Answer: Tacos

Question: What do I crave with a constant, fiendish hunger like a zombie looking for brains?

I never realized how often I ate tacos until I went away to college in the wastelands of the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains, where there are no tacos. Only ham sandwiches. Over 19 years, I had become accustomed to a regular, steady, intake of Mexican food in the form of cheese enchiladas with chile con carne sauce, fresh, bright salsas with chunks of jalapeno and garlic, refried beans cooked with gallons of lard, and especially tacos. Not the pitiful, despairing mass-produced kind that come in a sterile yellow pre-formed shell and are filled with a mysterious, grainy meat by-product. But rather, soft, warm tortillas with tasty bits of char from being cooked over a flame filled with juicy meats – roasted, braised, grilled, fried – and topped with a colorful mix of salsa and fresh vegetables. Sometimes when I think about tacos, my eyes go black and I grope about blindly in all directions in the hopes that a plate of tacos will somehow materialize in front of me, allowing me to shovel them maniacally into my mouth like a crazed wolverine. This is rarely an effective strategy for producing tacos, so I’ve often resorted to making them for myself.

When I was growing up in Austin, I was particularly partial to tacos al pastor, which are filled with orange chunks of slow-roasted pork, onions, cilantro and pineapple. Customarily they are served with wedges of lime, and you would be remiss not to take advantage of these. I’m sure that there are many fine tacos al pastor in Austin, but I am particularly fond of the ones at Guero’s (to the surprise of no one), and at Chango’s, where you can order them with an insanely good watermelon agua fresca on the side. Here in Fort Worth, Will and I love the ones at Melis Taqueria on Vickery. Theirs are served with their house green sauce, which has sinister addictive properties.

Until very recently I had never tried to make tacos al pastor for myself. Traditionally the meat is rotisserie cooked on a spit, which is difficult to replicate in my kitchen. However, Will got me an amazing cookbook called Just Tacos, by Shelley Wiseman, which has a great method for marinating pork chops or thinly sliced pork shoulder. This recipe is adapted from that cookbook.

In this recipe, you marinate the pork chops in a blend of pineapple, vinegar, guajillo chiles and spices. Guajillo chiles are pretty widely available, and you can use fresh or the dried kind. Here's your ingredient rundown:

3 large guajillo chiles, stemmed, seeded, and cut or torn into large chunks
1/2 c water
1 c chopped fresh pineapple (buy a whole pineapple so you can make the pineapple juice in the recipe that follows)
1/4 c white vinegar
1 tsp salt
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped (I'm a lazy hobo so I use the kind that comes in the big jar. Sorry, Bourdain.)
1/2 tsp dried oregano (Mexican, if you can find it)
1/4 tsp cumin
pinch ground cloves
1 1/2 lb thin pork chops or sliced pork shoulder
corn tortillas

For the taco toppings:
thick slices of pineapple (you'll be roasting them)
1 white onion
fresh cilantro
lime

There are all kinds of crazy ways people will tell you to use to determine if your pineapple is ripe, but basically it should have lots of yellow, and it should smell sweet. Reserve the rind when you slice up this pineapple if you want to make the pineapple juice that follows.





Cube some of the pineapple for the marinade, but remember to leave some thick slices intact so you can have them to grill later.

Put the pineapple in a saucepan along with the water, vinegar, chiles, and salt. Simmer uncovered for about 10 minutes, or until the chiles are nice and soft. Please note that I used way more than a cup of pineapple. I don't measure. Whatever.

Once that's finished, pour the mixture into a blender and add the garlic and spices. If you're anything like me, for this next step you'll have to spend 10 minutes taking everything out of your spice cabinet to find what you need because you have the organizational skills of a chihuahua.

Once you've located the cloves, cumin and oregano, put them in the blender and resolve to organize at a later, as-yet-undetermined date.

Blend, and pour in a wide mixing bowl, or directly into whatever you plan to use to marinate the pork chops, and allow the mixture to cool to room temperature.

Also - key step - smell and taste. This stuff smells ridiculously good.

Idea: Add some fresh onion and cilantro to the blender and make yourself an awesome salsa for chips or whatever. If you do, let me know how that works for you.

