I had totally forgotten about some pictures I took of my wife trying out a new recipe for crab cakes she had seen while watching a segment on KENS-5 the weekend of Easter. Coming off of our trip from Florida and my yammering on and on about the Deviled Crabs, she saw this segment where a Chef from The Quarry Restaurant showed viewers how to make their special crab cakes.
Being good sports, we made up a shopping list and off we went to the HEB to get some crab and other stuff so we could whip up some crab cakes.
Now keep in mind, we had no idea what we were doing, but it seemed pretty easy. You just mix in the ingredients, turn the mixture into patties (or cakes) and fry them up, right?
But something crazy happened. The mixture was so runny that my wife came up with a conspiracy theory about the chef telling the viewers on TV the wrong directions so that they could never recreate his masterpiece, and they would be forced to go over to The Quarry and pay high dollar fro some real crab cakes. The recipe called for 2 cups of mayonnaise. Doesn't that sound like a lot of mayo for something that is supposed to be healthy?
So off to HEB I went to grab more cans of crab meat. And I might point out that crab meat is not cheap. I was thinking to myself that for what it was costing us to experiment with this recipe, we probably could go and pay the chef to whip up a few for us to try.
Anyway, with the consistency just about right, I made up a little ball of crab and put it in a pan of hot grease. Right away, my wife told me that A) there was too much oil in the pan, and 2) the oil was way to hot. I would show you a picture of the hard, blackened ball of burnt crab, but I was a little busy checking the status of our fire extinguisher. 
We decided that since we weren't going to be actually eating the crab cakes until the next day anyway, we would let the stuff sit overnight in the fridge and make them in the morning. This actually did the trick. When we made the crab cake patties, they stayed together, and this time, my wife manned the frying pan with a very small amount of oil to cook on.
In the end, they were so incredibly good, I felt like the $20 or so I spent on cans of crab meat was well worth it. Honestly, they were simply awesome.
Okay, so why am I bringing up the crab cakes from three weeks ago now? I was reading the Express-News food section yesterday and I saw that Karen Haram did a review on the The Quarry Restaurant. For those people who don't want to read the entire review, they have a little column with the highlights. It lists things such as the prices, location, hours etc, and they also have a Hit and a Miss section. The crab cakes came out as a Miss. Ouch!
I promise you, Eva's crab cakes were a Hit, even if the chef tried to trick her on the recipe.
My wife was reading in the San Antonio Express-News Food section and saw the review on a place called Two Bros. BBQ Market that sounded pretty good. As the review reports, this place was opened by some ritzy restaurant guy, Jason Dady who has a few other places around town - Bin 555 and Tre Trattoria. Yea, I'll stick to checking out the BBQ place, someone else can report on the others.
Anyway, we decided to make the drive over and find out what all the fuss was about. I'll tell you up front, we have sort of mixed feelings about the place; some real positives and some real negatives.
When you get there, you find that Two Bros. is hidden behind another restaurant, a Mexican place called El Bosque. Pull in just beyond and you will find Two Bros.
What we found right off the bat was that parking can present a situation. The place was not crowded at all (based on the amount of available seating), but the parking situation was already troublesome. Perhaps they will buy out El Bosque and pave over it for more parking. Part of the issue was that people parked really goofy. The three vehicles you see above right were all parked over two rows of slots each. Maybe they need valet parking.
Anyway, as soon as you pull into the lot, the wonderful aroma of BBQ hits you. It really does smell good. We walked in and the building is very inviting; nothing to make you think you are in a ritzy place, yet everything is clean, well organized and something I especially liked, there was no uncomfortable guessing about what you were supposed to do.
I have mentioned before that I often feel pressured into making a snap decision on my order because I don't fully grasp the way they menu options work or have time to figure out what I want. In this case, they use the line to get you started with drink options (beer & sodas), but with a sign letting you know that iced tea, lemonade and other stuff is available at the register. They made that sign for me. On the wall are well laid out menus showing packages you can get or, as I like, vittles by the pound. The sides are clearly identified as are the desserts and such.
When it is your turn to order, the guy asks for your name, then takes the order and prints out a receipt. From there, you take your receipt to a second register where you pay and pick up any other drinks you need. As you wait to hear your name called for the order, you can be grabbing your plastic ware, pickles, jalapenos, napkins and drink lids etc.
One thing we did note is that they do not have a speaker outside for the folks sitting on the awesome patio to hear their name called. This resulted in hearing an extremely loud guy yell "Bob!" about 10 times before someone else went and popped out the door to the patio and yelled for Bob to come get his food.
