🍽️ A Spring Chef Took His Own Knife to New York for a Shot at Bobby Flay

🚰 The First Water Connection in Tamina Lands on the Bells’ Property

🏗️ Eighty-Seven Road Projects, $70.8 Million, One Precinct

🚌 The VA Stop Moves to South Lee Street Starting Monday

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One degree short of triple digits, so find your shade before noon and stay in it.

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Thomas Bille, chef at the Michelin-recognized Spring restaurant Belly of the Beast, flew to New York to compete on Food Network’s Beat Bobby Flay. The episode is called Mole Mania, and it airs Tuesday, August 4 at 7 p.m. He filmed it back in January, which means he has been sitting on the outcome for six months. The rest of us find out Tuesday.

He does not get to Flay right away. The format puts two challengers against each other first, cooking with an ingredient Flay picks, with twenty minutes on a clock that stays in plain view. Bille’s opponent is Austin chef Keegan Andrews of ATX Cocina. Actor Jeff Hiller and chef Amanda Freitag are the ones who bring the two of them in. Whoever survives that round gets forty-five minutes against Flay, cooking a signature dish Flay has not seen until the round starts, while Flay builds his own version of the same thing.

Mole is the ingredient, and mole is Bille’s ground. His signature version carries thirty-two ingredients, and it started with a fig tree in his yard about twenty years ago. There were only so many preserves a family could make, so he turned the rest into mole. That is the part worth sitting with. A dish that becomes your identity does not usually arrive as a plan. It arrives as a surplus of figs.

He rehearsed the forty-five minute round exactly once, in his own kitchen at Belly of the Beast. And he brought his own knife, a Yoshihiro he has cooked with for more than a decade.

“I brought my knife because I don’t like using other people’s knives,” Bille said. “That’s kind of an extension of my arm. And if I use someone else’s, I’m not gonna move as fast because I don’t know that knife.”

Why it matters: A cook from a Spring kitchen carried a twenty-year-old family recipe onto a national set, and the whole thing traces back to a tree in his yard.

Source/Credits: PaperCity Magazine

Residents of Tamina stood with officials from Shenandoah and Montgomery County on July 30 to mark the pending completion of Phase 1 of the Tamina water and sanitary sewer connection project. When it is finished, the unincorporated community will draw public utilities from Shenandoah, which sits next door and manages the project because Tamina falls inside its extraterritorial jurisdiction.

Construction began in November 2023. The money came from $21 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds the county set aside, plus another $750,000 in ARPA money from Shenandoah. Phase 1 runs from David Memorial Drive east almost to Johnson Road.

Tamina was established in 1871 by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, and Shenandoah Mayor John Escoto said some of their descendants still live there. Until now the community bought wholesale water through the Old Tamina Water Supply Corp. from neighboring Lake Chateau Woods and ran on septic tanks. Montgomery County Judge Mark Keough recalled a house fire where there was no real way to get water to it.

The first connection was built on property belonging to residents Ivy and Pat Bell, on Tamina Road. Precinct 3 Commissioner Ritch Wheeler said he first got to know the Bells while serving on Shenandoah’s planning and zoning board, and called it fitting that theirs is the one that goes first.

Why it matters: A hundred and fifty-five years after it was founded, Tamina is getting the plumbing the rest of the county has had for generations.

Source/Credits: Community Impact

The office of Montgomery County Precinct 3 Commissioner Ritch Wheeler has taken on 87 capital improvement projects, funded at $70,864,707. They are spread across three stages, and reading the list is a fair way to understand what maintaining a fifty-year-old township actually costs.

Still in design: widening the eastbound Grand Parkway frontage road and adding turn lanes, signalizing Grogan’s Mill Road at the Grogan’s Mill Village Center, improving Lake Woodlands Drive at Gosling Road, widening Robinson Road, and replacing or upgrading four traffic signals along Rayford Road and Sawdust Road. Under construction now: the Grogan’s Mill Road and North Millbend Drive intersection, Research Forest Drive at Gosling Road, and asphalt shoulder replacement along Woodlands Parkway.

