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Gumbo—it doesn’t get much more Louisiana style than that. Louisiana is a prototype for the melting pot of cultures that defines this country; this hearty dish alone can count the cuisines of West Africa, France, and Italy among its influences. Both the Creole and Cajun communities have laid claim to this spicy seafood stew, and I’ve appropriated a bit from each in this version: the Creole comes in with the tomatoes—that’s the Italian presence making itself known—and the Cajun of course is present in the spicy pork andouille sausage. Okra is a traditional gumbo component, and it’s usually cooked into the body of the soup. I like the flavor but find that the texture can be a bit slimy. Deep-fried cornmeal-crusted rings of okra solve that problem deliciously.

This casserole is a lot like the man who invented it—larger than life, over the top, and guaranteed to make you happy. Bud’s the name behind Royers Round Top Café, a “contemporary comfort food” oasis in, no surprise—Round Top, a 1 1/2-hour drive from Austin—that serves up heaping portions and Bud’s famous pies. Bud’s casserole is a side dish that’s hearty enough to qualify as a main course, and a great option if you have vegetarian guests coming for dinner.

For Southerners like me, there’s not a better meal on the planet than cornbread, beans, and greens cooked with lots of bacon. I know a lot of good old ranch cooks who feel the same. There wasn’t much green to eat for cowboys on the range, but beans cooked with salt pork were common. So common, in fact, that cowboy nicknames for beans were many: Mexican strawberries, prairie strawberries, and whistle berries. But the funniest of all, recorded in Ramon F. Adams’s book Come an’ Get It, was “deceitful beans ’cause they talk behind yore back.”

Lou Lambert, another one of my chef friends who grew up on a ranch, now owns two Texas restaurants—Lamberts Downtown Barbecue in Austin, and Lambert’s steak house in Fort Worth. Lou got the idea for his seared chickpeas when he was a kid growing up on the family ranch near Odessa. “We had a camp cook who would make hominy loaded with chili powder and garlic. I adapted his dish with chickpeas. I originally put this on the menu at the first Lambert’s on South Congress, and it has been a mainstay at all the restaurants since.” I’ve been coveting this recipe ever since I first tasted it at Lou’s first restaurant. Now that I have it, I know it will become a mainstay for me, too, especially when I have some entertaining to do.

Cowboy nicknames for their cattle-drive cooks—biscuit shooter, dough puncher, and dough belly—suggest how important sourdough biscuits were to hungry, range-riding wranglers. No self-respecting chuck wagon cook traveled without a dough keg for his prized sourdough starter, the fermented yeast needed to make sourdough biscuits. I covered this macaroni and cheese with a generous blanket of buttered sourdough breadcrumbs in honor of chuck wagon cooks of the past. The rest has little to do with old-time chuck wagon cooking, but I don’t know a modern cowboy or anyone else who would turn down a bubbling pan of freshly baked mac and cheese.

Stuffed quail sizzling on the grill is a common sight at many a West Texas barbecue. A lot of my friends use a shotgun to bag their quail, but I snag mine on the Internet from The Diamond H Ranch in Bandera, Texas (www.texasgourmetquail.com), where they raise the birds and process them, too. They come vacuum-packed and ready for cooking, with the back, breast, and thigh bones removed. All I have to do is stuff them with a spicy chile-cheese mixture, wrap them up with a piece of bacon, and then put ’em on the grill. I finish them off with a jalapeño jelly glaze just before serving. In all, a mighty nice dinner treat to share with friends.

Tom Perini started as a chuck wagon cook. Ten years later, in 1983, he opened The Perini Ranch Steakhouse on the family spread in Buffalo Gap, not too far from Abilene. After twenty-five years, his business is still going strong. Tom has cooked all over the country, including the White House, and he still takes his 1850svintage chuck wagon to rodeos and other events throughout Texas. Chicken-fried steak is one of my all-time favorites, and I knew exactly where to go for a genuine rendition. Tom gave me permission to adapt this recipe from his book Texas Cowboy Cooking. He says, “Cream gravy is a must with chicken-fried steak.” No argument there, so I’ve included his gravy recipe too.

I met chef Kevin Stewart and his partner, Richard Cordray, at my friend Loncito Cartwright’s South Texas ranch. Kevin prepared this dish using Loncito’s grass-fed lamb and I asked for the recipe, named after Kevin and Richard’s former Marfa restaurant, Blue Javalina. Wild packs of javalinas—compact, coarse-haired, piglike animals with short snouts—roam the high plains of West Texas. Javalinas do not come in blue, nor do they make for great eating. Loncito’s lamb is a different story. His grass-fed lamb has a mild taste that appeals to even the most reluctant lamb eater. It is available at select farmers’ markets and specialty foods stores throughout Texas.

