I can’t stop making this. It might be the best snack in world. I’ve even made a meal of it, with a bag of tortilla chips or using it to top quesadillas. I highly recommend enjoying the Texas Caviar with Miller High Life, since it’s the champagne of beers and all, it would be poetic and silly. Here’s my recipe.

Six 14 oz. cans of beans (I use black beans and black eyed peas because they’re nice and earthy and meaty), rinsed and drained.

One red onion, finely diced.

Two large banana peppers, finely diced. One large red or orange bell pepper would be tasty too, and very pretty.

Two average-to-small sized cucumbers, seeded and finely diced (All this fine dicing I do is to make everything roughly the same size as the beans. It looks nice on a chip).

One bunch fresh cilantro, finely chopped (if you’re not a fan of cilantro, it’s fairly innocuous and very refreshing when chopped finely, but basil works just as well if not better. Or use both. I love basil! Fresh, fresh, fresh!)

Put all of your nice dicey veggies, herbs, and beans in a large bowl and season with a half teaspoon kosher salt and one teaspoon cracked pepper. I usually add a quarter teaspoon of powdered chipotle peppers to add some smokey heat. A little goes a long way.

Next, pour in one sixteen ounce bottle of some store-bought vinaigrette that you love. I use Newmans Own Oil and Vinegar. It’s awesome. Another one I really like is Annie’s Naturals Papaya and Poppyseed dressing. Yummo. I’m going to try making my own version of the papaya poppy seed dressing soon, blending in some basil and chipotles, but I digress…

Toss all of the yum together with a slotted spoon or your clean hands, which works much better, and eat! This stuff is like crack if you let it sit and marinate in the fridge for a day or two.

I’m ignorant to how people traditionally sear white rice to give it that burnished flavor other than a very hot wok with sesame or peanut oils added until shimmering, then the cold, limpid, precooked white rice is added to the smoking pond and allowed to rest until the smell of brown starts to emanate and is flipped often and with urgency enough to imbue each sticky, pallid grain with that treacherously lovely, smoky flavor and color.

But when do you add other moist flavors, such as stock? Do you sear the deep monks of flavor, the ginger root, the garlic, the shallots, until the smile stretches uncontrollably across your face and you can’t stop stirring with fury?

I cheat. Toasted sesame oil. It’s too wonderful a flavor and too common to keep secret. If you feel you haven’t “seared” something sufficiently, it’s the seductress ingredient you add in small doses, to make its presence barely known, like a hot breath; that smoky dimension that everyone lusts after, but in this dish is too easy. You keep it minimal. You don’t want it obvious. You just want it THERE.

You could cook the egg in the sexy sesame. Heat your pan with neutral canola oil and a dousing of the sesame oil and then pour your whisked egg in just after that oil is shimmering, before it’s smoking. Watch it bubble up on the edges, then attack it with a heat-proof spatula. Swirl it around to coax the raw egg to the heat and to break it up as it cooks. You want blending, but you want evenness. You want crispy. When those silky curds start to darken beyond their normal buttery color, you want to pull them.

Next, you refresh the fat in the pan (isn’t that a beautiful phrase?). You gently throw in small pieces of pork, or any other meat you choose, though nothing is so yielding as pork. You stir it enough to coat it in the oil, you make sure the heat is at low to medium, then you stir it seldom. You want it to stick. You want browning. You want UMAMI…..which is created soon, Doctor.

Once the meat is browned, tightened up, you add finely diced carrot and toss it with the urgent wrist-flicking to coat it. You toss, rest, toss, rest, with even timing until the bits of carrot have helped to dislodge the savory brownness from the bottom of the pan and are themselves a slightly brighter shade of orange than they were upon peeling and entering.

Now you add you add that cold, white rice. You turn up the flame. You want the scorching sound; the rain torrent on pavement sound. You let it settle for almost a minute before wrist-flipping that pan to bring up the slightly singed layer. You let it sit again, hearing the summerry sound you long for, then you toss again. This continues until you feel the rice is drying and starting to stick to the pan in a bad way. You need a spatula to release those grains you plan on savoring. This is when you douse the rice desert with stock, with soy sauce, with something that will release it enough to toss each grain back into the fold and allow the process to begin again, moments later, waiting on your flavor storm to free it’s grains from the searing heat into just the savor you crave……

Here is where I step back, pretend I’m not taking 30 mental minutes to describe something that is more compulsory, more instinctual, more half-assed western cooking. Here is where I say you throw in your other vegetables, your flavors, your ginger and garlic and bok choy. You have the heat on your side and anything you wish will yield to the heat and the pan, the flash and the flip. But make sure they rise in direct proportion. You want every grain covered with chemistry.

I just purchased David Bowie’s “Black Tie White Noise,” the 2003 limited edition of the 1993 album. After largely ignoring his Eighties output and Tin Machine, I was very excited to listen to this album. It was written after a decade-long dry spell, both artistically and romantically, as a wedding present to his new wife, Iman. After the first listen I can tell it is the beginning of new ideas and a new era [listen to me...I'm sure I'll regurgitate some things I've learned from research, but most is coupled with genuine reaction].

Considering the fact that it sounds like 1993, there’s plenty on this album that’s exciting. There’s forward, rolling drumbeat throughout every track as well as the Bowie saxophone-playing, which has a slightly strident reminder of “Low” and “Heroes” as a credit. This album is not lacking in rhythm, and “Let’s Dance”‘s Nile Rodgers (or Bowie himself) as producer keeps Reeves Gabrels’ guitar way back in the mix. We have loved Bowies guitarists through almost every phase, but the presence of Gabrels from Tin Machine is hardly indicative on this album of the fierce foil he will become on subsequent Bowie albums for the next decade.

The standout track for me is “You’ve Been Around,” which begins with heavy synthesizer-drumbeat-bass. There are no harmonics until Bowie starts to sing the chorus in his gorgeous staccato, crooning baritone, but the song fills out once his vocals and the jazzy bass line take over, his voice through some effects-filter, and becomes the most interesting track on this album.

The title track is a response to the Rodney King race riot situation in LA that varies between cheesy and poignant and becomes as much of a Bowie song as an homage to Marvin Gaye (adding perfect phrasing from “What’s Going On”) and his new marriage, using the montage of melodies as a blending of races. There’s a multitracked melody that get’s the point across perfectly. Avoid the remixes on the second disc, however.

Next to “You’ve Been Around” is my favorite “Nite Flights.” On an album that has three instrumentals and four covers, this cover is sublime. “Nite Flites” by The Walker Brothers is an out-of-print gem that should be downloded from Amazon as that is the most affordable way to own that album. It’s a cornerstone of Scott Walker’s work that no one in 1978 could accomplish with such ease and innovation. The man was a melodic genius. Anyways…..

“Black Tie White Noise” set the stage for Bowie albums such as “Outside.” The limited edition has two CDs and a DVD housed in a great folding cardboard sleeve. The second CD contains the excellent period tracks “Real CooL World” and “Lucy Can’t Dance” which should have been album cuts, as well as ten remixes of album cuts/singles, several of which mix in more guitar and less sax than the album tracks. I prefer the “Rock Mix” of the single from this album, “Jump They Say.”

Next I need to buy “The Buddha of Suburbia,” and if anyone cares, I am excited to hear it.