Coat the pork chops with the mixture, place them in a dish and cover the container with plastic wrap. Marinate them for 6 - 24 hours. When you're ready to cook dinner, pre-heat your grill. You could use a grill pan or griddle if you want. Slice the onion into thick rounds, and skewer the rounds with grilling skewers to make your life easier. Please note from the picture that I forgot about the rounds and sliced my onion in half. Wrong move. Brush the onion and the pineapple with oil (canola or peanut for the grill - olive oil doesn't do well at high temperatures) and place on the upper rack of your grill. You could also do these in the oven using the broiler and a baking sheet.

Grill the pork about 1 minute per side. Once it's finished, slice it thinly for your tacos.



Did I want to take the pork chop bones into the bathroom and gnaw blissfully away in the bathtub? Yes. But I restrained myself.

Chop up your fixins.

Last step: Heat your tortillas. This is, in my opinion, a crucial step. Eating hot food out of a cold tortilla is terrible. This is not North Korea. You don't have to live your life like that. Very lightly brush the tortillas with oil. This will soften them up a little and give them some of that delicious char. Heat them directly on the stove or grill. Usually they will start to puff up in the middle when they are ready to flip.





Oh yes. Unfortunately I do not have a picture of the assembled taco. Too busy scarfing. Also unfortunate, I forgot to take pictures of the tomatillo sauce I made for these tacos. I promise you they're great without the sauce, but I'll put up pictures in the future.

I did enjoy my tacos with pineapple juice made from the rind of the pineapple. It's super easy, so here you go. Chop the rind into 1-2 inch chunks, and put it into a large pot along with:

4 c water
1/2 c cider vinegar
1/2 c turbinado or brown sugar

Boil it for about 20 minutes, then let the mixture cool to room temperature. If you have time, let it sit overnight to let the flavors groove on each other. Once it's cooled, move it to the blender and blend until the mixture is coarse. I had to do mine in batches. Once it's blended, pour it through a mesh strainer. Again, if you're a hobo like me, use your flour sifter. It works just fine. Mash down on the solids in the sifter to squeeze out as much of the juice as possible.

Taste the juice and decide if it needs more sugar or cider vinegar. Mine needed about 1/8 cup more sugar. Chill and serve over ice. Reserve about an inch at the top of your glass, and top it off with some club soda.

This would be really awesome with rum or tequila, but as I am currently living in a dark underworld of non-alcoholic beverages, this passes for a cocktail.

Cheers!

A



Why you should read Dorian Gray, but not take up absinthe.

Over my Spring Break this year, Will and I took a trip to New Orleans. I had read about a little bookstore off Jackson Square called Faulkner House Books, so we decided to check it out. Faulkner House is on a tiny cobbled street called Pirate’s Alley, which is tremendously cool.

 It is also the former home of William Faulkner, who rented it from a jewelry maker during the twenties. This is also tremendously cool. The entire store is about the size of my dining room, and, similarly, most of it is occupied by a large table filled with books. The room has charming tile floors, high ceilings with beautiful moldings, and enormous floor to ceiling windows. The entire effect makes seem like it must have been terribly wonderful to live in poverty as a writer 80 years ago. Particularly in New Orleans, with an absinthe bar right next door. Please do not disabuse me of my romantic notions of writerly poverty.

it looks just like this, right?

Because the store is tiny, you can browse their stock in no time flat, but of course, as with any carefully curated store, closer inspection is rewarded. They have a large section on New Orleans history and New Orleans cooking, and a nice collection of first editions by southern writers. Of course, a very special case is reserved for all the Faulkner.

Although I was tempted by an enormous, illuminated version of The Canterbury Tales, I settled for a beautiful large-format edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The text of the story is accompanied by extensive marginal annotations and beautiful full-color illustrations of everything from examples of art referenced in the story to places frequented by Wilde in London.

Parenthetically, I’d like to note that this sort of thing would be impossible with an e-Reader. That is all.

