Cypress – The suburbs of the Space City continue to reach for the stars, and the city of Cypress is right there skyrocketing in population with the rest of Houston. If you’re looking for a stop that provides some serene scenery away from the hustle and bustle, Murdoch’s Backyard Pub is a peaceful pit stop.

“It is hands down my favorite restaurant,” said Trammell Stewart. “I love this place.”

Rick Franke helped get Murdoch’s get off the ground, but the driving force behind this easygoing eatery is his daughter Sarah.

“There hasn’t been anything she’s made that I haven’t liked and that’s kind of a phenomenal thing,” Rick said.

This family effort includes his wife Gwen, and the namesake of this special place is their loveable lab named Murdoch.

“Excuse me just a second,” Rick said. “He just bit through his collar.”

Murdoch simply wanted to frolic among the flowers because that’s what brings out all sorts of smaller things.

“The fact that the dog can come out here and run with all the kids and the other dogs,” Karen Monroe said. “We love that.”

There’s a lot of four-legged friends around here.

“We do have a lot of four-legged friends, lizards, frogs, toads and cats,” Rick said.

The food is a big draw too because everything is made from scratch.

“She makes everything here,” Rick said. “So the mustard, the ketchup, the pickles, mayo, Kimchi, a Sauerkraut, all made here. Sarah makes all the sausages here in house. I think if you find the right ingredients, which she seems to have that talent to do, you can make just about anything.”

Since I had no idea which way to steer our sausage soiree, Sarah did our selecting. She got the grind and got us three different links.

“This one is the two Gs,” Sarah said. “Which stands for garlic and green onion. This one’s the Constantine named after an old friend of mine and it’s a Greek style sausage. It’s got lots of citrus flavors and we put some Pheta and some Kalamata olives in it.”

While the big ol’ bangers boiled up, we got our extras underway starting with Love Bites.

“It’s a big clove of garlic wrapped in bacon and then roasted in the oven,” Sarah said.

The sausages get scored and sit on a flat top while we find some toppings.

“There’s two things I loved,” Jon Gant said. “Bacon and garlic and it was a match made in heaven.”

Apparently, some of those four legged friends also think the food is fantastic.

“Sarah is just not your short order of a cook or somebody that can do fries and things,” Jerry Mutchler said. “She’s an absolute chef.”

It’s easy to see why the sausages are the fixtures of Murdoch’s Backyard Pub along with an incredible assortment of unique flavors you wouldn’t expect to find in a backyard. These flavors are well worth a stop on the Texas Bucket List.

“We’re beyond normal,” Sarah said. “We’re not like anywhere else. It’s an interesting adventure.”

El Campo – While El Campo is not extremely close to Cajun country, you’ll find colorful cafe here dedicated to the cuisine that includes crustaceans. Pinchers Boil’n Pot Restaurant is a unique place to pull some tails.

“Welcome to Texas,” Coy Radley said.

Mudbugs, mountain lobsters, crayfish, or crawfish, whatever you call these crazy looking crawdads one thing is for sure: They are delicious.

“Dam good place to come and eat,” Remington Morton said.

Craig Radley and his wife Debbie opened up this escapade in El Campo back when people liked to party in 1999.

“You know, I was a struggling farmer looking for a way to make a living and I tried several different things, got into real estate, and found a crawfish farm and, after a few years, then we decided to open a restaurant just to market crawfish,” Craig said.

We’ve all heard the term putting the cart before the horse, but buying the farm before the business worked out well for Craig and his family is a unique spin.  Now, this entrepreneur might just have the only farm to table crawfish restaurant in the country!

“I never envisioned myself being in the restaurant business,” Craig said. “We were just trying to make a living. My Dad made a bet with me when we opened. He was angry because I was venturing out away from the farm and doing something risky and so he bet me 2:1 odds that I’d be broke in 6 months. He didn’t ask me any questions so we rented the building for 6 months and were supplying our own products so I wasn’t going broke in the first 6 months. So he paid up the day before with a check and on the memo column it said, ‘for a good bad debt.’”

Craig’s son Coy is usually holding down the fort at the family restaurant.

“It is full working with him,” Coy said. “I was promised a couple more golf days, but we will get around to that as soon as crawfish season is over. I don’t see him much. If you want to find him you’ve got to go to the farm. You’ve got to go hop on a crawfish boat.”

Coy makes it out to the farm too.

“I’m one million percent proud,” Coy said. “Nobody this age works as hard as this man does.”

Fortunately Craig’s taken to crawfish farming like a mudbug in the mud. Once he’s tidied up the traps, he brings the batch back to the restaurant to be purged.

“Every day we catch them on a boat,” Craig said. “We don’t put them in bags on the boat. We drop them in boxes, and then we bring them here and drop them in the water overnight and pull them out the next morning. That’s one advantage to waiting until April to start trapping. They’ve been able to grow all season.”

Once cleaned it’s on to the pot. Then, they’re seasoned and soaked before being savored.  

“”That is a big one,” Coy said. “Doesn’t get much fresher.”

Of course that begs the question, what do you do with the heads?

“We come and suck the head at Pinchers,” Remington said.

No matter how you eat them, they truly are a Texan treat. These little lobsters raised in the Lone Star State can be found at Pitchers Boil’n Pot making it a tasty stop on the Texas Bucket List.

“I remember worrying, when we first opened up, there was a pipeline coming through and a lot of Cajuns coming through, and they would tell me right off the bat when they walked through the door, ‘We’re Cajun. We are going to tell you right away whether we like it or not,’” Craig said. “It made me nervous as hell, but I haven’t had a complaint from them yet.”

