What few people know is that Texans dine out more often than anyone else in the entire country. Texas started out as cow country, but in 1930 C.M. Joiner struck oil 100 miles east of Dallas - the largest oil discovery on earth at that time. Dallas, Houston and San Antonio are among the nation's ten largest cities. The only state with 3 top ten cities within its borders.

Now if there's one food Texans are fiercely proud of it has to be barbecue No, not like that barbecue you think you know from say Memphis or the Carolinas ... Texas barbecue is all about the beef. And the techniques they use were brought to the Lone Star State by German immigrants who blended local Mexican and Caribbean influences that they found in Texas that dealt with the preparation of pork and applied it to beef.

That's why the Mikeska family is as comfy BBQ-ing sweetbreads as they are cooking ribs-dubbed by Texas Monthly magazine as the "First Family of Texas Barbecue", Tim Mikeska is the owner of Mikeska's Bar-B-Q in Taylor and they've been serving barbecue for more than 50 years. This family of settlers of Czech origin came to Texas more than 150 years ago. What did I eat there? Well I piled my plate high with ...

*Smoked Tex-Czech Stewed Sweetbreads- As a 3rd generation Texas Czech Family, the Mikeskas took a traditional homeland Czech dish that was passed down many generations in their family, and "Texa-fied" it by marinating the sweetbreads in brisket seasoning, smoking it over oak wood, and then adding a stew mix of chopped Texas sweet onions and celery.

*Smoked Mutton Ribs - Awarded the "Best Offbeat BBQ" honor by Texas Monthly magazine. Tim marinates and then smokes the breast of lambs. Lamb breast is the thick fatty flank of breast/brisket meat still attached to the upper rib. It's very fatty and can be very chewy but if prepared right, it's superb. It was a very popular item back in the day when Texas was still predominantly using manual labor to pick their cotton. It's still one of the cheapest cuts of meat in existence today.

*Smoked dove hearts with jalapeno peppers and smoked wild dove breast stuffed with jalapenos and wrapped in bacon. Oh my lord it was good.
*smoked liver sausage-another Tex-Czech dish
*smoked head cheese - another very old family recipe

I love state fairs, and they say that everything is bigger in Texas, and the annual State Fair of Texas is no exception. The State Fair of Texas is the largest state fair in the U.S. when measured by annual attendance and its 212-foot Texas Star Ferris wheel is the largest in North America. The foods of the Texas State Fair fall into a few categories: There's the true Texan foods, unusual desserts, most-bizarre creations ... but more than anything else they love to fry food. There's deep fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fried cookie dough, fried peach cobbler on a stick, zesty fried guacamole bites, deep fried lattes, fried chili Frito burrito, fried hot dogs, Chicken Fried Bacon, Fried Banana Split, Fried Grilled Cheese Sandwich, Texas Fried Jelly Belly Beans, Deep Fried S'mores, Fried Chocolate Truffles, Fried Dinner Roll, Fried Cake on a Stick, Texas Barbecue Eggrolls, "Jalapeno" Deep Fried Gorditas, Fried Apple Pie, Fried Snowballs, Fried Honey Bun, Ignited Moon Pie, Beefy Fried Queso Bites,¬ Chick-a-Mole Bites, Crispy Fried Cantaloupe Pie and fried banana pudding. I could list about 100 more but I am getting queasy just writing this down.

Our guide through this culinary maze of western culture was Abel Gonzalez a famous fixture at the massive fair. This Texas sized character is the guru of the most unusual fare at the fair. Abel is a computer analyst most of the year, and the son of a restaurant owner, and he works at his family-run stand. In 2005, judges and fairgoers picked Gonzales' fried PBJ and Banana Sandwich as the tastiest new food item at the fair. He sold about 25,000 during the 24-day fair. In 2006, he came up with a new artery-clogging concoction, fried Coke. Gonzales deep-fries Coca-Cola-flavored batter. He then drizzles Coke fountain syrup on it. The fried Coke is topped with whipped Coke flavored cream, cinnamon sugar and a cherry. Gonzales' diet-buster won the creativity honor at the Big Tex Choice Awards Contest. This last year his new creation was called Fire & Ice. Fire & Ice is a pineapple ring that is battered and deep-fried, then topped with banana-flavored whipped cream that's been frozen in liquid nitrogen. The smoking concoction is ladled with strawberries and syrup. Fire & Ice was a finalist in last year's Big Tex Choice Awards competition. If you hit the Fair next year, tell him I sent you and say hi ... and bring the Pepto!

