use beef cubes, but I really like to use a variety of meats.  Feel free to use a freezer clearing method.  The recipe below uses venison and wild boar, but beef is a great substitute.  When using duck or quail or any fowl combine it with a red meat for a full rounded flavor.  Smoking the meat prior to making the chili adds a tasty flavor.

Two ingredients that make your chili 🌶 award winning is ancho peppers and a rich stock.  Instead of chili powder use whole ancho peppers.  Soak them in quality stock then transfer the softened peppers and the liquid to a blender and purée until smooth.  Use a high quality, rich stock for more flavor, no water. 

Some ingredients listed below are on the “black list” from professional chili cooks, i.e. tomatoes, celery and bacon, but they help produce a big round flavor.

The recipe below has won several chili cook offs.  Feel free to make it your own.  Just add or change three ingredients and then it’s yours.  This chili takes more time, but it will get rave reviews, isn’t that what it’s all about.

Toppings depend how crazy you want to get.  Sour cream, yogurt and grated cheese are simple and tasty.  Elaborate salsas are a fun topping and a great way to make the recipe yours. 

 

Ingredients

8 ancho peppers, seeds and stems removed

½ lbs. bacon, chopped

2 lbs. meat, cubed.  Any combination.  I like venison and boar. 

6 cups white onions ¼” dice

½ cup minced garlic

4 ribs of celery ¼” dice

2 cups Roma tomatoes ¼” dice

3 cups high quality stock

1 lemon juiced and zested

2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

3 tablespoons cumin (best to toast cumin seeds and grind)

¼ cup ancho chili powder

2 tablespoons sea salt

2 teaspoons cayenne pepper, a great substitute for cayenne is jalapeños or Serrano peppers, add until desired heat is reached

 Method

8 ancho peppers, seeds and stems removed, soaked in rich stock and puréed until smooth in a blender.

Cook the chopped bacon and reserve the drippings.

Using a heavy bottomed pan on high heat, brown the meat in small batches with 3 tablespoons of bacon drippings.  Remember brown crust on the meat means flavor.  Grey meat is the equivalent of stewed meat, avoid avoid avoid.  After the meat has browned set it aside for later use.

In a large heavy bottomed pot add 3 tablespoon of bacon drippings. 

Sauté onions, celery, tomatoes, garlic, lemon zest and juice, sea salt, cumin, cayenne or peppers, sugar and chili powder. 

Cook until onion is soft and translucent.

Add the meat, ancho pepper purée and stock.

Simmer on medium heat until everything is blended and hot.

Top with your favorite topping.

 

It will store in your refrigerator for 2 weeks.  It freezes great.

THE LATE 1980’s & THE EARLY 1990’s

The development of our theme at Hudson’s happened on its own on an organic path driven by our customers first and foremost.  It was a no brainer to keep the best sellers on the menu and that was how I listened to our customers and this is how they told me what they wanted to eat.  Cash flow was speaking loudly in the early days, if it didn’t sell it was a liability, if it sold it was an asset.  Fortunately, I had the safety net of my father who somewhat willingly infused more money in order to keep us afloat.  It was after he passed, I was at his lawyer’s office cleaning up his will and other documents when his personal lawyer voluntarily told me that my father had asked him for guidance.  I had asked my dad for another infusion of cash and this prompted my father to seek advice from his lawyer concerning my need for more money to which his attorney advised him not to invest any more money.  Luckily for Hudson’s he didn’t take his lawyer’s advice.  It is important to note; all of the early P & L statements did not paint an optimistic picture for our investors. 

After we had depleted that last cash infusion I knew I needed to independently be much more creative to get more cash to stay afloat as we needed to keep the doors open so we could repay the investors.  Our guests were very loyal and fortunately they were also affluent enough to allow them some wiggle room in their finances so I presented them with the opportunity of their lifetime!  If they contributed $2,000.00 to Hudson’s bank account, they would receive in return a $4,000.00 credit at the restaurant.  This was back in the olden days so I sent my proposal in the form of a letter via the old-fashioned snail mail.  Much to my surprise, delight and relief there was a great response; Hudson’s received $36,000.00.  This transaction was beneficial to me and the restaurant on so many different levels.  The customers that invested monetarily also became emotionally invested in our success and became the very best customers a restaurant could ever hope for. 

As it turned out, that was the last cash infusion we needed to make it beyond the “new” restaurant money woes and throughout all of this I became hyper aware of the value of every dollar.  We were finally on a more level playing field where you could actually apply the theory of “make it before you spend it” rather than always being three steps behind.  After years of experience in the restaurant business I had learned that a negative profit margin was a combination of costs that were out of line as there are many costs that have to be figured into the restaurant profit margin.  You had to keep an ever-watchful eye on the spending in all areas, you had to be aware of food cost, wine cost, liquor cost, labor cost, etc. 

Luckily Hudson’s had a very vigilant and top-notch bookkeeper – Collin Nelson.  A quality bookkeeper keeps his thumb on the pulse of the business which allows the chef/operator/owner, i.e. me to concentrate on the food, creativity and promotion, three essentials for success.   

The demographics of the Hudson’s guests changed throughout the years.  In our early years customers would pack up their “roadies” and enjoy the drive out into the Hill Country while catching up on conversation during the road trip with a delightful dinner at the end of the journey.  Now it is a frightening bumper to bumper drive out to the Hill Country and you wouldn’t dare to drive with an alcoholic beverage in the car much less your hand.  Austin has changed from a 1980’s small simple town to a bustling city and with that comes big city traffic and big city laws.  Lakeway and the surrounding area has grown to offset the customers that no longer make the Austin to Hudson’s drive. 

Hudson’s was blessed to have a generous amount of media attention and from all different forms of media and therefore we never had to invest in costly advertising.  We received positive reviews from newspapers, magazines etc. both locally and from all around the country.  I received a “Top 50 Restaurant” review from Mimi Sheraton at Traveler Magazine.  I was included in the PBS Series “Great Chefs of the Southwest” which spawned a book as a companion for the TV series which I was also included in. 

Southwestern Cuisine was becoming quite the rage and Hudson’s was on the ground floor of this dining movement.  Hell, I even got nominated for a James Beard award, Best Chef of the Southwest.  During the Food and Wine Festival I hosted a young Bobby Flay who had just opened the Mesa Grill Restaurant and asked if he could do his festival prep at my restaurant.  The media that got the most attention and had the biggest and most lasting impact on our business was on NPR “All Things Considered”.  Linda Wertheimer was in town doing a bit on Title 9 at UT and did a little food story while she was in town which was the icing on the cake, so to speak.  For her story, she came to Hudson’s and we did our back-strap of Texas Axis venison stuffed with smoked New England lobster served atop guava sour cherry sauce, referred to as Austin to Boston on our menu.  While taping for the radio show, I took Linda on a very descriptive walking talking tour around the restaurant and kitchen ending the tour at the smoke house trying to bring the listeners with us; doing food on the radio is a little weird, but she liked it and it worked.  It was months before it aired and I had completely forgotten about it when all of a sudden, I got calls from friends in Boston, NYC, Omaha, San Francisco, etc.   Just another fun story on NPR that brought so many people from everywhere in the United States to dine at Hudson’s.  For years customers told me the reason they came to dine at Hudson’s was because they heard about us on NPR, who knew it was so powerful. 

As my star was rising my addictions were snowballing.  My addiction to speed (meth amphetamines) began years ago in my Aspen restaurant days as it allowed me to stay focused while working long hours and then still be good to hit the slopes.  Speed became my drug of choice as it was cheaper than cocaine and lasted longer but don’t get me wrong there was a time and place for things like coke, psychedelics, pot, downers, etc.  Being a chef, my objective was to concoct the perfect recipe to find the perfect balance, not too high and not too low, but just right.  If I made it home before the paperboy threw the morning newspaper I considered the day a perfect success!  Of course, this was not a sustainable lifestyle if I intended to maintain a successful restaurant and live to a ripe old age so I ended up at rehab and let me add I ended up at rehab more times than most.  The rehab facility that I came to prefer was located near the camp I had attended as 12-Year-old, so I called the rehab “Camp-Run-a-Muck”.   

