3 bullets on food

Some random stuff before I head off to New York:

• I think I've found the best barbeque sauce in the world. My mom's family comes from the part of South Carolina that uses mustard as the base for their BBQ sauce, and I'm partial to Mathews (which I think is from Saluda). I never thought that it would be replaced in my sauce hierarchy by a sauce from Texas, but it has. I'll be the first to say that Texans get a lot wrong about BBQ, including the feature animal (cow) and sauce base (tomato), but the folks at The Salt Lick in Austin are on to something great: a mustard based sauce with good tang, a touch of sweetness, and just the right amount of vinegar. I've been told their BBQ is also good, and if it's half as good as the sauce it's worth your trouble to acquire some.
• Many moons ago I complained about the lack of decent yogurt around here. Well, my favorite market started selling Stonyfield, which is great. What's weird is that I've been eating a lot of the caramel yogurt. It seems pretty strange to have "caramel" on the bottom as opposed to "peaches" on the bottom.
  
• Cheeks are hot. Huan experimented with halibut cheeks several times, and they were fantastic. Then on New Year's Eve I had a pasta dish with pork jowl. Now the New York Times just ran a story about to towns in Italy that have competing versions of a dish based on, you guessed it pork jowl. And it turns out that one of the few places you can get cured, unsmoked pork jowl in America is in Seattle. I'll let you know how it goes.