The completed column is the longest by far, and most of it is unglamorous. Asphalt shoulder replacement on Cochran’s Crossing, John Cooper, Kuykendahl, Flintridge, Lake Woodlands, North Panther Creek, Research Forest and South Millbend. Repaving on Black Oak, Carraway, Geneva, Matthews, Shadow Lane, Standard Road and the Champion Lake subdivision. Turn lane extensions at Woodlands Parkway and Branch Crossing, and at Lake Woodlands and East Panther Creek.

Residents can file work orders for potholes, clogged culverts, downed street signs and dead traffic lights through the precinct’s own portal at mctxpct3.org/services/p3works, either through the app or the desktop site.

Why it matters: Almost none of this makes the news, and all of it is why the drive to school on Monday morning goes the way it does.

Source/Credits: Woodlands Online

Starting Monday, August 3, the Woodlands Express stop at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center moves, because of construction on the VA campus. The stop on Mixon Avenue at Entrance 70 closes.

The temporary stop is on South Lee Street, next to Lot P, and that is where all boarding and exiting happens from Monday forward. Buses will come onto the campus through Almeda Road at Entrance 71 instead.

The Township expects the arrangement to hold for roughly ten weeks, depending on how construction goes. The Ringness at Café Terrace stop on the same campus is not affected. Riders with questions can reach Woodlands Express customer service at (832) 851-3362.

Why it matters: If you ride the Express down to the Medical Center, Monday morning is going to look different, and the time to know that is Sunday.

Source/Credits: Woodlands Online | The Woodlands Township

🎵 Rock the Row wraps up on August 6: The free Thursday night concert series at Hughes Landing plays its last date of the season on August 6, starting at 7 p.m. by the water. Read more in The Woodlands Township

🤝 Commissioner Wheeler is teaching polling place manners on August 18: “Respecting the Voter’s Experience: Election Day Etiquette” runs 6 to 7 p.m. at the Kevin Brady Community Center in Grogan’s Mill Village Center, free and open to candidates, campaign staff, poll workers and voters alike. Read more in Woodlands Online

🏆 A Spring builder just took the top custom home award in Texas: Royal Texan Homes won the Texas Association of Builders Custom Builder Grand Award at the 2026 TAB Star Awards, the first Greater Houston builder to take it since 2021, along with 19 Star Awards, the most in the company’s history. Read more in Woodlands Online

🎨 A college fife and drum corps won the Fourth of July parade: Lord Stirling’s Fifes & Drums, Lone Star College-Montgomery students in purple hunting shirts and tricorn hats modeled on 1776 Maryland troops, took the President’s Choice Award and a $250 prize at the 50th annual South County parade through Market Street. Read more in Woodlands Online

🗓️ The Woodlands Cars & Coffee for a Cause | Woodlands Performance Services, 9595 Six Pines Drive, Spring | 6:00 AM | More info

🗓️ National Youth Theater presents Newsies | Runs through August 9 | More info

🗓️ Running Club | 5:30 PM | More info

🗓️ Boogie Bash in August | 11:00 AM | More info

🗓️ Canon Beginner Class | Precision Camera & Video, 17937 I-45 North, Shenandoah | More info

🗓️ Workshop Wednesday, Summer Send-Off DIY Day | Magnolia Ritual, Texas Apothecary, 6318 FM 1488 Suite 110, Magnolia | 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM | More info

🗓️ Shadow Puppet Theatre, Amelia Bedelia’s First Day of School | 11:00 AM | More info

🗓️ Movie on the Lawn, Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie | 7:00 PM | More info

🗓️ Rock the Row | 7:00 PM | More info

🗓️ John Mellencamp, Dancing Words Tour: The Greatest Hits | The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, 2005 Lake Robbins Drive, The Woodlands | 8:00 PM | More info

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The Woodlands Waterway began in 1972 as a small drainage system. The 1.8-mile version people stroll today started as a diagram on a napkin, drawn by planner Robert Heineman. Construction did not begin until 1999, and the grand opening dedication came in 2018.

“It’s so dry I’m spittin’ cotton.” Translation: parched, in your mouth and out in the pasture both.

Your phone knows more about your sleep schedule than anybody who loves you does.

What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta.