The road home to San Angelo - Llano to Brady to Eden - is a gorgeous drive. Once you get out on Highway 71, past that new metropolis around the Hill Country Galleria on Highway 71 and 620, and past Bee Cave, at about the 40-miles-to-Llano mark, the landscape starts to spread out and fill the windshield and then some. It's rough terrain, but filled the trees and grasses and brush-covered hills. Sometimes the road goes narrow and tunnel-lilke, with the highway blasted through the middle of a small mountainous hill, and the car seems wedged between granite slabs for a few dramatic moments, until the vista spreads out again with clear views to the horizon of nothing but the brush, hills and grass. It's about this time you turn on the country music. As we did. And before you know it, you're in Llano.
There is of course, at this time of year, the Welcome Hunters banner down the main street that runs in front of the ornate courthouse, a few adorable facades for small cafes, then the bridge over the Llano River.
Heading out of town you can't help but notice the cars crammed into a small parking lot right up near the road, acrid smoke everyewhere, and, though early still, a line of people. This was Cooper's of course. Pit BBQ.
The heat and the smoke are a full sensory assault right away. No wonder. Rows and rows of pits. And a pulley system handling the raising and lowering of those lids covering the entire length of the pit filled witih mesquite coals.
Burning hot coals turned to ash all right there, out in the open.
The pits start at 4 a.m. That's when they put the brisket on. With a dry rub, which they make up themselves of course. (I just had to chat with one of the guys about all that. And about Lockhart BBQ versus Llano, and my decades of driving this road home to San Angelo.)
Up toward the front, the pit closest to the line-up of folks, the pit is full of all the good stuff to serve up right there.
It was not even 11 a.m. yet. We, the son and I, could not eat just yet. But plenty of others were lined up to load up their plates for lunch. We drove away. And I would soon regret this, as we were half an hour later or so ordering at the Sonic in Brady, having just left behind all that sausage and brisket dripping and juicy greasy.
My sister Cathy and her group, a half hour behind us, stoped and ate lunch there at Cooper's -- while we were pining for Cooper's brisket and ribs at the Sonic drive-through in Brady.
But the universe has a way of fixing food mistakes. It turns out we'll get a Cooper's fix anyway. Cathy had orders to bring back a few pounds of brisket to add to the Thanksgiving Day foodstuffs. And so she did.
Because two turkeys for the day - one roasted the other smoked by a friend of the family - are just not enough. Brisket is definitely a good side dish to that.
All of this will match well the two dressings - cornbread and oyster - and the two gravies.
There will two gravies because Cathy and Dad will be trash talking all day and fighting for control over the turkey drippings and the milk/flour debate that happens every year over the gravy and the thickness and consistency, with Mom doing her New Orleans thing and wanting the thinner, not creamy gravy of those massive holiday feasts of her childhood.
The gravy war never gets resolved. Which is how it should be.