Nowhere will you find that cowboy spirit stronger ... nor the scenery quite so stunning as in the Texas Hill Country. It is literally deep in the heart of Texas ... these rolling hills and wide open spaces west of San Antonio and south of Austin are what the New York Times labeled this year as its #1 tourist destination. German and Czech pioneers settled in these hills and today they're still welcoming new immigrants. I spent a day with Paula Disbrowe, the author of Cowgirl Cuisine, co-author of several other cook books and a freelance writer whose work appears regularly in The New York Times. We explored the unique foods of the Texas Hill Country-which is the area between Austin and San Antonio and west of those two cities riding shotgun style in an old pick-up. The first stop was the Mi Tierra café in San Antonio for a morning cafe con leche and plates of huevos rancheros. We stopped in at Dziuk's Meat Market in Castroville to sample a local cuisine called Parissa -- which is a steak tartare flavored with Tex-Mex seasonings, cheap cheddar cheese and lime juice. It's a popular appetizer in bars and for some strange reason fans of the dish would rather see it come from a nasty roadside stand than from any other type of establishment. Odd. Next stop was a local institution called Mac and Ernie's, which is known in the region for its goat burgers, but also offered the best chicken fried steak I ever ate, and the worlds best chocolate pie. We stopped for sweetbread gorditas at Live Oak Gorditas in Uvalde and made our final stop at Tommy Lee Jones' fave bar, the Liberty Bar in San Antonio. This place is nearly as old as the State of Texas and is still packing in cowboys and city folks alike with pure Southern Texas cooking.

Paula is without a doubt the most well informed, gracious and adventurous guide we have ever had on the show. And the fact that she is 6 feet tall, has super model hotness and long red hair, wears little short frocks with cowboy boots and drives a 50 year old truck has nothing to do with that assessment.

For unusual, bizarre and alien food that was quite literally out of this world, we headed to the Johnson Space Center outside Houston. It's the home of NASA, the nation's space program-mission control for all space shuttle flights, and mission control for the U.S. portion of the International Space Station. And since NASA hasn't been recruiting any chefs for missions into space ... all the food cooked for space travel is made right in Texas. Makes sense, after all an astronaut is little more than a cowboy in a space suit. When you think of space food, you're thinking Tang ... or one of those 'meals in a pill' type of scenarios, right? Not at all. In fact the NASA Space Food Systems Laboratory is really just a big kitchen ... but at the helm aren't chefs, they're "food scientists." A lot has changed since we first sent men to the moon in the Apollo missions 40 years ago. What NASA has learned from putting men and women in space, especially on longer Shuttle missions and even longer missions on board the Space Station is that food is THE most important component to maintaining the mental health of its astronauts. In an environment where so much is out of the control of the astronauts, having meals that appear to be home-cooked is now deemed critical to mission success. Sorry, Tang, you've been grounded. Interestingly astronaut ice cream is not served on missions, it gums up machinery, the Russians supply half the food for the International Space Station, the garbage is jettisoned during return to earth and burns up in the atmosphere, the mylar in common potato chip bags was developed by NASA and since space food goes non-nutritive after 18 months, the challenge facing scientists in 2015 with manned Mars missions is feeding our space cowboys on the 3 year roundtrip mission.

While Dallas was built with the wealth of oil, its sister city Fort Worth was and is a cow-town-- built on the fortunes of cattle ranchers ... fiercely proud ... a city where it's not about the size of your wallet-it's your belt buckle that matters. And the size of your appetite. And I didn't come here looking for a simple steak. Where does a Dallas billionaire or an east Texas cowboy go for a little rattlesnake, antelope, rabbit, deer, elk and the like? At my pal Tim Love's Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in Fort Worth. Fancy yes, but in a down home Texas way since Tim is a born and bred Texan with a personality as big as the Lone Star State. As the foremost pioneer of urban Western cuisine, Love wears his signature cowboy hat in place of a toque. The innovative menu at his critically acclaimed Lonesome Dove Western Bistro in the historic Fort Worth Stockyards is influenced by all of the ingredients and cultures that have been a part of the West since the first adventure began on the Goodnight-Loving and Chisholm Trails-with an added level of modern sophistication. Don't miss the buffalo rib eye or wild boar when he offers it as a special.