There are many funny stories about trying to get sober, but this is a food story so I will save those stories for another time.  When I left rehab in 1990 for the last time and was finally truly clean and sober the fever for Southwestern Cuisine had reached its peak without me. I call the years I was too high to remember, the “lost years”, and I have often wondered where a sober Jeff would have gone and what a sober Jeff would have accomplished.  Better late than never and fortunately, Hudson’s weathered all of my antics.   

One of the reasons for Hudson’s longevity was what I didn’t do opposed to what I did do, I didn’t try and do a second Hudson’s on the Bend Restaurant.  Rather, I created multiple other revenue streams that supported the restaurant.  I wrote two cookbooks which was also great advertising for the restaurant, we sold gift certificates, I taught cooking schools where we featured Hudson’s menu foods, we created 11 finishing sauces that were available in local stores and at the restaurant and I sponsored very well received salmon fishing and cooking expeditions to Alaska. 

 

Below is the recipe for the Austin to Boston atop Guava Sour Cherry Sauce.  This may seem like a weird combination of flavors but it works and was one of our most popular menu items.  You can use elk back-strap, large deer back-strap, beef tenderloin or large wild boar back-strap. 

Ingredients

1 lb. lobster tail meat

1 back-strap

Salt

Pepper 

Coat 1 lb. of lobster tail meat with sea salt & pepper.  Then slather the tail meat with plain yogurt before smoking.  The yogurt keeps it from drying out. 

Smoke 1 lb. of lobster tail meat. 

Cool and cut into 1” cubes and reserve for stuffing. 

Cut your back-strap into 4” long pieces. 

Salt & pepper the back-strap.  I use sea salt and Madagascar black peppercorns.

With a boning knife pierce the end of the 4” back-strap.

Gently push it through the back-strap until the end of the knife appears out of the other end.  Using both of your index fingers put them in each end of the back-strap (like Chinese finger traps).  When your fingers meet in the middle rotate in a circular motion until you have created a 1” hole in the back-strap. 

Stuff the 1” chilled and smoked lobster cubes into the back-strap until it is completely stuffed from one end to the other.  If the lobster breaks out of the back-strap it’s OKAY.  Once it’s grilled and sliced no one will know.  Make sure the lobster is cooked thoroughly as a medium rare temperature on the back-strap will only warm the lobster.

Grill the back-strap 3-5 minutes on all sides.  Use a probe thermometer to check the internal temperature.  Stop at 125 or medium rare. 

Slice each back-strap into 4 slices and serve atop guava sour cherry sauce, enjoy. 

Guava Sour Cherry Sauce

Ingredients

1 cup guava paste (found in specialty stores)

1 cup sour cherries (dried)

2 tablespoon minced garlic

3 tablespoon minced shallots

2 tablespoons of butter

1 cup apple juice concentrate (4 to 1)

1 cup water

1 cup dark brown sugar

½ cup raspberry vinegar

½ tablespoon sea salt or to taste 

Method

Melt butter in a sauce pan. 

Sweat shallots and garlic until they are translucent.  Add all the other ingredients and cook for 8 minutes on a simmer.

This will hold in your refrigerator for 3 weeks. 

It’s tasty on grilled chicken or duck.  Also tasty on grilled salmon.

EARLY DAYS AT HUDSON’S

 

We swung the doors at Hudson’s on the Bend Restaurant open on April 15, 1984 with no specific culinary direction, not Mexican food, not Italian food, not Cajun food etc.  What we did know was that we wanted to cook what was available in our backyard in a white tablecloth, rustic, Texan atmosphere.  It was years before the “farm to table” dining experience was popular, so in looking back I realize I was about 20 years ahead of the times in the industry so without trying to be “farm to table” we were doing it organically.

