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Black truffles don't really work like this, as I recently learned.

​I remember my first encounter with truffles vividly, probably because it was a simultaneously euphoric and traumatic experience. I was on a date at Al Tiramisu, a basement Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C., which I picked because I'd gotten a personal email from the chef. White truffles were here, it said, and he was so excited to share them with me. I found out why he was so excited later that night.

We were given a choice of risotto or pasta as a base for the glorious fungus. We both got risotto, and when the bowls of warm rice arrived, our waiter pulled out a pale, lumpy orb the size of a large marble from a wooden box and, with a silver shaver, rapidly sliced the truffle into our bowls.

That's when I started to get nervous.

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​Lisa Garza's Sissy's Southern Kitchen & Bar is coming. Press releases have been teasing the open of Uptown's newest soul-food source for the past few weeks now. A post on the Eats Blog got me thinking not so much about fried chicken itself but fried chicken condiments ...

The duo will also make its own house sriracha sauce for the chicken. "I'm from the South," says Garza. "We never put anything [such as gravy] on the chicken." But she confesses that she loves it with hot sauce.

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​This week in The New York Times, Pete Wells reviews someplace called Parm. His intro points out the lack of coverage food snobs give Italian-American cooking -- red-sauce pasta on red-checkered table cloths -- despite that it's a prominent comfort food for millions of Americans.

That's why it's so painful to see the cuisine abused to the degree it is, and so inspiring to see a polished chef devote such care to something as common as a meatball sandwich. Check out what Wells has to say about just the meat alone.

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​Remember this guy? Look at him, dimpling a dough round with the sharp corner of a drywall knife. Leslie Minora found his tiny bakery in Plano while researching Iraqi immigration, and I'm still thinking about him. Leslie returned from the trip with a bag full of freshly baked bread. The inside of the plastic was wet with condensed steam. The loaves were blistered and chewy and I ate one entirely.

That in mind, I wish I could find a restaurant that would do the following:

Marinate large hunks of chicken in olive oil, a little garlic, some herbs and a lot of lemon, and thread them on a skewer. (They could give lamb the exact same treatment with delicious results.) When someone orders a sandwich, they lay the skewer over a hot grill and start the bread. They don't have to use a drywall knife; they can use a dimpling tool that looks like this:

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​Word is out that Houston-based Spec's Wine, Spirits and Finer Foods is looking to buy Sigel's Beverages of Dallas. Per the Dallas Morning News, Sigel's president John Rector confirmed that the two companies were in talks. Sigel's has 10 area stores and a warehouse, which employs 250 people.

On a road trip over the holidays I noticed new Spec's in two different small towns, stores which could no doubt mean trouble for family-owned liquor stores in those towns.

This development helps explains what happened last week when I called Spec's corporate offices and politely asked how many stores they opened this year. I thought they might be proud of ("157! Thank you!"), but I was put on hold for a few minutes, then quickly told I was being transferred to the owner. In a very serious, deep voice, I was nicely told by the owner that disclosing their store openings would be like "handing my playbook over to my competitors." Followed by a moment of why-you-wanna-know, and how do I get you off my lawn?

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​I am made of considerable German stock -- my father was a Reitz, and my mother was a Schuster. But for whatever reason this heritage did not make it to my dinner table. We ate like the rest of America while I grew up.

The only time our table was graced with anything remotely German was New Year's Day. My mother would roast pork, reheat prepared sauerkraut and whip up some mashed potatoes with a hand mixer. We'd watch football all day and eat till we popped.

As I've carried on the tradition, I've upped the ante a little. I'll buy a case or two of German beer and bratwursts I'll slowly simmer in water or beer before browning them in a pan. I'll buy a big pork roast, too, and stud it with garlic and roast it. Some years there's spaetzle laced with black pepper and tossed in butter and fresh chives. But there's always a huge assortment of mustards and too much food. It's the last day to indulge the holidays before those resolutions kick in.

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Via

​No, no. You're right. I know. It's just that -- no, you're right.

I won't ask again.

​'Tis the season for cliche. I could do with fewer references to chilly weather and the warming bowls of soup I'm reading on food blogs lately. How about booze? How about hot booze? That's the stuff to warm up with.

Observer bar-and-clubs guru Daniel Hopkins came to my office this morning to tell me about a drink he had at Tate's, the new place on McKinney's. He said it was pretty good. He said they used this wicked strong rum, but he couldn't remember the bottle.

I took a guess and Googled "pot stilled rum" and scrolled through the images. I was looking for a familiar label -- a long lost friend whose name I couldn't place. "Was it Smith and Cross," I asked, pointing to a picture of navy blue labeled bottle filled with an amber liquid. I'd guessed right.

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​Every once in a while someone mistakes Scott for a food expert and risks ruining dinner by trusting him to answer to a burning question. Got a question about food or restaurants? Send it via Twitter @scottreitz, Facebook @ Cityofate or in the comments.

​Robyn Folmar (@Theburbanist): Can someone explain the use of pig's blood in desserts? Heavy or lack of flavor? Congealer? Seeing a lot of it. @beyondthekit @scottreitz

Lots of cultures use of blood in their cooking. Vietnamese pig's blood porridge makes use of large blocks of congealed pigs blood with the consistency of soft tofu. It's also a common addition to charcuterie like the french boudin noir, a sausage whose forcemeat is bound in coagulated pigs blood.

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Dallas Arboretum

​Sunday evening, just hours until Halloween, there were still hundreds of un-sold pumpkins at a local farmers market. It raised the question -- what happens to all the left-behind gourds? Do the extras go to the pie factory? Or are they all just tossed in the dump?

Turns out Libby's, of canned pumpkin-filling fame, gets all their pumpkins from specific farms around Morton, Illinois. Straight from farm-to-can is how they roll, so no pie glory there for the extras.

Farmers who grow pumpkins find more use for them. Ginger Mynatt of Sherman, who is a master gardener and has dabbled in the pumpkin farm business, explained to me how those in the industry handle the extra.

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