I love to hunt and hunting is an important part of the Texas economy and plays an integral role in the management of Texas wildlife populations. With more than 913,000 hunters, Texas ranks second in the nation for number of people engaged in hunting. Many Texans will tell you, if you want something to eat ... go shoot it yourself and I went to the Laguna ranch just north of the Rio Grande outside Laredo. This 12-thousand acre cattle ranch is a hunter's paradise. My guide was master outdoorsman Jerry Gonzalez of Pedernal Bowhunts, a company that outfits hunts on several ranches here in Deep South Texas. The critter I went on the prowl for was the javelina, a strange-looking critter sometimes referred to as Ranch Rats or Skunk Pigs. Though some people think javelinas are a type of wild pig, they are actually members of the peccary family, a group of hoofed mammals originating from South America. Many people refuse to eat Javelina because they have a musk gland that smells terrible, like rotting garbage, and one butchering or shooting misstep can make the meat taste bad. But if skinned properly, you can remove the gland without ever squeezing or puncturing it and your meat will taste pretty darn good. After the hunt we enjoyed a traditional barbacoa breakfast, a whole cow's head cooked overnight in a pit in the ground. The head was better than the javelina, but it was a great way to end our Texas sized adventure.

Tian Jin Hai seafood restaurant is a new restaurant but the food is oddly no newcomer to the local scene here. In fact, the chef had quite a following during his 10-year tenure at the Kopitiam MacPherson hawker stall that he ran at Jackson Centre. When the hawker centre was closed in September last year, owner-chef Francis Yeo, 51, went on a month-long holiday in China and the plan was to reopen in the Rochor area after that. But when he returned, he found that the shop space would not be ready for another four months. Not willing to sit idle, he went hunting for another location. Chance took him to the Marina Country Club in Punggol where a restaurant space had been left vacant for more than a year and the rest is history. I devoured his signature steamed sharks head with soy and ginger but really went nuts for his trio of mud crab dishes that I sampled. This was the dish that made Yeo famous for years at his hawker stall and in a country where chili crab is the national dish, his is the best one I have ever eaten.

Indian food is very popular in Singapore and Banana Leaf Apollo is the best restaurant to sample another staple of Singaporean food, fish head curry. Anita Kapoor took me there and when she gives you a recommendation you can take it to the bank.

We tried local Peranaken treats:
o Otak otak: sausage-like blend of fish, coconut milk, chili paste, galangal and herbs, wrapped and cooked in a banana leaf
o Shui kueh: steamed radish cakes with fried preserved radish topping
o Tulang: meaty bones in tomato-red gravy (slurp out the marrow)
o Che tow kway: omelette-like dish made from radishes, egg, garlic, and chili
o Beng Hiang Restaurant: fish maw soup with sea cucumber

I hit the hawker stalls at Zion Riverside Food Centre for some awesome clay pot porridges made with rice, loaded up at the Adam Road Food Centre: Bahrakath Mutton Soup King (soup with brains/ribs/tongues), Zaiton's Satay (tripe satay), Yummy Rojak (mango, cuttlefish, cucumber salad) for halal snack food and stuffed my face at Peoples Park hawker center, although I am still pulling duck feathers out of my teeth months later.

Traditional Chinese Medicine is still a large part of daily Singaporean life and there is a restaurant called the Imperial Herbal restaurant at VivoCity mall where they provide convenient access to a Chinese physician to give consultations to diners. He can dispense herbal remedies if necessary. But more importantly he gives recommendations on the types of dishes you could have for the night - which ones would tone down your yang or replenish your ying forces.

The food is done pretty much in classical Chinese style, with a few fusion type innovations.

One of Imperial Herbal restaurant's trademark dishes is the quick-fried egg white with dried scallop ($4), with polygonatum and ladybell root ground together to make a crunchy nest-like biscuit. I loved this dish and later found out it is good for the spleen and improves complexion.