I think many, if not most people, are familiar with the story of Dorian Gray. A society portrait painter in Victorian London paints his finest work – a luminous portrait of his young friend Dorian Gray. Dorian wishes aloud that he could always remain as youthful and innocent as the image in the portrait, and thus, without realizing it, makes a pact with SATAN. From that point on, all of his evil thoughts and unspeakable misdeeds are reflected in the painting, thus causing it to grow hideous and evil-looking while the actual Dorian remains as dewy and fresh as honeysuckle.

What prompted the book to be censored and Oscar Wilde to be prosecuted for gross indecency was the book’s implication that its protagonist and several of the other main characters were covertly engaging in GAY SEX. I’ll give you a minute to wipe all of the apple juice off of your computer screen after the enormous spit-take you just did. There you go. In fact, the painter Basil Hallward admits that he is initially hesitant to show the painting to Dorian precisely because “I have put into it all the extraordinary romance of which, of course, I have never dared to speak to him.” It was this sort of admission that would, in Victorian times, send monocles clattering into tea cups and old women lunging greedily for their smelling salts. To the Victorians, any painting that was born out of a forbidden homoerotic love would inevitably display the “unhealthy insanity” (to use the words of Wilde’s detractors) of both its author and subject. It’s all very Gothic and sinister, what with the painting secreted away in a dusty attic room for only Dorian to view.

One of the things that most struck me about the story of Oscar Wilde and the publication/persecution of Dorian Gray was the sadness of viewing Wilde’s history in hindsight. The adjective “Victorian” has become synonymous with oppressive morality for a reason. After Wilde was put on trial for gross indecency, he spent two years in a hard labor prison, and then retreated to Paris where he died alone, depressed and poor, all conditions he loathed. Although there are a few aspects of modernity I believe he would find repellent (e.g., the Pizza Hut P’Zone, the American penchant for wearing tear-away pants and Adidas slides in airports), I think that Wilde would have greatly enjoyed the present. To paraphrase Nicholas Frankel, the author of the general introduction, he would not have been forced to live the secret double life that spawned Dorian Gray, and he certainly would not have found himself and his ideals in conflict with a Puritanical society. He would possibly have been celebrated, according to Harold Bloom, as “an aesthetic superstar” not unlike Truman Capote or Andy Warhol. On a personal note, Oscar Wilde is probably Number One on the list of invitees to my zombie cocktail party, which will be entirely comprised of dead people who seem like they would be highly entertaining.  Other invitees include Truman Capote and Andy Warhol. And Waylon Jennings.

obviously.

If you’ve not read Dorian Gray, consider picking it up. In some ways the book is a story about the danger of confusing life and art. Not to make a speech or nothin’, but it should also make you think about the ways that art can have very real implications for people’s lives, the way this book did on Wilde’s. And. AND! It should make you deeply grateful that you don’t live in the 19^th century. Because not only were most people painfully repressed and judgmental and rabidly homophobic, but they had to drink hideous drinks like vermouth with orange bitters, or absinthe, which tastes like aftershave. Anyone who tells you differently is kidding themselves. Plus, they all probably smelled terrible since they weren’t wearing any deodorant under all those clothes. That is, if the Mennonites I saw last week at Rock City are to be believed. But more on that later.

Viva la Blog!

Well hello again! After almost a ten-month hiatus, I am returning to the blog. With school out, my days are filled with thousands of unscheduled minutes just waiting to be seized. While my primary impulse is to lie horizontal on the couch for the next two and a half months eating cheese, I am reluctantly trying to find ways to use my time in a semi-productive manner.

As most of you probably know, the preceding year has brought the exciting and, of course, life-altering news that Will and I are expecting our first child in October. Like any expectant parents, we are riding an emotional roller coaster of joy, anticipation, confusion, love, bewilderment, nervousness, and occasional vomiting. We’ve tried to break the news to our dogs as gently as possible, but at this point they appear to be in a state of collective denial. As happy as this news is, it has regrettably forced us to cancel our plans to spend 2 months in Oxford this summer while I continue my Master’s Degree. This, to quote Wayne Campbell, is both bogus and sad.