However, the birth of regional cuisine in American restaurants was starting to grow with Alice Waters developing Californian organic cuisine at Chez Panisse, Paul Prudhomme was developing Cajun New Orleans cuisine at K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, Larry Forgione, the Godfather of American Cuisine, was developing American New England cuisine at An American Place Restaurant in New York.  I observed this regional cuisine trend happening around the country and we did our part by undertaking Texas cuisine in the kitchen at Hudson’s on the Bend.  Texas cuisine at the time was a mix of cowboy cooking, Mexican flavors and of course BBQ.  This Texas cuisine menu plan was just a guideline, not a hard and fast rule.  If a dish tasted great to us, was popular with the diners and was relatively easy to cook in our restaurant kitchen, we would see if we could give it a little extra Texas Southwestern spin and offer it verbally to the customers as a special of the night.

In the beginning days of our opening, our menu was very limited and was small enough that we wrote it all on the blackboard every day and then was verbally recited table side by the waiter.  As our menu developed and outgrew the blackboard, we went all high tech and typed our menu daily using an IBM Selectric Typewriter which is a menu production strategy I stole from the Courtyard Restaurant.  This was before computers, printers and copy machines were commonplace, so we then had to run our typed-up menu down the street to McBride’s Paper Clip to use their copier services to have them print off menus for the night.  This process was important to the development of our cuisine as I would have a daily menu meeting with the always revolving kitchen staff as we had to have all of our ducks in a row in order to go to press for the evening service.  One of our objectives was to encourage the kitchen staff to have a voice as to what we cooked and we would try damn near anything, but at the end of the day, sales and popularity of each dish determined if it remained on the menu.  We needed an even spread between the cooking stations, you didn’t want to over load the grill station while sauté was looking for more action and vice versa so this was another factor that we considered when creating our menu. 

We always tried to keep things interesting for the diners by offering something they wouldn’t find anywhere else.  For example, the rattlesnake cakes came about because one of our cooks cooked a great crab cake and we thought long and hard, how do we put our Texas spin on it?  Well what is more Texas than rattlesnake, so we used rattlesnake from Sweetwater, Texas instead of crab and then we added cilantro and Serrano peppers and there you have it we created a unique dish.  Would it sell, only time would tell…and yes it did, it sold like hot cakes.  Locals would entertain their west coast, east coast, midwestern, etc. friends by treating them at Hudson’s to a never before seen rattlesnake cake.  Sometimes they wouldn’t tell their dining companions that they were eating snake and spring it on them after their last delicious bite.  One of our waiters would add a little extra atmosphere to the dish and shake a full toothpick holder behind his back as he served the dish and it did indeed sound like a rattle snake.

The New York Times took interest in the dish and printed the recipe and amplified its popularity.  That was a lovely unexpected surprise for us, we didn’t see that coming.

We opened in my typical “shoestring style”, we never spent money we didn’t have.  In all honesty, this stringent spending style was implemented and emphatically regulated by our bookkeeper and friend Collin Nelson.  He kept me aware of our cash flow on a daily basis.  I had known Collin since my Lakeway days so we had a longstanding relationship and with that there was trust.  This was very important for the growth of the restaurant because it allowed me to be creative with the cuisine and not spend any of my mental energy on the finances. 

We opened the restaurant with very little luxuries, i.e. we had a dirt parking lot and we had no air conditioning in the kitchen.  Collin would announce when we had made enough cash to buy these luxury items and we added those things as our cash flow allowed.  

