Because my day job is in the food service, I have access to restaurant-grade food products that you miserable mortals can only dream of.
Case in point, this five pound bucket of sour cream and this five pound block of extra-melty super-processed cheese.
You civilians are probably scratching your heads right now thinking, so? What does that have to do with me?
Well, if you put those two ingredients together, and add some spices, you have the exact recipe of Austin queso.
This is the sort of thing you might get if you order Kerbey Queso or queso con carne or some other chips and queso dish at any of Austin’s finer psuedo-Mexican diners. It has a smooth, creamy, cheesy texture that you can only achieve through proper blending of highly processed and artificial food-like substances.
Of course you can only eat so much queso, and one feels obligated to use up one’s surplus eight pounds of processed dairy product.
So I made some cheese and macaroni with tomatoes and sardines.
Which I suppose is something you don’t see every day.
Then I also made some dip. This started out as spinach and sour cream. And then I thought, what the hell, I have this can of SPAM. What would happen if I threw it in the blender with the rest of the dip?
I think I imagined a meaty cloud of SPAM mousse dip. But the SPAM completely disappeared into the dip. There was no trace of SPAM color, and only the faintest echo of the SPAM taste.
Certainly worth more experimentation, but a disappointing result all the same.
And now to relate some of my recent adventures with the taco carts.
From this cart near my house, I decided to break down and be that white guy who orders the tripas . You know, tacos filled with beef tripe.
They were greasy and crisp, and tasted like organ tubules. But in a good way. Hell, in a great way.
This taco cart sits in the parking lot of a tejano club on the far east side.
My friend ordered the al pastor torta. The red meat of the marinated pork is reminiscent of both shawarma and chicken tabouli.
And you gotta love the green sauce in the unrefrigerated squeeze bottle. Don’t worry, nothing could live in there, not even microscopically.
I ordered the barbacoa, because finding out that barbacoa comes from heads only makes it twice as delicious.