Peranakan cuisine is the melding of the Malay and Chinese food traditions that date back thousands of years on the island. And while my Peranakan meals in Singapore were outstanding, especially the meals I ate both on and off camera at Big D's Grill and at True Blue restaurant, where chef Ben Seck and his Mom cook with a skill set that is beyond fantastic, the best dish I ate all week in Singapore was at Mary's Laksa stall. According to the 'research' the term laksa is used to describe two different types of noodle soup dishes: curry laksa and assam laksa. Curry laksa refers to noodles served in coconut curry soup, while assam laksa refers to noodles served in sour fish soup. Usually, thick rice noodles also known as laksa noodles are preferred, although thin rice vermicelli (bee hoon or mee hoon) is also common.

Curry laksa is a coconut-based curry soup that Mary makes in a style more reminiscent of shellfish bisque than of coconut milk. The main ingredients for most versions of curry laksa are shrimp, noodles, tofu, dried shallots, bean sprouts, blanchan, ground candlenuts and anything else the chef cares to throw in. Saying that Mary makes the best laksa in Singapore is akin to declaring that Paradise Pup and Hot Dougs make the best hotdogs in Chicago, but both are true I think. Let the arguments begin.

Neil led me on a tour through the Sydney Fish Market to find the best seafood that Neil could use for his innovative and rockstar tasty menu. He cooked for me at Rockpool, one of his many restaurants. The market which has been around since 1945 is the largest market of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere and is the world's second largest seafood market in terms of variety outside of Japan (Tsukiji Market). It is located in Blackwattle Bay on the foreshore of Sydney Harbor, where there is a real working fishing port, a wholesale fish market, a fresh food retail market, food and beverage outlets, and a seafood cooking school. Everyday this particular fish market auctions off over 100 species of fish, and annually, the market trades tens of thousands of tons of seafood. Neil grabbed a basket and filled it with:

- Morton Bay Bugs (the animal resembles the back half of a lobster. Essentially it is a walking lobster tail with eyes. It is sweet and succulent and found along the entire coast of the northern half of Australia.)
- Balmain Bug (A type of slipper lobster found in all warm oceans and seas. They are closely related to spiny lobsters and furry lobsters.)
- Barramundi
- Flatheads (an incredible mild firm white fleshed fish that Neil used in his amazing Firewater signature dish)
- Mud Crabs

You can take all your bushtucker (country food) and all your Mod Oz (contemporary innovative big city food that over uses bushtucker in the extreme) and wrap it in a ball and toss it in the Harbour. I could eat Neil's food at Rockpool all day long.

Now, while Sydney offers some exceptional establishments for fine dining I ate at Tetsuya Wakuda's on an off night and had the meal of my life! Food freaks s can also sink their teeth into basic, inexpensive Aussie treats. Drunk tourists all head to the gates of the Woolloomooloo Naval Yard where they can visit Harry's Café de Wheels that was established during the depression selling sausages, floaters and other traditional street fare. I went during the day and stuffed myself silly. I also went out to Bondi Beach and went on a surfing lesson with Big Wave Dave, the king of the Aussie surf hounds. He is also an expert bikini chaser and even clued me in on the way surfers signal to each other that there are hotties on the shoreline so they show off appropriately. After exhausting myself in the ocean, we headed to a local snack bar for :

- Fish and Chips
- Chiko Roll (an Australian snack inspired by the Chinese egg roll and spring rolls designed to be eaten with one hand. Consists of boned mutton, celery, cabbage, barley, rice, carrot, and spices in a tube of egg, flour, and dough, which is then deep-fried.)

Everything tastes better after you crawl out of the ocean.

A word about Australia's national food and cultural icon-vegemite. Located in the Fisherman's Bend, between Sydney and Melbourne sits the Vegemite Factory. Everyone Down Under wishes they lived next door. It's a dark brown, savory food paste made from yeast extract, and is used mainly as a spread on sandwiches, toast and crackers, as well as a filling in local pastries like "cheesymite scroll." It's made from brewers' yeast extract, a by-product of the beer making. The taste may be described as salty, slightly bitter, malty, beef bouillon-ish or rotted vegetable barf. But even though it is a fairly simple food, Australians all have their own way of spreading vegemite. I love the stuff. It's fantastic spread thick on crusty buttered bread with sliced tomatoes.