The heat in the kitchen was intense because not only did we not have air conditioning in the kitchen, we had a wood burning grill pouring heat into the kitchen. We tried several different ingenious ideas to beat the heat, I placed a sprinkler on the roof to try and cool the kitchen down.  Another one of my sweat driven brainstorms that I tried was to install a 4’ factory fan to lower the temperature, it simultaneously worked and backfired.  The fan was so powerful that it sucked the swinging kitchen waiter doors open and pulled all of the air-conditioned air out of the dining room. NOT GOOD.  The diners were sweating more than the cooks so obviously, I deserted that plan.  We later installed 8 tons of air conditioning on top of the kitchen.  One of the side benefits of real air conditioning was I didn’t have to go into the walk-in cooler to find the cooks.  It was also better for business for the servers not to be serving food with sweat pouring off of their faces.

Smoke and fire were the cornerstone of our flavor and we quickly burned a hole in the firebox of our freestanding smoker.  Instead of replacing the smoker, we built a stone smoke house which we flavored our food with applewood, cherrywood, grapevines, etc.  Our main fuel was pecan wood but you have to be careful with pecan wood because it can either be too green or it can dry out quickly and be pithy. 

We also had a live fire burning nightly in the grill in the kitchen which required its own hood system to satisfy the fire codes.  The wood burning grill made a huge flavor difference.  It took practice and a lot of trial and error to be a proficient grill master.  Every fire has its own personality and the size and intensity of the heat are always different.  It creates a hot spot which is great for searing and then you finish cooking by pulling the meat back from the hot spot.  I walked into Jeffrey’s Restaurant kitchen and saw that they had two wire shelves mounted above the grill for the food to finish cooking.  What a great idea!  I had Abel (our handyman) mount two wire shelves above our grill and from that day forward, what a difference that made in controlling the end result.  We were able to impart more smoke flavor while the cooking process was completed.  It made cooking on an open fire much more manageable.

My philosophy was “if you work hard you play hard” and I was certainly working hard so my drinking and drugging were starting to get out of hand in an attempt to reward myself.  My standard routine was to take a 24 oz. glass Grey Poupon jar to the bar, fill it with ice, and then filled with gin, that’s right I said filled with gin and then a whisper of tonic with a finishing squeeze of half of a lime and on especially busy nights I would rinse and repeat.  This went on for years until I started day drinking, gin for breakfast tells you and everyone around you there might be a problem.

Fortunately for us we did not need to advertise and further, I can’t imagine that Collin would have ever signed off on that hefty expense.  Food writers for the magazines and newspapers were generous and came to us. Mike Levy the owner of Texas Monthly Magazine came into Hudson’s and requested to see me.  My chef coat was drenched with sweat and kitchen dirt (I was working the grill) and with a fresh grill towel over my shoulder I marched into the cool dining room.  Mike said lots of positive things, but the thing I remember most was when he said “I want to meet the person we are going to make famous”.  Texas Monthly Magazine gave us positive reviews from the start and we always got glowing reviews from their food editor, Pat Sharpe.  Kitty Crider at the Austin American Statesman was a big fan and did many complimentary articles.  At some point I lost track of all the articles, but one of those authors called me a rubicund chef.  This was not a word I was familiar with so I went to the dictionary and looked it up.  The definition said rubicund was an unusual redness from the overindulgence of food and drink.  How did they know?  Elaine Louie, a food writer from the New York Times wanted to do an article about a smoked antelope leg stuffed with chorizo that we did.  She had already purchased her return flight and I was given the impression that she wanted to watch the dish from start to finish but she was under time restraints and therefore this all needed to be done in 3 hours or less.  Knowing the power of The New York Times, of course l agreed.  All went well.  We built a roaring fire in the smoke house and went to the kitchen and did the stuffing and searing and then placed it in the smoke house.  After placing the antelope in the smokehouse, Elaine and I retired to the lobby to continue the interview.  The kitchen crew continued to throw more fuel on the already hot smokehouse fire because I had strongly stressed to them the importance of a very hot smoke house so that we could get the antelope smoked in our short time frame.  We were in the middle of our interview with Elaine’s back to the outside garden area and the smoke house when I noticed the kitchen crew running to the smokehouse with the 4-gallon mayonnaise buckets filled with water 💦.  The roof of the smoke house was ablaze.  It was all I could do not to alert Elaine that my smoke house was on fire.  The crew retrieved the antelope and put it in a hot oven inside.  I explained to Elaine that to meet her timeline we needed to finish inside.  The antelope was done and ever so tasty.  Elaine never knew about the fire and the article was a huge success. Whew!