I’ve yet to meet a man—Texan or otherwise—who can resist these meltingly tender short ribs. (Most women can’t either, but they tend not to eat as many.) Serve them over a pile of creamy cornmeal mush and you’ll have a party full of satisfied customers. At one gathering, I asked a group of guys how many ribs they thought they’d eat. The majority estimated that three would be plenty. They changed their tunes after taking a few bites and revised the number upward to four or five—and they kept their word. Short ribs come in varying sizes, so I figure about a pound per person, especially if my guest list includes a bunch of guys with big appetites.

Years ago, my dad owned a Honeybee Ham store, which he bought mostly as a tax write-off—until my sister Mary Jane got involved, that is. She took over the kitchen and started making, among other things, her fabulous bean soup for the store’s little front-of-the-house café. Business took off. But my father, whose main business was swimming pool contracting, finally sold it. Until he did, for years we had ham for every occasion—parties, family reunions, holidays. After that, I didn’t eat ham for a while. My little sister died suddenly last year, and I recently found her handwritten bean soup recipe in an old notebook. Serve it with my iceberg wedges (page 219) and Sweet Potato Biscuits (page 239), and you’ve got an easy, fortifying meal fit for a group of friends or family on a cool winter evening. Don’t forget that the beans need overnight soaking before cooking.

I’m betting it took a strong stomach to handle what cowboys called son-of-a-bitch stew, a concoction that included cow innards, even, and especially, the guts. “A son-of-a-bitch might not have any brains and no heart, but if he ain’t got guts he ain’t a son-of-a bitch” is the old cowboy saying. Known as son-of-a-gun stew in polite company, the dish was standard chuck wagon fare and said to include everything from a young calf but “the hair, horns, and holler.” According to Come an’ Get It: The Story of the Old Cowboy Cook by the late western folklorist Ramon F. Adams, the real thing did not include any vegetables save perhaps a “skunk egg,” cowboy slang for onion. I guess the only thing that my stew has in common with the cowboy favorite—and I know I am stretching things here—is my use of venison, just about as accessible to many of us Texans as the calves were to cowboys on the range. Everyone around here shoots deer, and many of my friends have freezers full of venison to prove it. If you don’t, feel free to substitute beef stewing meat. You can make this stew up to 3 days in advance, or freeze it for up to 3 weeks.

My dear friend Paula Disbrowe, cookbook author, chef, and general partner in cooking, partying, and eating, created this recipe. She says, “Don’t be fooled by the term salad. This gigantic tumble of ingredients creates an incredibly satisfying meal, with big, bold flavors that will satisfy friends and ranch hands alike. Be sure to remove any wilted or bruised outer leaves from the head of romaine, so you only use the crisp, sweet inner leaves in your salad.” This salad calls for jalapeño cornbread croutons (page 241). Bake them up first and let them cool while you prepare the rest of the recipe.

Good redneck that he is, John Pennell says he started making sausage out of every critter he hunted. Apparently that wasn’t enough, and he turned to making it out of quail purchased from nearby Diamond H Ranch in Bandera, Texas, a leading quail breeder and processor. Soon John’s sausage became so popular that he chucked a sixteen-year stint in construction to concentrate on a new business: Uncle John’s Quail Sausage. He ships his sausage all over the country and supplies numerous Texas restaurants (mine included) with his delicious quail links. Uncle John’s getting pretty well known in these parts, but I’m just as big a fan of his wife, Lanette, leader of Almost Patsy Cline, one of the area’s top party bands. A vocalist, songwriter, and bassist, she and fellow vocalist and keyboardist Vicki Gillespie started the band in 2002. The duo got so many requests for covers of country legend Patsy Cline’s songs that they named their band after her. As the band’s popularity grew, they brought in artists Larry Nolen (guitars, vocals), Bryan Kibbe (guitars, vocals) and Rick Reynolds (drums, vocals), expanding the group’s repertoire to include the music of numerous male legends. I’d sure like to have Almost Patsy Cline at my next party. On the menu, of course, would be Uncle John’s quail sausage on skewers, making it easy to grab a bite and keep on dancing.