OK, so we saw a lot of moonshine too, but that was about it. The cities and the towns along the Appalachian Trail charmed me in a way that I didn't think possible for a born and bred NY-er. I ate fresh squirrel in West Virginia with the chef-owner of Ember, a cool dude named Brian Ball. We packed away chicken fried squirrel platters and plenty of other hill country treats but the best thing I ate the whole trip was a tomato and dumpling dish that was a recipe from his grandmother that he served as a side dish to our meal. He stews tomatoes and onions for his garden, then puts them up, and in the cool weather months brings a quart or so of this heavenly stuff to a boil, makes a quick dumpling mixture (think elegant Bisquik style stuff) and drops handfuls on top of the tomatoes, covers it and turns the heat down. 30 minutes later he dumps the whole thing into a bowl and serves it. It has to be tried to be believed.

Appalachia was settled by many different ethnic groups and there are still some places today where the people carry on the culture and traditions of their forefathers as they have for centuries. The tiny picturesque town of Helvetia, West Virginia, population 194, was founded by the Swiss and the ways of the old world are still a strong influence in the culture. I spent a night at The Hutte Restaurant operated by longtime local Eleanor F. Mailloux, where traditional Swiss food is still served and where all the local characters can be found dining and catching up on the local happenings. Eleanor says she is in her late 80's but her nieces and grandsons say she is over 100. We even met an 80 year old who told us Eleanor was his teacher in junior high school...She has her roots deeply planted in the Helvetia community. She is the owner/operator of the Beekeeper Inn and at times was a teacher, Director of the Helvetia Folk Dancers, President of the Alpen Rose Garden Club, Secretary of the Helvetia Restoration Club, and member of the Centennial History Committee, her role in keeping the community alive is substantial. I can also tell you she makes an amazing dance partner. The cuisine at the Hutte House is heavily influenced by the local Swiss/German culture and nobody understands this better than Eleanor who had her great grand kids shoot a deer and cook it in a pit, country style. The deer is buried with hot coals and cooked overnight. Eaten with plenty of homemade cheese, home brewed beer, and lots of boiled onion pie.

In Shelby NC, I attended the Livermush Festival with Ted Alexander, the Mayor of Shelby as my dining companion. Freckle faced kids in the parade, bottles of locally brewed Sundrop on ice, fried wedges of livermush on white bread with grape jelly and mustard smeared on all over it. Amazing. But not as awesome as spending a day on a trout stream with the lads from the local fly fishing school and then taking our catch up the hill to Johnny Sue Meyer's house for a real Cherokee feast with roasted bear, sumac tossed sautéed trout and chestnut bread. Listening to Johnny Sue's cousin say a Cherokee prayer in her native tongue, well I guess it's our native tongue actually, and enjoying traditional recipes that are as old as the Cherokee Nation was a special experience. These are the dying breed stories that we try to capture whenever we are on the road with our cameras.

I got to forage for wild mushrooms with Alan Muskat and then we were off to Tennessee where we ended our trip with a true mountain top cookout of possum and raccoon, serenaded by a local bluegrass group, at a 100 year old cabin in the hills. One guest was a storyteller by trade and another a weaver. Only in Tennessee. One of the guests at the dinner was a woman who was real 'hill people' as the uber locals are referred to. She had been rescued by a local university professor who heard of a woman loving with her children in a cave in the hills, a woman who had run away from her abusive husband to whom she had been 'sold' to satisfy her families debts many years earlier. This woman, who had experienced such tragedy in her life, was the kindest soul I had ever met. She coached me through my meal, doused corn bread in the pot liquor for me and cracked open the raccoon head so I could spread the brains on the hardtack they had cooked for our party. She gave me a wild chestnut that she had dried and polished to keen shine, telling me to keep the charm in my pocket to help me calm the worldly clamors that she felt were causing me great anxiety. I haven't taken it out of my pocket since that day.

If you think you know the Appalachians, guess again.