Chef Jeffrey Blank, founder of Hudson’s on the Bend, a restaurant in Austin, Texas, was in town to speak about his new book, “Fired Up! More Adventures & Recipes From Hudson’s on the Bend” (Laurentius Books). Lance Armstrong, who sometimes orders rattlesnake at the restaurant, wrote the foreword. Others who have dined there include Farrah Fawcett, Johnny Depp, Olivia de Havilland, and President Bush.

The author entertained the audience with a demonstration of a technique called “face testing,” which allows one to estimate how well meat is cooked without cutting into it. Mr. Blank touched his cheek with his index finger and said that it is roughly equivalent to the density of rare meat, which would have an internal temperature of about 110 to 120 degrees. The chin is analogous to the texture of meat that is medium rare; the end of one’s nose has the feel of meat cooked medium, and one’s forehead resembles meat that is medium well done, which has an internal temperature of about 155 to 160 degrees. The sole of one’s shoe is closer to well done, he said.

He told of the time a journalist was writing a story about his recipe for an antelope leg stuffed with wild boar. Mr. Blank fired up the smokehouse quickly, but wooden timbers across the top caught fire. The kitchen staff carried out gallon buckets of water and put out the flames without the journalist seeing them. The antelope leg, he said, was almost cooked with “rooftop sauce.”

Another anecdote in the book describes “Valentine’s Massacre of ’99.” This was not a reference to gangland wars in Chicago, but to the time a new reservations manager booked reservations for Valentine’s Day without any regard for the restaurant’s capacity. Things went well with the first 100 people, but another 150 people were left in the cold. In recompense, those who returned to the restaurant and mentioned the ordeal received a free dessert.

Mr. Blank told his audience about the time the alarm company woke him at home one night at 3 a.m. to tell him the restaurant alarm had been triggered. They asked him to go and meet the sheriff there. Mr. Blank, who lives two and a half minutes from the restaurant, arrived before the sheriff and went inside to discover an air conditioner blowing around some paper that had set off the motion detector. Mr. Blank then picked up a piece of chocolate cake and was leaving the building when he found himself face to face with a gun barrel. “Drop it!” said the sheriff before realizing he was shouting at the owner. Mr. Blank dropped the cake. He said this sort of “Texas enforced” diet was guaranteed to help anyone lose weight.

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TEXT WITH TEETH A new quarterly journal featuring short fiction and personal-essay-style articles is about to take a bite out of contemporary belles lettres: BITE magazine, edited by Laura Podolnick, a 2004 graduate of New York University.

The magazine describes itself as quasi-literary and generally publishes a photograph of the author alongside each story. A goal of the magazine, Ms. Podolnick said, is to bridge the gap between literary journals and general publications.

Its guidelines suggest that personal essay submissions should be like the ‘My Turn’ page in Newsweek. It recommends sending fiction to which “many, most, or all” of the following adjectives could be applied: unusual, funny, interesting, sexy, original, perverse, quirky, sad, funny and sad, silly, wicked, inspired, genuine, weird, inappropriate, absurd, dirty, moving, bilious, beautiful, coherent.

At a launch reading in SoHo, Douglas Light read from a story that opened on Astor Place with the purchase of coffee from the Mud Truck. His first novel, “East Fifth Bliss,” is scheduled for publication next year.

Angela Lovell read a story involving the culture of art galleries. The magazine’s fiction editor, J. Hobart B., who studied film and television at New York University, read a story about owls taking over the house of a lonely woman. Reading from the short story “Sundogs” was Ashley Shelby, the author of “Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City” (Borealis) about the 1997 flood in Grand Forks, N.D., that forced the evacuation of 50,000 people. Given the recent tragic events in New Orleans, the subject of her book is very timely.