I’ve always thought of this blog as being essentially visual. After all, who wants to waste brain power reading when you can just look at pictures? So I’m sorry that there hasn’t been much visual content for a while. But we’re going to turn that trend around with this:
FOOD FRAKKER ROUNDUP!
Let’s revisit the breakfast I had just this morning. Mexican chocolate waffle:
My food-frakking deputy Julia insisted that the waffle was actually Belgian and only the chocolate was Mexican, but I think that’s selling the Mexican people short. They’re a cosmopolitan culture that’s just as capable of making a damn waffle as anyone else.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a pie where every slice was a different flavor of fruit? I’m working on that project right now. I’m going to call it the vari-o-pie.
At the local Korean grocery they have an entire aisle devoted to canned tuna. Who knew there were so many varieties? This is called jjajang tuna. I guess the jjajang part is the bean sauce, which covers the tuna like a rich and slightly sweet gravy.
Served on a rice wafer cracker.
I also bought myself some eel.
The sauce made the eel taste crispy and candied. I was not hard core enough to eat the spine (pictured above).
On the same trip I also bought the Korean version of corn bugles, made by Lotte, the same people who brought us most of those amazing icecream sack snacks.
They look and taste exactly like the bugles you remember from your childhood.
And of course it’s not a complete trip to New Oriental Market until you buy some icecream. There was a new option, a Japanese soft-serve treat in a perplexing package.
But once the package is peeled away it becomes a perfectly normal cone!
Although honestly, the cone tastes a little like it spent a couple weeks in a freezer cargo container crossing the Pacific.
From Madam Mam’s, the Thai restaurant on the drag, comes this Thai omelet.
Served with the sauce, it was truly amazing. Lusciously flavorful and subtlely meaty.
Did you know that you can only get most monster-oriented cereals during the Halloween holiday season?
Blind taste tests reveal a startling similarity between cereals with otherwise large visual deviation.
Julia sometimes craves chicken. Which is perfectly reasonable. So we went to Pollo Rico. Or maybe it was Pollo Regio. Is there a difference? I’m not certain. The point is that we sat at a picnic bench in the middle of a parking lot on the south side and they gave us a butcher-paper wrapped sack of sticky chicken bits.
There’s a whole chicken there. An entire bird had to die for our meal, not a partial bird. The best part was all the extras thrown in. There was a roasted onion wrapped up with the dismembered chicken bits. There was a side of beans and a side of rice, a foil-wrapped stack of tortillas, and some of that delicious creamy green salsa that I have yet to reproduce. It took a while to figure out the best way to eat it, but it seemed to work best to strip the pollo off the bones with a plastic fork, and then eat it like a taco with tortillas and salsa.
You might remember the ongoing fresh sardine pasta quest. It was decided that it was virtually impossible to find fresh sardines because they couldn’t really be frozen because of all the oils in their flesh. The best we could do is dried and salted or canned. Well, I actually found some fresh sardines at the HEB of all places.
They don’t look all that great, honestly. I suspect that they were simply refrigerated and not frozen. The guy behind the counter didn’t have a lot of information. But they were clearly sardines. Take a look at the yawn.
They fried up pretty good. The flesh was a lot firmer and juicier than I would have thought. I wish I had bought them out of their stock instead of settled on three. Here it is in the obligatory pasta:
You may have noticed that there aren’t any tacos in this entry. That’s because I am busy putting together the taco meat quiz that I promised. The format I’m going with is to double-up most of the meats, so you can look at the same meat as prepared by different taco cart purveyors.
I’m also working on the prizes. I’m planning on carving a trophy, but I’m not certain what should be pictured. Carving a taco sounds like a lot of trouble and probably not terribly visually striking. If you have any ideas let me know.
