I’ve blogged about Tam Deli on North Lamar before, mainly about the Vietnamese sandwiches, but as it happens, the Vietnamese also make a damn fine breakfast.
The ham slice and the fried egg are fairly mainstream, but the pate and the fresh grated vegetables give it that Vietnamese twist.
Julia, my food-frakking deputy, and I found ourselves in Lockhart and had breakfast at the Mr. Taco. I ordered the machacado plate, which is dried, shredded beef scrambled with eggs.
Quite the manly breakfast, I thought.
Another Mexican dried beef situation cropped up when Julia and I ate at one of the hip new food trailers, El Naranjo. The place has had a lot of buzz as being one of the best interior Mexican restaurants in town (as opposed to Tex-Mex which is exterior Mexican). The special of the day was a re-hydrated Oaxacan dried-beef taco, which I believe they called tasajo.
It was about twice as expensive as I would expect to pay for a taco cart taco, but it was pretty good nonetheless. The best part about the venue was the cat who hung around the patio, begging for scraps.
It ate everything we offered it, including lettuce and tortilla chips.
Awww!
Last week I had lunch at a diner attached to a Motel on the frontage road. The sign called it "Kettle", and there was no definite article, which should have been a portent of the food to come. The catfish fillet sandwich I ordered came on a ludicrously small bun. It wasn’t a sandwich so much as it was a scale model of a sandwich.
As I left, the only other patron in the restaurant asked if I had been in Austin for long, because she had memories of "Kettle" being a nice place and she wanted to know if anyone else was as shocked by the current lack of nice as she was.
The one positive aspect of "Kettle" was the love tester machine, which confirmed all my suspicions.
I had some weird fish in the back of my freezer for some time, so I figured I should probably eat it.
After a bit of googling, I decided that "River Bard Fish" was a typo and that this fish was actually a "River Barb" or a "Tinfoil Barb," Barbonymus schwanenfeldii. A lot of people keep tinfoil barbs in their cichlid tanks because they grow quite large and can co-exist with potentially aggressive aquarium fish like oscars (so yes, once again, I have eaten an animal that people consider a pet). The Clove Garden has an entry on it, and he talks about eating around the "spines." You see, I bought this fish before I did a lot of research into fishing, so I didn’t recognize at the time the slashing technique that scored the sides of these fish.
That’s the same way those crazy carp fisherman clean their catch. The river barb is somewhat related to carp, so it has the same proliferation of bones that make every mouthful a disgusting mass of so-called spines. The slashes, in theory, allow hot oil to seep into the fish-flesh and dissolve the boniness. So I took measures to cook these fish in plenty of hot oil.
And you know, it worked. I didn’t notice any bones that weren’t in the expected fish skeleton places.
The tinfoil barb tastes pretty good. The flesh strikes a nice balance between flavorful and fishy.
For Thanksgiving I baked a whole bunch of pies, because it’s much more fun if you don’t have to do it. I made a version of a Tex-Mex pie that I’ve been working on, that involves chili, cayenne, and lime.
People seemed to like it. I posted the recipe up at Austinpost.