Speaking of the outside patio, it really is nice. Lots of picnic tables to sit at and things were not cramped at all. And of course, two things you cannot miss are the smoke house or the huge play area for the kids to climb on while mommy and daddy toss back a few cold ones.
Inside, I noticed a few trees that stayed when construction began. One was behind our order taker, the other here, by the door to the patio had all sorts of wine bottle corks around it. Fancy, yet homey.
About the food. We ordered 1/4 pound of brisket, 1/2 bound of pork ribs, 2 chicken thighs and small portions of sides: Mac & Cheese, beans, potato salad, and creamed corn.
I love yard bird. This texture was fine, I just didn't care for the taste. And even with their sauce, (which I did not care for), it wasn't much better. My wife was okay with the chicken. I thought the pork ribs were pretty good but my wife felt like they had used some sort of chili powder rub or something on them, giving them a uniquely bad taste. Go figure. We both agreed that the brisket was pretty good, but we also agreed that we had had much, much better. Is it possible that they are trying to turn good down home BBQ into something fancy?
A perfect case in point: the beans. They had these barbecued beans that tasted weird. I overheard another customer asking the grill man what was in the beans and he said it was peaches. Okay, but it wasn't the peaches that gave them the over the top too ritzy for their own good taste. Blech.
The potato salad was very good, the cream corn was really good and the mac & cheese was just okay. 
Finally, I recalled from the Express-News review that they simply raved about the
"cream-cheese-stuffed, bacon-wrapped smoked jalapenos". Puhleez. This is one of the standards that I make whenever we grill outdoors and I promise, mine are bigger, better and served hotter. Unless money grows on trees for you, don't waste the $6.00.
Which reminds me. The prices were not bad at all. I'd say that for the amount of food we got - and yes, we did take a full box of food home - Two Bros. was priced consistent with most other BBQ places we have been to.
Bottomline: If you live on that side of town, or just happen to be in the area, by all means, stop in and give Two Bros a try. But if you just must have some good BBQ, whether it be in the form of chicken, brisket, ribs or whatever, I'd unconditionally recommend Augie's Barbed Wire Smoke House over Two Bros. BBQ Market.
If you happened to pick up the San Antonio Express-News for Saturday the 30th of August, you may have seen the brief article on the opening of the Terrific Tree houses exhibit at the San Antonio Botanical Gardens. Well, just so happens that on Friday, my wife and I made a trip to Funston off Broadway, to see the exhibit for ourselves, but without the ruffles and flourishes required of an opening.
Let me cut quickly to the chase on two important items: First, my wife has been trying to get me to go to SABG for years and each time, I simply have balked at the idea because I figured it involved more goofy flowers than an HEB on Valentines Day, and second, I took more pictures in the hour or two that we wandered through this place than I have in any single location we have written about since starting this blog.
So to answer my first complaint, it isn't all goofy flowers. This is a place that you can go to enjoy a relaxing walk, get some incredible ideas for your own landscaping at home, and enjoy some nice art.
And on the issue of taking lots of pictures, I couldn't possibly narrate our entire visit through the park, but if you'd like to see the pictures I took (either to avoid the entrance fee, or just to check it out before you actually go), I offer you a rare glimpse of my Flickr page. Have at it.
I'm only going to hit the high points and I'll let you explore this beautiful place on your own. So, a few administrative items are in order. First, the adult admission is well worth the $7.00 but if you are military, a senior citizen or any number of other qualifying census data markers, you can get a discount. I paid $5.00, my wife had to pay $7.00. Ha Ha!
Also, we hit it on a weekday and the sky was overcast. I would bet that if you visited during a period of heavy traffic like during a school field trip, it would be noisy, and in the heat of the day, it would really suck. Enjoy the pictures.
When you enter through the Sullivan Carriage House, you will see a nice gift shop and restaurant. My daughter ad her husband have dined at the Carriage House and really enjoyed it, though pricey to them, but we skipped it for a later lunch treat.
Once we entered the actual gardens, it was as if being transformed from the hustle and bustle of San Antonio and the harsh Alamo Heights traffic into a really peaceful, well, Botanical Garden. Okay, to be honest, at first I was underwhelmed. We went off into the Rose Garden. Coincidentally, I've been working in my own rose garden at the house, and though this place was 1,000 times better than mine, hell, at least my landscape timbers are in better shape. But it gets better.
I really enjoyed the Fountain Plaza, though I was unable to get a good photo of it due to the extraneous people and pop-up canopies in place preparing for the opening on Saturday.
We went in to the Japanese Garden and that was a real treat. I loved the rocks, the streams and the path. Oh, and stay off the grass!
