Alison Cook’s HTown

Every year now in October, I begin following the X/Twitter exploits of Rodrigo Delgado, the Mexico City food writer and flaneur who makes it his business to sample and rate every possible pan de muerto in the capital city. He calls it the Pan de Muerto Challenge. This year

When my sister emailed today to say "Happy Cabbage Night," it took me back to the Vermont of my childhood and teens. There, the night before Halloween was the time for tricksters to perform the misdeeds that characterize what other North American regions and states call Mischief Night,

Why yes, it's still ice-cream season.In my world, anyway, that season never ends. No nip in the air dulls my enthusiasm for one of mankind's greatest inventions. Especially when I am faced with a double scoop from the estimable Cosmic Ice Cream shop in Spring

File the egg-salad sandwich from chef Christine Ha's Stuffed Belly drive-thru in Spring Branch under "things I didn't know I needed." It reminds me of snuggling into a favorite down comforter.I love egg salad. I make it at home, using the mash-the-yolks technique

Now that I'm not a professional restaurant critic anymore, I can do things I never used to. Like show up at chef Hugo Ortega's new downtown restaurant, Zaranda, when the doors open for their first official dinner service.That's how eager I was to

I bet you didn't even know that there was a second edition of La Guadalupana, the spunky little Montrose bakery-cafe that has long punched above its weight. I didn't discover the new location until I ventured to the nearby Coastal Bake Shop in search of some

Curses.I did it to myself, I am pretty sure. When I praised the delightful little arroz con leche cups I found at cut-rate German grocery chain Aldi on my first visit, it did not occur to me that I was writing their obituary.But earlier this week, when I

Sorry, Cantina Barba. You'd slipped the last time I ordered your cheeseburger, and now I've got a new Houston fave in the affordable category. It's the gutsy number at the Narwhal Jousting Club, a marine-blue cottage in Rice Military.The aesthetic at this puckishly

I remember feeling idle curiosity when Aldi, the German cut-rate grocery chain, began opening Houston metroplex stores twelve years ago.Not enough to drive the distances required to check one out, though. My special trips have always been reserved for the likes of Central Market or HMart. Until last month,

Comfort food is deeply personal. The flavors and textures that soothe or revive are rooted in biography. As a child, my mother's spaghetti sauce burrowed into a primitive part of my brain, reinforced by the Friday nights when my dad would bring home a big garlicky sackful of

"You can't even get a decent loaf of bread over there!" scoffed a frenemy of mine when I moved to Houston's East End back in the 80s. That remained largely true until early this August, when the family-owned Coastal Bake Shop opened in Pasadena,

Nostalgia is a helluva drug. I rediscovered that uncomfortable truth when I set out to revisit the Enchiladas de Tejas at Molina's Cantina, the venerable Houston Tex-Mex spot that's been around in one form or another since 1941. In this city, that's forever.I

Pizza pescatore wasn't part of the plan. At a Latuli dinner recently, my companion and I had settled on a couple of fish dishes that sounded promising—both in terms of their ingredients, and because chef Bryan Caswell made his name at Gulf seafood pioneer Reef back

At Winnie's, the Louisiana-inflected sandwich shop in Midtown, I've found a new favorite burger that hits the sweet spot between inexpensive and eye-rollingly pricy. That's a vanishing category in this era of spiraling beef costs.And get this: on Mondays only from 6 p.

In my world as presently constituted, it is. "Presently constituted" means I just made a power run through the vast Phoenicia Specialty Foods market on Westheimer, where I acquired all four of the necessary ingredients. (And much, much more, but that's another post.)First step: Grab