Like all chefs I got ideas from other restaurants and replicated the flavors when I got home.  The Orange Ginger BBQ sauce was from a restaurant in Dallas called Dakota.  It is a unique flavor that we used on many things over the years.  It complimented our Coca Cola baby back ribs.  We marinated the ribs in coke syrup before we smoked them and served them atop Orange Ginger BBQ Sauce.  This is a sauce that we bottled and sold.

Here is the recipe.  If it is too thick for you thin it out with water.

 

Ingredients

4 slices of bacon, frozen then ground to hamburger size in the food processor, use the S blade

 1/3 cup minced onion

2 tablespoon minced garlic

½ cup minced fresh ginger

2 tablespoon cracked black pepper

1/3 cup dark brown sugar

3 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1/3 cup concentrated (5 to1) orange juice

4 tablespoon rice wine vinegar

1 tablespoon Cholula hot sauce

¾ cup catsup

1 teaspoon sea salt

 

Method

Cook bacon and drain fat or leave it in your choice.  I leave it in for more flavor.

Add the onion, garlic, ginger, cracked pepper and sweat until the onions are clear.

Add the brown sugar, Worcestershire, OJ, Cholula, vinegar and bring to boil or until the sugar blends.

Add the catsup and sea salt.

Adjust salt to taste.

 

Serve it on beef, game or seafood.  It’s also great on shrimp 🦐.

Building Hudson’s on the Bend

 

After the Broadway Oyster Co. closed we quickly moved from San Antonio to Austin, moving hastily attempting to getting the bad taste of failure in the form of a closed restaurant out of our mouth.  The failure of Broadway Oyster Co. was particularly dramatic for me because I knew if we stuck it out we would have eventually become a successful restaurant.  I just did not feel as though I had the luxury of living in the red for the amount of time that was necessary to realize that money making dream.  I have been called tenacious all of my life and I really have to be completely backed into a corner before I will give up as I just do not like giving up.  It’s important when restaurant is underfunded to have a talent for thinking outside of the box as the lack of moolah forces you to be extra creative.

I need to give a “shout out” to my father and mother who lent me money for all project initiations throughout the years and the three restaurants I opened.  Our credit rating with them remained intact through all three restaurants, and my eternal gratitude goes to George and Dorothy Blank.  They did get much easier to approach for a loan after we exhibited that we honored our debts and we repaid them with interest for our first restaurant in Aspen, the Wineskin. 

The house that became Hudson’s on the Bend had many lives prior to our ownership and had served many people well even before we invited one and all to dinner at our little restaurant.  The house was first built as a fish camp in 1930 by a fellow that put in a pond and raised minnows and sold a variety of fish bait.  Fifty-five years later, I repurposed the pond by filling it with dirt and starting my own herb garden, my foundation for the “eat less from a box and more from the earth” movement.  The second owner was Orin and Bernadette McBride.  They converted the garage into what we now know as the fireplace room and added a carport on to the house and raised their family in the home until they sold the house to George and Rebecca Rakin.  Rebecca taught ballet classes to the Lake Travis children in the fireplace room.  The Rakin’s sold the property to my father in 1985 who in turn sold the property to me once I was running a restaurant that was in the black.  So, the property purchase was my contribution to the life of Hudson’s on the Bend.  At this time, Ranch Road 620 was a two-lane pot holed asphalt road that led to Mansfield Dam.  The dam was built in 1937.  It was a lonely road, no grocery stores, two gas stations, maybe three restaurants and there was Lakeway which was in its early days. 

