5.15.16   Cookbook features Texas restaurant recipes

Texas Back Road Restaurant Recipes: A Cookbook & Restaurant Guide by Anita Musgrove (Great American Publishers, $18.95 paperback) offers up favorite recipes from about 125 Texas cafes, diners, and eateries. Most of them are, as the book’s title suggest, off the beaten path, although the state’s metropolitan areas are represented as well.

Musgrove, who has produced similar restaurant recipe books about Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee, divides the state into three regions, certainly a departure from most Texas guidebooks or cookbooks. Her regions are northwestern, eastern and southern, but “northwestern” stretches all the way from El Paso to Texarkana! Maybe she means north/western.

Restaurants are listed alphabetically by town in each region, so the very first one in the book is Bogie’s Downtown Deli in Abilene, taking note of four of its specialty sandwiches.

Other West Texas dining choices include Owl Drug Store in Coleman, Circle M Barbecue in Eastland, Star Beau’s in Comanche, the Butcher’s Block in Snyder, River Smith’s and Tommy’s Famous Burgers in Lubbock, Silo House and Zentner’s Daughter in San Angelo, and Sugar Creek Grill in Big Lake.

This book may make you want to head out on your own gastronomic tour of Texas. And what a far-ranging tour it could be, from Peggy’s on the Bayou Cajun Café in Orange to Ted’s Restaurant on South Padre Island to Baby Butt’s BBQ in Perryton, and dozens in between.

Or you could just stay home and try out the recipes yourself.

Mystery series: Since retiring as longtime director of TCU Press, Fort Worth author Judy Alter has turned her talent toward writing murder mysteries.

Murder at Peacock Mansion, the third book in her Blue Plate Café mystery series, again features small town Texas café owner Kate Chambers, who gets caught up in trying to solve a thirty-year-old murder case and finds herself perhaps the killer’s latest target (Alter Ego Publishing, $13.99 paperback).The rousing tale also includes recipes served at the café, such as enchilada casserole, sticky buns, American lasagna and cheeseburger soup. The mystery series blends two of the author’s passions — writing and cooking.

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Glenn Dromgoole’s latest book is More Civility, Please. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.