First off, old business. I’m setting a firm end date for the fabulous taco quiz. You all have until 4pm this Thursday to give me your entries. Then I will tabulate the vast pile of submissions from wannabe taco masters and determine who is the winner.
Now let’s talk about the stuff I’ve been putting in my mouth recently.
Julia, my food-frakking deputy, and I went out to the marisco place where we had the creamy seafood platter and the octopus cocktail about a year ago. Only the format had changed, it was no longer marisco but jalisco. In practice this meant that the seafood options on the menu were cut in half, while the meat platter options were doubled. I ordered the special which was written on a piece of construction paper taped to the window, chuletas de puerco, or pork chops.
Because this was a jalisco version of porkchops, most of them were chopped up into little bits and they were fried until crisp, the outside crusted in salt and spices.
Julia ordered the second entree platter listed on the menu (the Jalisco Special is always the first in any jalisco joint). It was called alhambra, or alambra, or ahamaba, or something like that. It was a pile of fajita marinated beef, fried up with chunks of bacon and covered in melted cheese. It was the single most meaty thing I’ve ever had. I ate about a third of Julia’s portion and I wasn’t hungry until about 4pm the next afternoon.
I checked the web to see if I could find the proper spelling for Julia’s dish, and I found a couple of interesting discussion threads on Chowhound that discussed the qualities of jalisco restaurants as well as Tex-Mex. For every attribute of jalisco and Tex-Mex that they listed, I could think of a restaurant that violated that culinary principle. For instance, they said that serving meal platters with re-fried pinto beans and chopped lettuce is a only done in Tex-Mex, but every jalisco joint I’ve ever visited has done exactly that. Suffice it to say, there is no doubt a constant interplay of cultures and cuisines that’s going on even as we speak.
An example of something that is probably Tex-Mex, but barely qualifies as food at all is this Jack in the Box dish called taco-nachos.
Those things that look like tortilla chips are actually tortilla-like flaps of corn dough that have been folded around some sort of meaty/beany paste that vaguely resembles taco filling. Then the whole thing was drenched in melted velveeta. Culturally, this dish is puzzling, but on a purely "waiting for the bus and needing to eat something" level it was quite satisfying.
Julia and I went to a different jalisco place that was the restaurant attached to a hotel off of 290. It had a bizarre molded concrete roof, like some 1950s futuristic roadside diner from route 66.
It was part of the Taqueria Jaliscienses empire. When we first got there, a three piece mariachi band was serenading the group tables, their hand-held amplifiers echoing deafeningly from the peaked concrete roof. We avoided making eye contact and eventually they filed out the door, waving goodbye to the waitresses.
I ordered the mojarra frita, the whole-fried tilapia.
I was talking to a friend a couple nights ago about how he couldn’t stand eating anything that still had its head on it. He was all about the filets and the boneless. Personally I’ve gotten to the point that it seems gross to eat a fish that’s come pre-mutilated. This particular mojarra was pretty good until I got to the part in the middle that was completely uncooked. I imagine it was dropped in the fryer before completely thawing. Julia made me exchange it for a torta, which was a good idea. As a quiet Midwesterner I probably wouldn’t have said anything. The wait staff was extremely good natured about the whole thing.
Julia threw a party recently, and one of her friends showed up with a ghost pepper. You know, the bhut jolokia that the media has been talking about. This is the reputedly hottest pepper in the world, the pepper that makes habaneros look like little Japanese schoolgirls, the pepper that the Indian military has weaponized for use against angry mobs of religious extremists.
Here he is cutting off a precisely measured hunk of ghost pepper. Notice the protective latex gloves.
Of course I ate some. At first I was like, what sort of an idiot does something that they know is going to hurt really bad? And then I asked for a piece, for the same reason that the ghost pepper is selling like hotcakes at grocery stores across the country: because the very concept of a "world’s hottest pepper" is a tacit challenge to my masculinity.
But I’m not really stupid. I just took a tiny bite.
Every square millimeter of my mouth that touched the ghost pepper maxed out its pain receptors. It’s like when you look at bodily fluids smeared across a wall under a blacklight, I had a high definition sensory map of where the ghost pepper left its residue. My nose ran and I developed that painful hiccuping that I had previously only experienced from the tacos selene green salsa. And then after five minutes, I could tell that I had experienced the worst of it, and the rest would be downhill.
So, nope, not going to do that again.
Last night, Julia and I visited this Korean place, Chosun Galbi, that’s in the parking lot of the Highland movie theater. We’ve been there before, they have a reasonably-priced and quite good sushi happy hour.
I ordered the cold buckwheat noodles with fish. I was warned twice by two different wait staff that as an American I might not like it. They asked if I had had it before.
When it was served, the lady who brought it, cut the noodles with a pair of shears at the table. It came with a delicious, iced dipping sauce. Notice also the wide assortment of the traditional pickled snack dishes that you find at Korean restaurants. It was a pretty good bowl of noodles I thought.
What was curious, however, was how no-one warned Julia about her fish stew. Not a word was mentioned about the quantity of unidentified fish organs floating in the broth.
At first I thought it might be a fig. But then I put it in my mouth. It was leathery, and inflated under pressure, like a tiny football. I had to bite down pretty hard before it popped, spraying the inside of my mouth with a fluid that can only be described as tasting like fish guts. Like an idiot I continued chewing, but the deflated leather fish-organ sack was too tough.
I traded out with Julia, giving her the rest of my cold noodles. I picked out the fish organs and ate the chunks of bisected fish that floated in the broth. They had to be separated from their spines, but were otherwise quite edible.
I’m not sure if the organs were meant to eaten, or if the fish organs were just there to give the soup the taste and smell of something that was left onshore after high tide. I imagine that it’s some sort of traditional peasant dish, a nostalgic leftover from the days when you were happy to get a bowl full of fish organs.
The fish organ stew was easily the most disgusting thing I’ve seen served at a restaurant. So of course I’m going back.
When they brought us the bill, the hostess also brought a couple of delicate bowls filled with icy cinnamon apple tea. A single delicate shred of dried apple floated at the top of each bowl.
"This is delicious," Julia said as she sipped. "Palate cleansing. No innards."
