This entry is going to give everyone the impression that I spend all my time eating piles of weirdness. Which is probably only half true.
From the taco trailer "La Nortena" on Cameron, near 51st. Carnita tacos:
"Carnita" is the Spanish word for "little carnival." It’s chopped up bits of pig, as juicy and tender as anything I’ve eaten. This is one of the taco stands that uses that delicious, creamy cilantro salsa.
I stopped by the icecream counter at the foodcourt, and got the peanut butter sundae.
It used hard Oakcrest icecream, which was a nice touch, but the peanut butter part was just lumpy spoonfuls of unsweetened PB. It wasn’t bad per se, it just seemed like something I would have made when I was 12 and I didn’t think my parents were looking.
I had dinner at the Korea House restaurant up on Anderson, and of course I had to get the dish that had raw beef and raw egg.
The beef strips tasted like sashimi. The raw egg was hardly noticeable once it was mixed into the crunchy greens. Because this was a Korean restaurant, the meal came with its own little personal buffet, minus the sneeze guard:
From the local Korean grocery, fish cakes:
These deeply processed fish sticks have the texture of extruded rubber, and taste like an Asian grocery smells.
It rained furiously last Tuesday, so I took refuge in the Fiesta, which in retrospect might have been a bad idea considering the series of impulse purchases which included:
Tiny bananas!
An Irish meat product (remember, the UK has ethnic food too) called "black pudding."
According to the ingredients it’s pork that is fluffed out with oatmeal and "dessicated beef hemoglobin." And it indeed tastes like meaty, bloody pudding.
Mexican pastries!
The apple empanada (in the rear) tasted like a dinner roll stuffed with jelly.
What is essentially spicy beef jerky:
And I found some of that machacado I mentioned earlier:
And I went to the trouble of turning it into a breakfast taco:
Here’s some of the fallout from my last trip to the Pakistani grocers:
Chiki brittle, which is not unlike the sesame seed lovechild of peanut brittle and a popcorn ball:
Mint chutney, which makes a very good mayo substitute:
Chatka, which is what you would get if you had Indian immigrants in Houston produce a Cheetos substitute:
Crunchy corn dollops with Indian spices? How could anything be more awesome?
Well, what’s more awesome is the product copy on the back of the package (the ellipses are not mine, they are native to the text, because I really wouldn’t use more than three periods in an ellipses under any circumstance):
| Quote: |
| This is the crrrrunch-wala, mazedaar snack of all snacks! Thora salty, thora spicy, little sweet…just like apna phillums, aar! Try one …. and one more and one more and one more and …
ek Chatka khana…. Impossible! |
I would call that Hinglish, but considering that it’s made in Houston, I would call it Englu. Indeed it’s naya cool.
And while I have your attention, I would like to mention the phenomenon where Austin patio restaurants acquire cats. The Parlor on North Loop has a cat who begs for scraps of pizza.
There’s some sort of evolutionary process going on here, but I hesitate to guess who’s getting the short end of the selective adaptation, me or the cat.