Owning the property was the smartest part of our plan as it gave the restaurant real value.  The total investment including the real estate, septic and restaurant was less than $400,000.  Just try and do that today without adding another ‘0’ to the total cost, impossible.

Gert’s contribution to the business was that he got a loan for our operating capital from Bill Milburn, a well-known home builder in the Austin area in the ‘80s.  Big Bill played football for Green Bay during the Lombardi era.  He was a regular customer at Gert’s restaurant, the Courtyard Restaurant and he liked everything German, enter Gert.

We converted the open-air carport into the kitchen.  The Courtyard Restaurant was buying new chairs so Hudson’s got custody of the old ones.  We purchased all used but refurbished equipment, like I said earlier, all was done on a shoestring.

While we were busy with the construction phase my parents were busy updating the landscaping.  Most of the new plants were donated from their next-door neighbors, Darrell and Darrell Kirkland who had a need to thin out their landscaping.  Yes, Darrell and Darrell are male and female.  The Kirkland’s had a black lab named Fred that my mother doted on.  Darrell would dress up Fred just to amuse my mother.  Mother had a framed picture of Fred wearing a white long tie.  Darrell and Darrell had a party one night and left the buffet food out with the intention of cleaning up after the party mess the next day.  They were awakened early that morning by a strong methane gas smell, thinking they had a gas leak they called the fire department.  As they awaited the fired department they moved about the house very thoughtfully and carefully so as not to cause a spark that would ignite the leaking gas.  As they tip toed out of the bedroom and into the kitchen they passed an embarrassed and guilty Fred who had eaten the rich goose liver pate that was left out on the buffet the night before.  The pate passed through Fred quickly and was the source of the methane odor.  You can all relate, poor Fred he was just having a late-night snack.

I worked at Gert’s restaurant, the Courtyard while Hudson’s was being created.  I was originally hired by Gert to be a waiter, but after the smoke cleared and the maître’d was consulted, they did not have a waiter spot for me and l was a busboy.  What a humbling experience. As it turned out it was the perfect experience that I needed in order to truly understand the ins and outs from the front to the back and the top to the bottom of owning and running a restaurant.  It re affirmed what I knew about Gert from the past, if you wanted Gert’s decision to be in your favor make sure you were the last person to talk with him.  He tended to tell you what you wanted to hear and just wanted to please whomever was in his face at the moment.

Heber Stone was the head bartender at the Wineskin in Aspen and he followed the work path with Gert from Aspen to Woodcreek Resort in Wimberly, Texas.  Heber became Gert’s partner at the Courtyard Restaurant in Austin and was also a partner of Hudson’s.  There are stories about the Courtyard’s creation but I wasn’t there so its only stories to me. I heard tell a tale about a big truck being backed up to the loading dock at Woodcreek Resort in the dark of the night in order to furnish the upcoming Courtyard, but don’t quote me on that.  Eventually I bought Heber’s partnership portion out, it took a few years after we opened.  One very valuable piece of business advice I adhered to and shall pass along, when buying a partner out wait until they need cash.  Heber was married to Karen Dickiehut.   Karen’s dad, Herb Dickiehut, was part of a big construction firm that did a lot of highway type work so he had the big earth movers that we needed to build the septic drain field and the parking lot.  He did most of the work and we never got a bill.

Joe Spillman was our licensed septic installer and he worked closely with Herb to insure everything was within code.  Joe was a Texas Hill Country good old boy with a slow thick Texas country accent and with that drawl, he was always recognized on the phone before he announced himself.  I’ll never forget standing with Joe and looking over one of our septic tanks as waste began to pour in.  Joe turned to me as we watched and said, “Jeff, it maybe shit to you, but it’s bread and butter to me”.  That made perfect simple sense.  The septic drain field was the cause of several months of delay as we were building during an unusually wet spring.  One of our drain fields was lined with a thick plastic liner that held the rain perfectly.  I spent weeks pumping the rainwater out, but the pump was constantly getting clogged as the water level was going down.  It rained every night and thus it was a never-ending battle.  I thought I had found the solution when I found a pump mounted in an inner tube and I was feeling very pleased and a bit overconfident but all went well until the pump and tube lowered to the uneven bottom and the red-hot muffler on the pump exploded the rubber inner tube and the mud clogged the pump again.  Back to the drawing board, or perhaps time to pray to the rain gods to vamoose.  It was months before my prayers were answered and I was able to get it dry enough to allow the work to progress.