Since I will not get to spend the summer pretending to be Hermione Granger, I will be living an equally gripping existence here in Benbrook, cooking various meat-related items, reading fictional and non-fictional works about British people, and fantasizing about red wine. And, of course, I’ll be attempting to mentally prepare myself for the idea that Will and I will soon be parents. This, I’ve discovered, is something that almost certainly takes nine months. If not longer.

As I transition from non-mom to mom, I find my interactions with other people’s babies becoming more natural and less full of painful silences. While Will is a stone-cold baby magnet, historically I haven’t ever really felt that uterus flutter of glee whenever a tiny human enters the room. I observed that most people’s babies were cute, objectively speaking, it’s just that I couldn’t really relate to them on a personal level. A typical interaction might go something like this:

Amanda: (stares at drink) Sooooo…

Baby: kdeoirjknbvieurh


Amanda: Did you read Christopher Hitchens’ latest essay for Slate?

Baby: (eats handful of dog hair off the floor)

Amanda: (pats baby on the head with primitive Frankenstein hand) So, no?

Baby: (drools and stares reflectively into middle distance). Lkheriuhkjsbvn ciuerihiuhernmnvkjheroiu

Amanda: (joins baby in eating handful of dog hair)

In short, despite my chosen career path, I am not maternal. While I believe that is changing as I grow more attached to the 1 pound critter swimming around in my stomach, I am resolved not to allow my brain to completely succumb to an endless loop of mom-thoughts after my child is born, never to return to its former state. Like the survivors living among the infected in 28 Days Later, it is crucial to remain ever-vigilant. 

Unlike 28 Days Later, it is possible to be both a mother and a human. I realize that any actual parents out there reading this may be laughing coldly at my ignorance, but my simple hope is that, even when I am a quivering pile of goo compulsively posting pictures of my adorable child on facebook, I will still be able to sustain the occasional adult interaction. As such, I plan to use this blog to 1) Exercise my brain’s writey-typey-thinky areas, and 2) serve as a permanent record that I once used these areas of my brain. Hopefully I’ll be posting stuff about food that I cook and food that I want to cook, books I read, and the exotic destination spots Will and I visit this summer, e.g., Chattanooga, TN and Archer City, TX.

Cheers!

Frijoles!

Beans, and pinto beans in particular, are one of the great pleasures on this fertile earth of ours. I think that living in Texas precludes one to be even more fond of beans than residents of other parts of the world, perhaps because they so nicely compliment many of the other foods we enjoy here. I challenge you to find me a Mexican or Barbecue restaurant at which beans are not the default side on any plate.

I inherited a cookbook from my grandmother called "A Taste of Texas," which is notable not just for its delicious recipes, but the highly entertaining essays which accompany many of the recipes. The essay accompanying the two recipes for pinto beans is by J. Frank Dobie, and if you don't know who that is, well, you're probably not from Texas. I kind of want his life. Aside from the part where he was getting shelled by Germans during World War I. Anyway, Dobie's essay is a treatise on the frijole which I am tempted to reproduce in its entirety here because it is as learned and eloquent a discussion of bean cooking as I've ever read. Here's the last paragraph:

"A meat eater could live on frijoles and never miss meat. When a Mexican laborer is unable to lift a heavy weight, his companions say that he 'lacks frijoles.' As you may deduce, I am kind of a frijole man. On the oldtime ranches of the border country, where I grew up, frijoles were about as regular as bread and in some households they still are."

Yeah. Dobie makes the point, and I agree, that pinto beans should be prepared simply. At their most basic, with just water, pork, salt, onions and peppers. Here's my recipe.

First, dump your bag of HEB pinto beans into a large pot. Cover them with cold water and let them sit, ideally over night, but if you're a slacker like me, then maybe just a couple of hours. I don't plan. Some people say you should sift through the beans and look for rocks and dirt and whatever. Meh.

When you're ready to cook them, drain the beans. You can rinse them if it helps you sleep better at night. Here are my beans post-soak.

Cover the beans with water again, probably about 6 cups to start. If you're feeling zesty, you can replace some of the water with chicken broth or beer. For this particular batch I used 2 cups water, 2 cups chicken broth, and a bottle of Shiner, just because that's how I was feeling yesterday. I pretty much always pour a light beer in there. You can go fancy if you want, but Bud Light works just fine.

