Moist, savory, smoked brisket that falls to pieces in your mouth. Tangy, smokey, homemade jalapeño sausage. Tender new potatoes swimming in a cup of warm butter. A grilled chicken sandwich served on two halves of a garlicky, deep fried donut. Handmade lemon cream popsicles dipped in white chocolate and dusted with toasted coconut.

And we’ve been trying to eat light.

The food here is delicious but, I fear, deadly unless one exercises some restraint. And restraint seems to be in particularly short supply in the Lone Star State. Everything is bigger in Texas, including appetites… and waistlines.

Creative

Our most entertaining meal was at an Italian place in San Antonio where our dog, Zora (and Maureen’s blue eyes), charmed our server, Esteban—a Colombian refugee whose brother had been murdered by the 1990s cocaine cartels—to the point where he started bringing us free beer and bottles of sparkling wine, then showed off his hand-painted pizza boxes while tearfully proclaiming his faith that America, the shining light of the world, would soon find its inner goodness again.

Confusing

Our most confusing dining experience, however, was ordering barbecue at a roadhouse behind a gas station here in Austin, where we struggled to figure out what we needed to ask the cashier for (meat and hot sides, it turned out), what we needed to procure ourselves from the cold cases (beer, soda, slaw, and dessert), and what was simply not available (plates of any sort, as dinner was eaten off sheets of butcher paper lining a plastic soda crate). The cashier rolled her eyes so hard at our inability to master the barbecue buying process that I thought she was having a seizure.

Concerning

And then there was that donut sandwich. Last night, after watching the Austin bats put on their nightly show emerging en masse from the Congress Street Bridge, we ate a late dinner at Gourdough’s Public House, which is famous (infamous?) for making donuts a staple item in just about everything on the menu. The marquee appetizer is a donut stuffed with mozzarella cheese. Salads come with donuts instead of croutons. Burgers and sandwiches are served between piping hot donut halves. And, of course, you can get all sorts of decadent, donutty desserts buried under fudge sauce or filled with cheesecake or otherwise pushed past the point of caloric insanity.

Tomorrow we will waddle our way out of Austin. But not before meeting a former colleague of Maureen’s for lunch today, when we’ll get another shot at trying to order barbecue without humiliating ourselves, and then dining with a Bay Area friend who happens to be in town for work.

Not to worry, though. I’m sure we’ll be eating much more healthily at our next destination: New Orleans. That’s a town that’s known for moderation in all things, right?