The West Side of San Antonio, Texas is the heartland of the city's Tejano population, a barrio whose Spanish traditions go back to the Alamo and way beyond. Nevertheless, denizens of this colorful and richly cultural neighborhood prefer to be called simply Mexicans, and their cuisine includes, not only contemporary dishes from Mexico, but the Tex-Mex cooking created by immigrants who, like new Italian-Americans, arrived to find that certain foods they depended on were missing, and others (lots of beef, white flour, and scary cheese among them), were available cheaply and in abundance. Here are some photos I took in the San Antonio barrio not long ago.

Ramps--also known as Allium tricoccum or wild leeks--are one of the most pungent plants known to humankind. They're found wild in the forest beginning in early April, sometimes extending into early May. So appealing are they to some people, that Rapunzel's mom traded her for a fistful of them, resulting in the golden-haired beauty being locked in a tower.

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Next week, Weekend Special will continue with its series Great Barbecues of Texas, but this week our subject will be the pagan symbolism of the rabbit in seasonal Easter art. So sit back, put your smoking jacket on and your feet up, and enjoy our gallery.

My great good luck in chasing down eats in Baltimore a few weeks a go led me and a pal to make a brazen assault on Philadelphia this weekend.

By the time Luling was founded in 1874 as a station on the Galveston, Harrison, and San Antonio railroad, it was already one of the wildest towns in the Wild West, frequented by outlaws like Sam Bass and John Wesley Hardin, with a red-light district on the edge of the municipality known as Dogtown.

There's no question that Kreuz Market (pronounced "Krites" by the locals) is the world's most famous barbecue. Or maybe it's the world's two most famous barbecues. I say that because, in 1999, following a disagreement between the son and daughter of Edgar "Smitty" Schmidt--who bought the market from the Kreuz family in 1948--had a falling out, and the original Kreuz split into two. The brother took the name and started a barn-like new place out on the highway that runs to Austin, which is the barbecue called Kreuz Market today.

We've never had a better year for snowpeople. So much snow, such wet snow. Snow figures have been appearing all over Greenwich Village, and here's a small sampling.

In 2004, I visited two barbecues in Houston while working on a story for Gourmet about West African restaurants around the country. Both barbecues are now sadly closed. Like people, dead barbecues need to be eulogized so we don't forget them.

In many ways, the Salt Lick Bar-B-Que in Driftwood, Texas is the odd man out among Central Texas barbecues.

The town of Taylor, Texas, was founded in 1876 just as the Great Northern Railroad burned through the area laying track on the way to Austin. The east-west axis of the town still lies along those tracks--broad, dusty streets with Victorian and Art Nouveau buildings lining them. The town was in the center of what was said to be the richest cotton land in the world, and it prospered mightily well into the mid-1900's, when the declining fortunes of the railroad and subsiding cotton prices gutted the industry. The town is still lively compared to many, and part of the credit must go to Louie Mueller Barbecue, which sits just across the road from the railroad tracks in a building that was a high school gymnasium long ago.