A homage to Pickett House

Pickett_House_interior

How far would you go out of your way for a meal? A fairly casual common meal? One that you can whip out at home in less than two hours? How long of a drive would be worth the stead of cooking? How scenic is the route? Sometimes it’s not so much the food that draws one back to a restaurant, given that the food is lovely of course. Sometimes it’s that craving for a bit of simple nature and not artifice, a bit of old fashion and not modernity, just a bit of the familiar unknown. The longer my family lives in the city, the more often we get those cravings. Almost every year now we would make a two-hour drive to the Heritage Village in Woodville for a bowl of chicken and dumpling. And it’s best on a cloudy day of January, when the young pine trees along Highway 190 are at their greenest and fuzziest. We never learned the name of this restaurant. We know where it is, we call it “the chicken and dumpling place”, and that’s enough. But it’s not just chicken and dumpling. It’s an all-you-can-eat country style with fried chicken, […]

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Food and plates

ZsFillingStation_Woodville_TX

Two hours north east of Kingwood is this town Woodville. So peaceful is the thirty-some-mile long hilly road from Livingston to it, a thin ribbon through the verdency. Every year mom and dad find it rewarding to make the drive to eat chicken and dumpling at a local restaurant there, when the wind turns cold and the sky is covered in mesmerizing gray. But this year the pilgrimage took a different turn. We missed the chicken dumpling by half an hour, and starvation is not easily appeased with only a tranquil landscape. We drove further to downtown Woodville, found Jack in the Box and Z’s Fillin Station. It was God’s will? We pulled into Z’s Fillin Station. Long menu. The hostess waited patiently for our order, but exhaustion showed on her face. She was also the cook. The host, big and friendly like any countryman of Texas, eagerly checked on us and was happy when we cleaned our plates. A few men in cowboy boots swaggered in, nodded hi to us. This part of Texas is rural and secluded, but it’s nice precisely because of that. People here are home-folk like the land they’ve settled on. The food, too, […]

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