From there, we moved on to the Lucile Halsell Conservatory where there are several different pavillions containing different types of plants. If you have ever driven by the area and have seen the tall glass structures, this is where the plants are.
In addition to the plants and trees and ferns and cacti, the entire SABG has various artistic designs and sculptures and such incorporated into the gardens. You don't have to do a school report on it after the fact, so go ahead and enjoy the beauty without all the associated anxiety of trying to guess what it means.
I did really enjoy the fern grotto because the day was beginning to warm up and inside, the combination of the waterfall and some strategically placed fans and air vents, it was a cool respite from the humidity that was building up.
I suppose each of the little enclosed areas is some sort of different gardening experiment. They control the climate inside to allow them to focus on different areas so you can go from a desert environment to a tropical garden from one building to the next. It really is enjoyable to see. And it isn't just rows and rows of plants like walking through a nursery; the gardens themselves are art.
Atop a hill overlooking a beautiful lawn (I guess this is where they hold concerts), is an interesting structure. At times the place looks like a golf course, and at other times, you feel like you are in a Disney park with the really nice detail of landscaping and water features.
And at the top of this Overlook, you can see the San Antonio skyline several miles away. It's interesting that, until I got to the top and saw beyond the boundaries of the gardens, I had completely lost myself in the place. You don't hear traffic and since we went a a day where no school field trips were in progress, we really didn't hear much of anything aside from birds and the occasional buzzing bee.
Speaking of field trips and kids, we did walk by the Children's Vegetable Garden which is a program to teach kids how to, well, grow veggies. They apparently give each kid some plants, they farm them and then maybe later they eat them. Sounds like a hoot.
In spite of all the beautiful flowers and plants and sculptures and things, my favorite place in the entire gardens was the East Texas Pineywoods setting surrounding a nice sized pond. The path is not made of cement or stepping stones, but instead it is the natuarl pine needles that cover the trail.
And the pond is a thing of beauty, so quiet and really, calming. If I was a homeless guy, I'd sell some blood, pay my way into this place and just hang out here all day long. It really is incredible.
If it wasn't just wonderful enough, we seemed to become the interest of this little herd of woodducklings, no doubt assuming we had a quarter's worth of feed from a dispenser on the other side of the pond.
Oh, I guess you'd like to see the treehouses. And this is the thing; the tree houses aren't exactly in trees - in fact a few of them weren't anywhere near trees. I guess they did this as a safety thing, because afterall, what kid on a field trip could resist climbing into a tree house so as to smoke a few cigarettes or take a quick hit from his pocket flask, and then all hell would break loose.
This one was really nice, called Inspirational Treehouse. I could see this in my back yard. Unitl it got windy.
This one is called The Windcatcher. It seems to be made of PVC pipe hanging from the tree with little windmills attached to the pipes. They say that if you were to sit inside, you would here a nice humming sound from the breeze. I also get that at my house everytime I'm working in the yard and the Air Conditioner turns on. But this is prettier.
This was my wife's favorite. The Re-Born treehouse is made of recycled materials. Of all the displays, this is the treehouse you would want if you were a kid.
The Greek Revival Sandbox. Okay. Imagine the tree.
Our Green Treehouse has a solar panel on the top of it. How green. I'm sure kids are cutting in line to hang out here.
This one is called Bamboo Pavilion. And you can use it to change your clothes.
There were a few more treehouses on display that either didn't catch my fancy or they looked more like sculptures than treehouses that I didn't realize they were part of the show. Likewise, there are several other areas in the gardens, but in the interest of time I'm skipping over, but you can check out the pictures page or better yet, visit SABG for yourself. It really was a great time.
Now keep in mind, we had no idea what we were doing, but it seemed pretty easy. You just mix in the ingredients, turn the mixture into patties (or cakes) and fry them up, right?
But something crazy happened. The mixture was so runny that my wife came up with a conspiracy theory about the chef telling the viewers on TV the wrong directions so that they could never recreate his masterpiece, and they would be forced to go over to The Quarry and pay high dollar fro some real crab cakes. The recipe called for 2 cups of mayonnaise. Doesn't that sound like a lot of mayo for something that is supposed to be healthy?
We decided that since we weren't going to be actually eating the crab cakes until the next day anyway, we would let the stuff sit overnight in the fridge and make them in the morning. This actually did the trick. When we made the crab cake patties, they stayed together, and this time, my wife manned the frying pan with a very small amount of oil to cook on.
In the end, they were so incredibly good, I felt like the $20 or so I spent on cans of crab meat was well worth it. Honestly, they were simply awesome.
