Today's post is from Annie Frank , a librarian at Parr Library in Plano:

There’s an Arts and Letters Live program on April 14 that might lure you into arriving a day early for the 2008 TLA Conference. It’s called Cowgirl vs. Cowboy Cuisine with Paula Disbrowe and Robb Walsh, a showdown between two chefs “celebrating Texas cuisine” (I don’t know about that “cuisine” part).

Paula Disbrowe is a former New Yorker (she couldn’t help where she was born) who had the good sense to move to Texas. Her book, Cowgirl Cuisine: Rustic Recipes and Cowgirl Adventures from a Texas Ranch, mixes great recipes (Watermelon Margaritas) with humorous anecdotes about ranch life. Robb Walsh is the restaurant critic for the Houston Press. He has written several cookbooks, the latest being the Texas Cowboy Cookbook (2006), described by NPR’s Kitchen Sisters as like “a collaboration by John Wayne, Larry McMurtry and Emiliano Zapata.”

The event includes a luncheon buffet and cook-off at Dallas Museum of Art’s Seventeen Seventeen Restaurant, serving recipes from the above cited cookbooks, and costs $45. The authors’ presentation in the Horchow Auditorium afterwards costs an additional $30. You can go to both or to either one, depending on your budget. Reservations are required.