Then you're going to chop some stuff. Here's my still life with ingredients.

Dice the onion and throw that in. Dice up one of the jalapenos and throw that in. If that looks like a LOT of jalapeno to you then hold off on the other one for a couple of hours, taste your bean juice and then make a decision about the second one. Editor's note: I always add the second one. Before you do anything else, wash your hands. If you don't do it immediately, you will forget. And then you will rub your eyes, or pick your nose, and then you will hate yourself. So do it right away before you forget.

Then, chop garlic until you can't stand to chop garlic anymore. About 4 large cloves should be enough. Next, get yourself some link sausauge.

Mine is frozen because I just took it out of the freezer. Like I said, I don't plan. This is venison/pork sausage from a deer that Will shot. Pork is important for beans. Pork and beans love each other like...pork and beans. Like my sister's feral cats named Frank and Beans who only love each other and hate all other living creatures.

Dice up the sausage and throw that in.

Now add your spices. I don't measure, so use the measurements below for novelty purposes only. They might be kind of accurate, I don't know. Use your taste buds. And your eyes.

1 1/2 Tbsp. Salt
1 Tbsp. black pepper
1 tsp. sage
2 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. cayenne pepper
2 bay leaves

I realized when I started looking for the sage yesterday that I didn't have any. MUCH to my consternation. I substitued oregano, but it's really not as good for beans. You should use sage.

Mmmm...beans. Bring them to a boil, then put the lid on and turn the fire down to medium-low. More like low-medium. Then you should pretty much leave them alone for about 4 hours. If you don't have that long, just plan on eating them the next day. They'll be better then anyway. Stir them occasionally, but not too often or they'll get all mushy. Also, keep an eye on the water level and add more if it gets too low, or if the beans start to stick to the bottom. I usually add another couple cups at some point. Before you serve, taste and adjust the seasonings as needed. I can't really help you with that part.

I didn't get a picture of the finished beans because I was too busy wharking them down. Sorry. Suffice it to say they were delicious, and I will likely be eating them again soon, as this recipe makes enough beans to feed my entire college graduating class.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must go fix myself a bowl of beans.

All Apologies

The following is an entry that I started writing last Wednesday afternoon. I was listening to the Avett Brothers and feeling somewhat maudlin about leaving. I didn't get a chance to finish the post, so it's just been sitting here for 5 days. I just re-read it, and I'm a little embarrassed about how pitiful it sounds, but I decided to publish it anyway. Sometimes a little emotion is a good thing.

Today is my last day here in the dorms and my room is empty, except for my computer and close to seven hundred dead bugs. I promise I didn't kill all of them, just the one that I wrote about previously. I do feel badly that they get in and then can't get out again; I'm not really sure how to solve that problem for them though.

An empty dorm building is a pretty sad thing, but it has allowed me to reflect a bit on everything that I've learned here this summer.

What follows is a piss-poor photograph of the staircase at Loretto Chapel.

I really am sorry it's so terrible. For those of you who don't know, the staircase was constructed in the 1880s by a mysterious stranger who came to town. He offered to build it for a convent of nuns during the construction of the chapel, and after he was finished, he left town and was never heard from again. The staircase was built without nails or a central support, so the joinery used is some sort of witchery that defies understanding. The prevailing theory espoused by the nuns is that the mysterious stranger was St. Joseph, and thus the staircase is considered an actual real-life miracle.

After graduation earlier, I was looking through my phone at some of the pictures I took in Santa Fe this summer, and, as English majors are wont to do, attempting to come up with some sort of unifying metaphor for the summer (not something, I understand, that occupies the brains of most people who are productive, functioning members of society). I've been working for the past six weeks to wrap my head around some truly astonishing feats of verbal skill. It was my task, on several occasions, to select some tiny facet of these texts and articulate what exactly makes them fuction as they do. Digging through mounds of scholarly research and poring over the significance of each word selected by the author, I attempted, with my tiny pea brain, to tease out the implications of these choices and identify the ever-elusive "deeper meaning" behind a really good story. Like the staircase at Loretto, these texts are artifacts that represent a super-human achievement combining virtuoso technical skill and artistic wizardry (whether or not they were created by actual saints). Like my pathetic iPhone photo, any attempts to capture and articulate the brilliance of the original work are at best derivative, stupid and pointless.