I fancy myself to be part Cajun, not surprising since I grew up on the Texas-Louisiana border. When entertaining, I often include a little something with Cajun flair. My Shreveport-born friend Mary Cunningham feels the same way. She served these at a recent dinner party in her home and happily shared her recipe (once she figured out what she did and wrote it down, that is). Like many accomplished home cooks I know, Mary rarely measures, cooking by taste and feel. I’ve adapted her recipe and created a cornbread crust to go with it. Depending on where you live, it may be tough to find crayfish. It can be ordered online, but if necessary, substitute an equal amount of chopped, fresh shrimp.

These delicate, pale-green avocado pancakes come from my former big-city life as executive pastry chef at Anthony’s, owned by Tony Vallone, one of Houston’s top restaurateurs. The recipe for these savory pancakes was shared by a sous chef there, and I fell in love with them. We served them with crab and pico de gallo. In this version, I top them with homemade crème fraîche and trout caviar, a gorgeous, orange, medium-grained roe. (It is also more reasonably priced than many caviars and sustainably raised.) Incredibly simple, the pancakes must be made at the last minute and served warm.

Puffy tacos have become modern-day icons of the San Antonio food scene. You can find the meat-filled, deep-fried corn tortillas throughout the Alamo City and—believe it or not—on the baseball field, too, where Henry, the Puffy Taco, serves as a mascot for the San Antonio Mission, a minor league team. I propose a build-your-own puffy taco party, where guests crowd into the kitchen to feast on hotfrom-the-skillet tacos stuffed with bison chili, a dab of guacamole, and whatever other fixings you set out. Ask friends to act as revolving fry cooks, so nobody gets stuck by the stove for too long, and in the meantime, assign others to shake up batches of Silver Bullet Margaritas (page 175). Diana Barrios Trevino, friend and the restaurateur behind San Antonio’s La Hacienda de los Barrios, gave me permission to use her famous puffy taco recipe. It was the recipe that beat TV chef Bobby Flay in a puffy taco “throwdown” staged for Flay’s popular Food Network show. If you can find fresh masa dough, use it to make the tortillas. Otherwise, dried masa mix will work just fine.

My mom was a veteran entertainer, and the Mexican décor of her home often influenced the menu. She insisted on doing things ahead and served a favorite casserole she called “sopa” at informal dinner parties. I never understood why she used the Spanish word for soup as the name of her casserole, but after browsing through several Texas community cookbooks, I discovered that a commonly used ingredient in a similar chicken tortilla casserole was condensed soup—cream of chicken, celery, or mushroom. Frankly, my inner chef’s code of conduct means I’d sooner come face to face with an ornery Texas longhorn than serve a casserole with a condensed soup base to my guests. But I remember loving my mom’s party sopa, and since she didn’t leave me her recipe, I created this meal-in-a-dish in her honor. I’ve nixed the soup shortcut, but I’m all for picking up a rotisserie chicken from the local market to ease the workload. Best of all, the casserole can be made ahead and refrigerated or frozen—on party day, just slide it in the oven.

For those who don’t speak Tex-Mex, chile gravy is a smooth sauce made with reconstituted dried chiles, broth, flour or some other thickener, and fat. The canned version—enchilada sauce—is stacked in grocery aisles all over the country. It’s worth the effort to make homemade, though, because fresh chile gravy is about as far from the canned stuff as Texas is from Toronto. I serve my cheese enchiladas topped with gravy, diced yellow or sweet onions, and sides of refried beans (page 161) and Rosa’s Mexican Rice (page 161).

My old friend David Garrido, a supremely talented chef, came up with a fresh take on mole that combines guajillo chiles with fresh basil, bananas, and dates to create a lively, fruit-sweetened sauce that marries beautifully with chicken. I love this dish for a relaxed but elegant dinner party at home. Skinny bi***es take note: the dish contains little fat, lots of flavor.

I’m always trying to get Rosa to make chiles rellenos for the bakery’s lunch special. Customers love them and they always sell out. But they are messy and a lot of work. Even after you’ve roasted and peeled the chiles and finished making the meat filling, you’re only halfway there: they still need dipping in egg-white batter, individual deep-frying, and an immediate mouth to feed, because nobody likes cold chiles rellenos. I complained about this to Yvonne Bowden, a favorite party-throwing partner. She told me about a relleno casserole that bypassed the deep fryer. It’s still a lot of work, but the casserole configuration is more party friendly. We worked on the dish together and Fiesta Chiles Rellenos were born. Serve with small bowls of Beans a la Charra (page 150).