Jack Corbin was our general contractor for the restaurant remodel and he somehow kept construction on track. 

 

We were years ahead of the farm to table craze before the phrase or practice were ever even verbalized.  We were farm to table without knowing its future and the impact it would have on the restaurant industry so many years later.  Our concept was to cook what was in the backyard and to keep with our Texan theme, we used wood fire and smoke to compliment the wild game flavors.  To do this we had to buy everything from the fire wood to the wild game to the veggies to the cheeses to honey all from locals.  I was a regular at the Tony Berger Center Farmer’s Market every Saturday morning to ferret out product and connections.

Hudson’s was a magical combination of things that Texans love, smoke, fire, sweet and spicy. We started with a classic double oil barrel smoker but due to our smoky menu, we burned a hole in the base of the smoker rather quickly and this inspired us to build the permanent stone smoke house that still stands and smokes to this day.  Smoke houses are basic.  We hung metal wire shelves on one side of the house and the fire was built daily on the opposite side of the house.  We learned the art of smoking by trial and error.  We had four shelves and the Texas saying “low and slow is the way to go” made perfect sense because we quickly learned that the lower shelf was the coolest as heat rises, so for a slow smoke, load in the meat on the lowest shelf.  We quickly learned that smoke extends the holding life of our food but convincing the health department of that fell on deaf ears.  Over the years we used many wood flavors; pecan wood was the work horse but we also used apple wood, cherry wood, grapevines and many others.  The woods that we learned to stay away from because they are too strong are cedar, juniper and mesquite.  Mesquite is fine to grill with, but too strong for smoking.  Our routine was to smoke to a rare/medium rare, put it in our cooler and reheat to serving temperature over our indoor wood fire.

Our menu was hand written daily on the blackboard.  This was all before computers, fax machines, copiers, etc.

 

Below you will find a smoked shrimp quesadilla recipe with avocado and goat cheese. 

When we smoke any seafood, we cover it with seasoned sour cream or plain yogurt.  This locks in the moisture and attracts the smoke.  When smoking seafood be watchful because it smokes quickly.  Use your favorite flavored spice mix to flavor the sour cream or yogurt like Lawry’s or Old Bay.

We were doing a BBC show featuring this quesadilla and while preparing the avocado, I flicked a piece of the avocado 🥑 onto one of their 1000-watt bulbs which caused a big bulb explosion.  Glass went everywhere, what a mess, ah show biz.

 

Ingredients

4 flour tortillas

1 avocado, cut into 12 slices

12 shrimp, lightly smoked, 21 to 25 per lbs.

4 ounces of goat cheese

¼ cup grated Monterey Jack cheese

2 tablespoon minced garlic

2 tablespoon sour cream

¼ teaspoon each of dried basil, oregano, thyme & tarragon

2 tablespoon of virgin olive oil

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 teaspoon of sea salt

 

Method

Mix goat cheese, jack cheese, sour cream, all herbs, salt, minced garlic and cayenne.

Place the cheese/herb mixture in a bowl over simmering water to aid in blending. 

When blended slather the cheese/herb mix on each tortilla. 

Place 3 avocado slices and 3 smoked shrimp on the lower half of the tortilla.

Fold the tortilla in half. 

Over medium heat place olive oil in a large sauté pan and heat. 

When hot place the folded tortillas in the pan and cook for 3 minutes on each side or until golden brown. 

Slice into 3 wedges and serve.

Top it with your favorite salsa.

You just made a deluxe south of the boarder cheese sandwich.