In which I am nostalgic (redux)

For a person who claims not to indulge in sentimentality, I seem to be engaging in rather a lot of it lately. I suspect part of it is due to my upcoming trip to Houston. (I am always ambivalent about returning to Texas. I love Virginia, but Texas will always be home. And YET, it's never quite as familiar as I hoped when I go back. Buildings are torn down, new ones are thrown up, roads are re-routed. But that's the cities. I know if I stood on the banks of the cold, green Frio River, nothing would have changed.) Part of my nostalgia is due to watching "Tuna Christmas"--too many familiar accents. And part of it is because I am in a domestic mood and have been flipping through my Texas cookbooks. Here are my favorites:

*Cowgirl Cuisine by Paula Disbrowe. A beautiful, beautiful book. Paula cooks with local ingredients, so there are lots of recipes with mesquite honey and quail and pepitas. It is Hill Country haute cuisine, and every dish is more tempting than the last. This is my very favorite sort of cookbook, beautifully photographed with lots of prose.

*A Cowboy in the Kitchen by Grady Spears. Nothing I have cooked out of this cookbook has been less than extraordinary. Grady's books are chatty and informative, and full of local color. He does a lot of what I refer to as "man cooking", with campfires and home-rigged smokers.

*The Tex-Mex Cookbook by Robb Walsh. Robb Walsh is larger than life and so is his food. I'm not even going to tell you how close this book came to making me sob. It is full of photographs of chili queens and taquerias from historic San Antonio, and loaded with the history of my very favorite cuisine. Robb has written several books, all superb, but this one is my favorite. (I also exchanged a few e-mails with him last year and he is charming.)

Interestingly enough, all three of these estimable writers have traditional margarita recipes, but Grady's gorgeous book, The Texas Cowboy Kitchen, has a recipe for something called La Paloma, a cocktail that just might replace the margarita in my affections. It calls for silver tequila and lime (Key lime, please, not Persian), but instead of Cointreau or Controy, it is mixed with grapefruit juice. I haven't mixed a batch yet because I am saving that for a special occasion. New Year's?