Catherine Downes

If you're a careful diner, you might have noticed the term "compression" attached to a fruit that's featured in your dish or dessert. John Tesar added compressed heirloom tomato slices to a "burger" he fashioned for Eater a few weeks ago, and at Belly and Trumpet, compressed mango is featured in their popular yellowfin tuna dish.

See also:
This Week's Review: Belly and Trumpet

"Compressed" fruits may evoke images of pressure plates, sledgehammers and other more violent treatments, but the technique is actually quite gentle. It involves nothing more than a plastic bag, a vacuum sealer and a little bit of time.

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WOATS

Justin Anderson, founder of WOATS, is one of those granola kind of guys. Here's a fact about granola: It can be like eating tiny bricks sometimes. And if you have braces, the snack can be a downright menacing.

Anderson knows all about that. When he was 16 he bit into some homemade granola and it broke a bracket on his braces, so, he came up with his own recipe for soft granola. Ten years later, Anderson, who went to TCU and now lives in Fort Worth, has not only taken his product to market, but also to a high-flying place few others have ever been.

What does all this have to do with the president of the United States? Last week, when President Obama tied up the byways and flyways in the most congested little city in our fine state (Austin), Anderson was there too as one of the entrepreneurs who got to meet the president.

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It was a gloomy day, so when a friend offered to deliver me lunch I jumped on the opportunity. "Bring me two banh mi sandwiches from Mot Hai Ba, and make sure one of them has pork pâté," I asked. I was curious how the restaurant would package the sandwiches, but I never thought it would be like this.

Each sandwich came carefully wrapped in brown paper. One sandwich was filled with grilled pork and the other with earthy pâte. Both were slathered with just enough mayonnaise. In the larger carryout bag, a smaller white paper bag was filled with fresh, green cilantro leaves. There was also a small, plastic carryout container packed with pickled cucumber and ribbons of daikon and carrot.

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Yesterday I was back at La Banqueta for lunch. While I was waiting for my plate of suadero tacos, I chatted with a few guys who'd stopped in to give the place a try. One of the gentlemen had obviously fallen in love with La Banqueta's delicious street tacos previously, and talked his officemates into trying something new that afternoon. I was sad to see that many of them had ordered chicken tacos for their inaugural La Banqueta meal.

This made me sad because the chicken tacos at La Banqueta are rather forgettable. Compared to the suadero, pastor and cabeza tacos I've fallen in love with, they're actually pretty dismal. In fact chicken tacos at most taquerías around Dallas are usually awful because they're often fashioned from griddled poultry that's cooked until it's as dry as a saltine cracker.

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Sausage orgy

Hopefully you made it to Iron Fork last night. Hopefully you dressed lightly. While massive blowers at the front of the venue did their best, the back of the Dallas Contemporary was quite warm. I'm half convinced that Matt McCallister's sweat was the magical ingredient that propelled the young chef to victory, but I'll let Alice tell that tale in another post. What I want to focus on is all the amazing food I devoured at the event. Honestly, there were some really good bites, starting with that mess of sausage in the picture above.

See also: The People and The Food of Iron Fork 2013

Kuby's sausage plate may not have been the prettiest presentation at Iron Fork, but it was a serious contender for the most delicious. It almost seems odd that the line to Kuby's table was much longer than other participants given the simplicity of their presentation, but that just goes to show that when you carefully cook great ingredients, great things always happen. With a big spoonful of mustard this little sausage party was a really winner. And it was just the beginning.

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foodbitch

Remember the Klondike Choco Taco that Taco Bueno offered back in the day? It held all the same ingredients as a Drumstick with the fun of being taco shaped. Ice cream plus taco equaled good.

But then somewhere around 2009, according to the Internet, Choco Tacos suddenly became hard to find, casting America in a dairy-taco family.

Klondike's original is back in stores now, but if you fear getting hooked on the treats only to have them disappear again, then rejoice, we've found something better. Pokey O's (creators of the customizable cookies-and-ice-cream-sandwich) plans to develop a customizable riff of the Choco Taco simply called the Ice Cream Taco.

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foodbitch

Lemley's Tomatoes salad at Boulevardier

Like I said back in January, I like to experiment with healthy eating every once in a while. And when I do, I love to stumble upon a salad that makes me go mmmm. In honor of Salad Month (or is it BBQ Month?), here is a list of salads to try next time you get a hankerin' for health.

SEE ALSO: 13 Dallas Spots for Healthy Foods That Don't Suck

1. Lemley's Tomatoes salad at Boulevardier (above)
This stunner combines Lemley's tomatoes, burrata, arugula, pistou, balsamic, olive oil, sel gris and grilled baguette. I think the magic is in the pistou, but I'll let you decide.

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Tumblr

Dear Reader: Before you load up to fire off a comment about this post on our food blog, just stare at this picture and count to 10.

I'm currently building a baby, and I realize that in addition to the gift of life, I've got this awesome placenta that's brewing in me, too. I'm told I have some choices to make about what I want to do with it when it, uh, comes out of the smoker. I'm all about the locavore movement, and it doesn't get any more local than I-made-it-in-me, right?

See also:
- The Charmin Bears Must Die
- My Lady Parts and I Have a Few Questions for the Makers of Bic For Her Pens

Brittany Wackowski, a placenta encapsulation specialist in Dallas, tells me that placenta encapsulation offers "a natural hormone replacement, made by Mom, at a time when she needs it most." She tells me that placenta ingestion has several benefits. "It can reduce postpartum fatigue, increase milk supply for breast feeding moms, lessen post-labor bleeding. It offers a boost in vitamins (namely Iron). Ingestion of placenta can help a mom prevent PPD altogether. It's a more balanced, more energetic, yet at the same time, relaxed recovery."

But, "Why encapsulate this and take it like a vitamin when I could smoke it in a real smoker, throw it on the grill or make it into casserole," thought so many people on the Internet, apparently. I Googled "placenta recipes" in order to see if anyone on the World Wide Web had ever made placenta pastrami, and that's when I found these words: "The Best Placenta Recipes On The Internet!" and these "It's a fine placenta sausage topping."

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LDD

While soaking in the good times and general merriment just west of downtown Fort Worth at Untapped this weekend, I discovered something that all you legion of Buc-ee's Beaver Nuggets followers should note. There's some local competition, and it's pretty good.

See also:
Beaver Nuggets, the Debate

Sisters Andrea and Jennifer Kerwin were peddling bags (and small samples, thanks) of golden-amberish, slightly salted, sweet, puffs of caramel. "Are these Beaver Nuggets?" I asked and immediately wished I could've pulled those words back into mouth. Just didn't feel right.

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Flickr

I first noticed them on a salad at Urbano Café: smaller, bright crimson tomatoes that exploded with flavor in my mouth. These weren't the cottony, faded-red orbs I've been eating since last November. They tasted like the summer to come.

If you're a tomato freak you've likely noticed it too. Some of these smaller tomatoes are really starting to wake up. The full-size fruits we like to slice for sandwiches are still dormant. Even J.T. Lemeley's tomatoes at the farmers market (they're grown in a green house for the first part of the year) taste forgettable right now. But the little guys are really hitting their stride.

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