Out and About

A few weekends ago we traveled to Austin for a Big Green Egg festival - aka EggFest. The road to Austin goes by a town called Brenham, home of Blue Bell ice cream. Blue Bell is an institution here in Texas and is the ONLY ice cream to have. They do tours of the factory and have a gift shop that offers scoops for $1. We have never done the tour but have been known to take the detour for a scoop! :) My fave - blackberry cobbler ...

The EggFest was on the shores of Lake Travis and we got a great day for it - sunny but not overly humid. MM signed up to be a cook for the day so we were allocated a demonstration egg and went to work! With the help of our neighbors The Cottens, (who also made the trip to Austin for the weekend) we made about 400 tortilla scoops (the scoop filled with mexican style pinto beans, skirt steak and cheese topped with an avocado cream and pickled jalapeno) and chocolate chip-candied bacon cookies. Yes, you read right - CANDIED BACON!! :)
Here's one of the 6 batches of cookies going on. The cookies were such a hit we had to cut them into quarters to make them go around - that made around 340 samples and we had no problems getting rid of them! In fact, we had a line each time a new batch came off the grill!
It was a great day and we'll be sure to sign up to cook again next year.

Oh, and a random shot - our first strawberry of the season :)