While driving up on Anderson Lane, I caught a glimpse, out of the corner of my eye, of the message "Pizza! Tacos! Tortas!"
Those are three things I really love, I thought to myself. A while later, I convinced Jeremiah to accompany me to Pizza Zi, a store that has everything my heart desires. Or at least the three most prominent things.
We didn’t have the tacos (perhaps another trip) but we did have tortas and pizza in the same meal!
The torta was pretty decent, as was the pizza. But what was truly amazing, is they sold us the pizza at taco-cart prices. You live in this town too long and you forget that pizza is a cheap food, and it doesn’t have to cost fifteen or twenty bucks.
Jeremiah and I speculated amongst ourselves if it would be possible to get a pizza with al pastor and nopalitos as topping. Next time for sure.
I was at Shangri La, a hipster bar on E. Sixth and a guy came up to me carrying a drink cooler. "You want to buy some tamales?" he asked. "No thanks," I said reflexively. After he had walked off, I thought, why the hell did I say no to such an amazing offer? So I chased after him, buying a half dozen for a fiver.
The tamales were served wrapped in aluminum foil and held in a previously-used HEB plastic grocery bag. Because they were in the drink cooler they were still piping hot, probably even above the health department mandated safe temperature. They may have been the best tamales I’ve ever eaten. The corn meal was soft and moist, held together by hot chicken fat. And the chicken meat inside was juicy and flavorful.
Which goes to show, sometimes the guy making you a sordid offer in the bar has something you actually want.
A trip to the New Oriental Market came up with these pastries.
They looked delicious, but I should have read the ingredients. They were filled with beans. Yech.
I still don’t see how anyone can call something non-carbonated, let alone filled with yogurt, a soft drink
But it was pretty good.
A little mixer-platter of fish cakes came with a soup base packet, presumably to boil and serve the fish paste items.
The fish-paste fish-cakes, despite the variety of shapes, tasted pretty much the same. Although there was an interesting subtle gradation of texture. Some had the consistency of rubber, and some were almost as soft as fish marshmallows.
These are called skwinkles.
They were in a bargain bin at the Fiesta. Basically there’s these hard fruit sticks that you’re supposed to dip in the obligatory tamarind and chili paste.
This isn’t particularly food-frakkin’ but it’s an example of a particular type of slacker/hipster food. This is from "Your Mama", a burger bar on Caesar Chavez, which has been open for only a few months but has nevertheless already landed an appearance on Man vs. Food. It’s one of those places that names all its modest variations of a simple food after celebrities; a somewhat saccharine exercise in stretched metaphors. This was the Frida Kahlo.
Why was it named that? It’s unclear. Maybe because of the fried egg. But the gimmick of Your Mama is to fry the meat patty as two separate patties with a filling in between. So it’s sort of like the Pizza Hut stuffed crust but with all meat.
Went down to the corner fruitcup stand with Toasterwaffel and I got a torta hawallana. It’s Hawaiian because it has pineapple, ham, and sliced hotdog wieners.
I snuck a picture of the altar in the corner. You can’t see it from this distance, but all the statues have folded dollar bills wedged into every crevasse.
And of course the actual fruitcups.
Toasterwaffel had the strawberry malt (maltada fresa?), and I had a cup of chopped ice filled with strawberry, cucumber, salt, chili, and watermelon. It would have tasted a lot better if it had been about twenty degrees warmer.
My food-frakking deputy Julia and I bought some frozen, salted flounder.
The fins, head, scales, and guts had been removed but it was otherwise whole. A fascinating exploration of flounder anatomy.
It seemed like a regular fish that had been mutilated and squashed, a birth-defect hunchback of a fish. But it fried well.
There were some odd little bones near the edge, a line of tiny little support structures, but otherwise the bones peeled out of the fish like a cartoon drawing of a skeleton. It was a flavorful and slightly oily meat.
