Tag Archives: Southern

Foodie Finds, Traveling Texas, Waco/McGregor, World's Best Eats

Cool Awards: Best Pies in Texas, Best Breakfast in Waco!

February 9, 2016 Valerie Citrano Leave a comment

Wow! I can’t tell y’all how amazed and humbled we are about the awards and accolades we’ve been receiving lately concerning our restaurant! We wanted to be sure to Thank y’all!

Texas Highway Magazine, the official travel magazine of the state of Texas, named my pies third best in the state! What an honor!! I came in behind two cafes with a long tradition of having some of the best pies for longer than I’ve been alive! I’ll take being the newbie in this prestigious group. They also named The Coffee Shop Cafe one of the 40 Best Small Town Cafe’s in Texas! Crazy awesome, huh!?

Then, the restaurant was was given a readers choice award by Waco Today Magazine for having the best breakfast in Waco! Y’all, if you haven’t come out to The Coffee Shop Cafe for breakfast, you are really missing out! We serve breakfast all day and on weekend mornings we have a totally amazing breakfast buffet! All sorts of eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, pancakes, gravy, fruit and lots more. My favorite, migas, are on the buffet too. It’s over at 10:45 AM on Saturday and Sunday, so come early and hungry!

We want to Thank all our friends and customers for voting for us! Without you, we wouldn’t be where we are today!

We also had a really fun honor when the producers from HGTV’s show, Fixer Upper stopped by and filmed part of our decorations for their Christmas special featuring Chip and Joanna Gaines new bed and breakfast in town, Magnolia House. How fun to see a quick flash of our restaurant on their show! Of course, it went by so fast that if you hadn’t ever been to the restaurant before you would have never even known where it was filmed! Haha! Still super cool for Donald and I and for our regular customers that spotted us! We appreciate all of their business with us too. Lots of wonderful people!

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

All the glory goes to God!

Recipes

Southern Deviled Eggs

March 11, 2015 Valerie Citrano 3 Comments

No southern Sunday supper table would be complete without a beautiful plate of Deviled Eggs. A simple recipe that is perfect beside baked ham for your Easter meal, as an appetizer before a bar-b-que or center stage on your party buffet table.

It doesn’t hurt that eggs are a good source of protein and each of these darling stuffed egg halves are just 51 calories each when you use sugar-free sweet pickles.

Southern Deviled Eggs Recipe — Cut eggs in half. Reserve yolks in bowl.

Southern Deviled Eggs

9 hard boiled eggs

5 tablespoons Miracle Whip

1 tablespoon mustard

3 sweet gherkin pickles, finely chopped

Cut hard boiled eggs in half. Remove yolks and place them in a bowl. Using a fork, smash up the yolks into fine pieces. Add Miracle Whip, mustard and the finely chopped sweet pickles to the egg yolks and mix throughly. Place a heaping tablespoon of yolk mixture in each egg white half. Enjoy!

Store in refrigerator.

Deviled eggs on an antique plate. Doesn’t every southern girl have one that’s been passed down to her? Paired with thick cut bacon for brunch or as an appetizer before a Sunday bar-b-que..

European Travel, Recipes, Traveling Texas, Viking River Cruise, Waco/McGregor

MeeMee’s Texan Goulash

February 25, 2015 Valerie Citrano 4 Comments

I have to make a confession. My “foodie” card may be taken away from me for admitting to this….

All my life, I thought that my grandmother made goulash the Eastern European way. After all, my MeeMee’s mother was German. Why would I have ever had thought differently? I was so wrong! I can’t believe at my age I am just coming to this realization!

My German great great grandmother, Nana.

How did I come to find the real truth about ‘goulash’? You see, my husband and I are planning a trip to Eastern Europe, taking a cruise down the Danube River through Hungary, Austria and Germany. This means that I’ve been doing a lot of research on places to visit including restaurants. I was so looking forward to experiencing a big bowl of goulash in the motherland of my ancestors but the photos on the cafe’s websites looked nothing like the bowls of pasta and ground meat that my MeeMee sat before us at her dining room table.

More research was necessary.

I’ll admit that I was a bit disappointed. Had my own grandmother lied to me all those years? It was the one dish that she made that I had looked forward to her serving on our visits.

I ran across a recipe on the Viking River Cruises website and decided to compare it to the one that I have known all those years. The European version has chunks of meat and no noodles but the spices were very comparable. My grandmother used chili powder and the European recipe using some of the same type spices including paprika.

I realized that the recipe had been changed to acomidate my family’s living in Texas with a growing family. Money was scarce and ground beef was more affordable. Pasta stretched the recipe to fill more hungry bellies. The chili powder had that same smokey flavor as paprika but was more available and affordable in Texas.

I’ll have to tell ya… I still like my MeeMee’s version even if it may not be the ‘real’ thing! I’ll bet y’all will too!

My grandmother's Texan Goulash — My grandmother’s Texan Goulash

MeeMee’s Texan Goulash

2 pounds ground beef

1 bell pepper, diced

1 yellow onion, diced

2 large cans peeled tomatoes (or Rotel tomatoes)

2 small cans tomato sauce

1 tablespoon chili powder

1 teaspoon sugar

Large bag of elbow macaroni

Sauté ground beef on top of stove in frying pan till done. Add diced bell pepper and onion and sauté until onion is almost translucent. Drain grease from pan.

In a Dutch oven, combine meat and vegetable mixture with tomatoes, tomato sauce and spices. Cover and simmer on stove about 20 minutes till bubbly. Meanwhile, boil pasta on stove in heavy saucepan till done. Add pasta to meat and tomato mixture. Taste. Add more chili powder at this point if you’d like.

Serve with crusty bread if you’d like.

Enjoy!

Recipes

Have you tried Chex Mix Baked the original way?

January 19, 2015 Valerie Citrano Leave a comment

Thought I’d share an old recipe that you don’t see baked anymore. The cereal box has a microwave version that may be quicker but I don’t think is as good. My husband’s mom always served a close version of this every Christmas. Hers was always so good and she would send a bit of it home with everyone.

I made this for my snack loving granddaughter and happily, she approved! I’m going to keep this in my kid friendly arsenal for when they visit and maybe even continue my MIL’s tradition.

Baked Chex Mix is is kid approved by my snack lovin' granddaughter! www.Pie LadyLife.com — My snack lovin’ granddaughter approves! Thanks for the picture, mom!

Yep, I’ve made a few changes from the old recipe, adding more butter, spices and Texas pecans instead of mixed nuts. I like wheat and rice cereal but you can use 3 cups each of rice, corn and wheat. That’s the fun of recipes.. To change them up and make them your own!

Baked Chex Mix

2 1/2 sticks butter
4 1/2 cups rice Chex
4 1/2 cups wheat Chex
2 cups bite size pretzels or sticks
2 cups garlic bagel chips, broken into pieces
2 cups Texas pecans
4 tablespoons worsechishier sauce
2 1/2 teaspoons season salt
3/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon onion powder

Preheat oven to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Melt butter in a large Dutch oven or large, deep casserole dish in the oven. Remove from oven. Add spices and worsechishier sauce to melted butter and mix well. Add cereal and remaining items and toss well in butter mixture.

Place in oven and bake for 15 minutes. Remove from oven and stir well. Repeat 3 more times baking a total of one hour. Remove from oven and spread evenly on two paper towel lined cookie sheets to cool. Store in air tight containers. Makes about 12 cups.