Nevertheless, I can't think of any better way to spend my summer, or the rest of my life, for that matter, than to live as a scholar. It's unlikely I'll ever create anything as wonderful as a staircase with invisible joinery, or The Canterbury Tales, but spending my time thinking about them is good enough for me.

Lit and Lard Links

Well, things are starting to wind down here in Santa Fe, and I'm amazed at all the things that I haven't managed to do yet. I've yet to visit the Santa Fe Opera, I haven't been able to do much hiking due to the fires, and I've been spending so much time in the dining hall that my list of recommended restaurants and bars to visit is getting really backed up. Since I haven't had time to come up with an idea for an actual post either, here are some delightful links from around the Interwebs pertaining to my areas of interest. (Sidenote: My familiarity with obscure corners of the internet is in no way related to my inability to get out in the world and do productive things. So don't even think about suggesting that.)

I want to eat almost all of these. Will purchased a new grill last weekend after our old one crumbled into dust when he attempted to repair it, so now I have a reasonable excuse for making that crispy pork belly.

I've been hatching this plan recently for Will and I to move to England for a brief spell while I indulge my irresponsible fantasy of being a professional scholar. This list of the top 10 pubs in London isn't making me any less excited about that idea.

Speaking of drinking. And books. I'm wondering how Hunter S. Thompson got left off this list. But I suppose the jist of the article is "How to Drink Like Your Favorite Author," not "How to Eat Acid with Murderous Bikers Like Your Favorite Author."

This article is one of the most fascinating things I've read in quite some time. Basically this ridiculous person walks into the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC and asks them to authenticate the most famous stolen book in the world. That he stole, by the way. Madcap hysteria ensues.

Do you lament the disappearance of useless and archaic words from the English language? Don't you wish there was something you could do, as an individual? The Oxford English Dictionary is here to help.

I'm heading home to see Will, the pups, and Dolly Parton before the home stretch.

Cheers!

Folk Art! That's My Favorite Kind of Folk Medium!

That's a Simpsons quote, for those of you not in the know.

Today I traipsed down to the Santa Fe International Folk Art Festival for some art of the folky persuasion. The idea is that artists from countries all over the world come here to Santa Fe to sell their wares to greedy Americans, get some exposure and make pretty decent money. According to the festival organizers, exhibitors take home approximately 90% the proceeds, and the average exhibitor earns $15,000. As you can imagine, that's a great deal of money for some of these people, who travel from places like Uzbekistan, Ghana and Laos.

Also, through consultations with volunteers, prices are what Americans would expect to pay for merchandise like this if they bought it here in America. Which is to say, not as cheap as it would be in Uzbekistan, Ghana or Laos.

Aren't these rugs beautiful?

They're handwoven silk. They're made using dyes from things like walnuts, wild herbs and pomegranate juice. They never fade, and you can clean them with water and shampoo. Touching one is like caressing an angel. And a tiny one is $1200. A nice lady asked if she could put something aside for me, and I muttered something about having to scuttle back to my hovel.

It was great just to wander around and look at everything. There are over 150 vendors from 49 countries, so the variety is pretty amazing. Here's some very vibrant hand painted stuff from Poland:

And some lace textiles from Haiti:

I spent way less than I was tempted to, but way more than I should have. I got a couple of paintings from a very nice Cuban woman. Here's a rooster stomping on a town:

And a very brightly-colored villiage:

I like the dog in the doorway.

Here's a pretty Mexican textile I got as well:

I also got some gifts for some lovely people, so you don't get to see pictures of those. I will say, however, that I got several very beautiful things from different vendors from Uzbekistan, so if you ever find yourself there, you should probably locate the nearest market area and look around. And although I can't say for certain, I'm sure that Laos and Ghana have many talented native artists as well.

Yay folk art!