The Homesick Texan Took the Ultimate Queso Road Trip for Her New Cookbook

You may know Lisa Fain for her Homesick Texan blog and cookbooks. Well, add a new title: the queso queen of Texas.Her latest book, Queso! Regional recipes for the world's favorite chile-cheese dip (Ten Speed Press, $15), is the definitive guide to melted cheese and chiles across the Lone Star state.Fain answered some of life's deepest queso questions by phone from her home in New York. Can you live on queso? Shoot, yeah. Can you plan a road trip around queso? Yes, and we want to come. What if you wanted to do a queso potluck? The options are limited only by the number of friends you have.Fain says while she was researching recipes, "I ate queso every day for four months straight, and I lost weight." Some of those were three-a-days -- queso breakfast, lunch and supper. Because that happens, even if you're not writing a book.Queso is so much more than melted Velveeta and Ro-Tel. The hunt for recipes took Fain from deep in Southern New Mexico, along the Texas border to Corpus Christi, and to most of the large cities in the state. She uncovered everything from crawfish queso (East Texas) to chile con queso sausage balls (all of Texas). There's a queso with cactus, and an Indian queso with jalapeño chutney ("such a new Texas thing").Lisa Fain will be in Dallas on Nov. 7 for a book signing from 7-9 p.m. at Interabang Books, 10720 Preston Road, Dallas. You can also hear an interview with ain at noon Oct. 10 on KERA's "Think." She joins host Krys Boyd to talk about the flavors specific to Texas.   Continue reading...

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