SHOW & RECIPE FOR NOV. 3

A TIME-FREE ZONE
The Texas Renaissance Festival may have a specific period in its name, but that doesn’t keep employees and casual celebrants from tiptoeing through about 500 years of extremely vague history. Still, one guy at the festival who tries NOT to is chef Charles Prince. As the man in charge of the bawdy King’s Feast at the RenFest each year, Prince spends a good deal of his time researching which foods and drinks were enjoyed when. It’s only after they’ve passed historical muster that this chef lets himself (and his guests) start having fun with them.

BEER LOVERS DELIGHT
At any Renaissance festival, you’d expect something billed as a “beer tasting” to get pretty wild, in a room filled with ham-fisted lords and cleavage-ridden ladies knocking back brews less than likely to be distinguished. But after a recent rethinking, this is no longer the case. The daily beer tasting actually supplies attendees with solid information on beer itself – you know, yeast for fermentation, malts and hops, that sort of thing – as it travels through fascinating different brews from England, Wales, Belgium and Germany. We do the tasting ourselves in today’s Grape & Grain segment.

IN THE MARKET FOR A MEAL
First and foremost, the Texas Renaissance Festival is a festival, and that points us toward row after row of food and drink vendors. In today’s show, we wander about tasting things – one of our favorite activities on earth – and settle in to chat with a pair of cooks who’ve parlayed their cooking into an annual gig. Ligia Giles, known as the Empanada Lady, has been hawking her delicious Latin-flavored wares here for 31 years, while relative newcomer Rhonni DuBose has turned her Queen’s Pantry into THE place for breakfast on the colorful fairgrounds near Plantersville.

This Week’s Delicious Mischief Recipe…
THE KING’S SALT-CRUSTED PRIME RIB

4 pounds beef prime ribeye
¼ cup chopped garlic
½ cup kosher salt
4 tablespoons fresh or dried rosemary
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 ounce extra-virgin olive oil

Dry the roast completely with a paper towels. Combine salt crust ingredients then rub a few tablespoons. of this mixture into the surface of the roast. Place roast on a wire rack in a 2 inch deep roasting pan. Cover roast with the remaining crust mixture on top and sides of the piece try to spread evenly and leave the bottom bare of the crust. Roast in oven at 450 degrees for 30 minutes. the garlic should brown a bit. Reduce oven temperature to 300 F and roast until the roast reaches an internal temperature of 125 F. about and 1 ½ hours on a 4-5 Lb roast about a half of a prime rib. Larger roast of 8-12 Lb. takes about 1-hour more. Allow to rest for 30 minutes before serving.

Chef Charles Prince says: “The roasting of beef is a simple process that we tend to make difficult with formulas for cooking times that many times result in the roast being over cooked. Internal temperature is the best guide. The crusting is added before cooking. If you leave the crust on overnight the salt will begin to “corn” as in corned beef - the flesh takes on a pink hue from the salt. This can be a good or bad thing. It makes the finished product more forgiving in the color for presentation. The drawback if left overnight is that even if overcooked it will keep a pink color. Patrons who prefer their meat ‘well done,’ with no pink color, can be a problem.”