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!