Balmorhea – The wide expanses of West Texas contain majestic landscapes with mountains, dirt and dust.  Despite the dry climate, life has found a way to flourish in this part of the state and the growing conditions are so good, you just never know what you’ll find blooming near Balmorhea.

“I guess we’re proving a point that you can grow watermelons in the desert,” Luke Brown said.

Luke Brown is a fourth^h generation watermelon farmer.

“Everybody in Texas has their own story about a watermelon, and this is mine,” Luke said.

Since 2010, he’s made melon magic on these 800 acres right off of Interstate 10.

“It’s a long ways to get anything,” Luke said. “Midland Odessa is over a hundred miles. Fort Stockton’s 50 miles. Pecos is 40 miles and when you get to those two places, you still don’t have a lot options.”

Despite the long drive, Luke loves growing the great gourds in the parched part of our state. Technically, watermelons were first found in the deserts of Africa, and the climate here is just about the same sort of circumstances.

“They do very well in the arid climate because of the cool nights,” Luke said. “No humidity, low disease pressure, low pest pressure. This is a long growing season. We’re not so far north that we run out of heat days like today, you get this nice breeze. It’s very nice farming watermelons out here.”

When it came marketing his massive melons, Luke needed something that made his large juicy fruit stick out, so he made a very unique sticker.

“A picture’s worth a thousand words,” Luke said.

It’s not just his picture that pulls in the attention, his contact info actually creates a crazy amount of correspondence.

“I have an email address on the sticker,” Luke said. “I have received thousands of emails from people all over the state, all over the country, Canada, even a few from England. I don’t know how they got over there.”

Growing up in a family of watermelon farmers, Luke has been surrounded by this sort of lifestyle his whole life. It was no wonder that when he found love, he was looking in the sweetest spot: The Annual Watermelon Convention.

“I’ve been attending those watermelon conventions,” Luke said. “I attended my first one in 2007 and I was 12 and those girls were pretty then.”

Luke didn’t settle for just any good-looking Texas lady, he earned a blue ribbon when he married the Watermelon Queen. We’ve established Luke did a great job picking a wife, but can he pick the perfect watermelon?

“That is a question that is difficult for even I to answer,” Luke said. “Size doesn’t make ripeness. Exterior color doesn’t exactly make ripeness. It’s a combination of looking at this field and knowing which watermelon showing is ripe. That being said, for those of you in the store, if it’s cut and put in a bin, it should be ripe.”

Turns out giving it a smack might help too.

“That hollow kind of a good..that means you’re getting a uniform vibration, reverberation back out of the melon,” Luke said. “The interior quality is all intact. It hasn’t been dropped. It hasn’t been bruised and it hasn’t been allowed to just sit and get hot.”

The best part of being in a watermelon field in far West Texas is that you’ve got your pick of the litter.

“The perfect watermelon to me is sweet, crisp, firm texture,” Luke said.

For Luke, growing watermelon is his way of life.  A Texas tradition that means more to him than a sweet simple snack on a summer afternoon made for a great stop on the Texas Bucket List.

“This is freedom, waking up, figuring out what needs to be done and then making that happen,” Luke said. “It’s something I don’t take light heartedly or for granted. I’m thankful every day that I wake up and have had this opportunity to be here. And, I’ve been blessed with the family that I have and all I aspire to do is when I have children of my own grandchildren, my own, that I can instill the same values and work ethic that I believe I possess.”

San Benito – San Benito is just a few miles from the sand of South Padre and the border of Mexico, and along the busy highway between Harligen and Brownsville sits a spot called the Longhorn Cattle Company.

“Everything’s bigger in Texas,” Lisa Turner said.

Lisa and Bill Turner have owned this eatery since the eighties, and they do things a bit different here. That includes serving tea in pitchers!

“Everybody has a different take on it,” Bill said. “We have some people they think we are supposed to give them a glass to pour it in.”

Lisa’s father started this business back in 1985, but he handed the reigns to Lisa and Bill back when they first got married.

“Got married and a month later we were down here and took over,” Lisa said.

As if a barbecue joint down in the valley didn’t stick out enough, the Longhorn Cattle Company added a few things to really have horns up  on the competition: Actual longhorns.

“You don’t expect it in a place like this,” Gary Hackler said. “You don’t see that at all, anywhere. These are like petting animals from the petting zoo.”

Then there’s the beans, served to everyone who enters. It sure makes the ride home mighty interesting.

“When you come into the Longhorn Cattle Company, you get pinto bean soup set in front of you before you ever see a menu,” Bill said. “Kinda like when you go into a good Mexican food restaurant you get chips and salsa set in front of you. Something to satisfy you ’cause when you walk into a restaurant, you came in there ’cause you’re hungry.”

Then there’s the baked potatoes that are so big they’ve become legendary.

“It was humongous and could not even…one person could not eat it,” Monica Chance said. “It took two to finish it.”

Ruben has been building these bad boys since 1992, and it’s not complicated. Chopped brisket, queso, and butter make these baked potatoes a masterpiece.  

“It’s a phenomenon,” Bill said. “People just really love a good, a nicely cooked potato with chopped brisket in it and real sour cream and real butter, put some barbecue sauce on there and they’re all over it.”

For a Texas size potato with barbecue that’s good enough for the cows to come home, the Longhorn Cattle Company in San Benito, Texas, is well-worth a stop on the Texas Bucket List.

“You only live once so you might as well come see it and enjoy it before you kick the bucket,” Monica said.