Why haven’t I fired up the grill more often? I made a special trip to a carneceria and bought a strip of bright-red marinated fajita meat.
Meat should always cook over an open flame. It brings together the two great elements of the human condition: flesh and fire.
At a friend’s backyard barbecue, I had some of the super-fancy Wholefoods sausage. The top sausage has dried cherries mixed in. That’s what the dark spots are.
You would think the sweetness would be revolting, but it meshed with the pork and the grease with intriguing effects.
Julia my food-frakking deputy left some fillets of freezer-burned salmon at my house, so I decided to make them into grav lax, which is Swedish for "fish from the grave." Traditionally it’s made by packing the salmon in salt and spices (dill in this case), and burying it in the ground for a week. In my case I just used the refrigerator.
I was shocked to find that the salt and the dill flavor penetrated all the way to the center of the cut after just three days. I would have thought that flesh would be less permeable.
They sold this gelatin cup at Baguette House, the Vietnamese sandwich shop. It could very well have been pistachio jello made with coconut milk.
I have never seen the tamarind version of the ice cream sacks.
If only it were filled with chili and salt. I prefer the eggnog flavor.
A buddy has a large canister of mineral water. So I fetched some chocolate syrup and milk and made some egg creams.
Like all egg creams is was that fascinating combination of delicious and vile.
Speaking of vile, I had thought that these "Huevitos," subtitled as "candy-coated chocolate flavor eggs," were your standard malted milk balls.
They tasted more like stale malted milk balls that used rancid rum instead of milk.
The "Cielo" bottled water is made right here in Austin! Or at least bottled here, I don’t think they burned hydrogen molecules to make this.
The label says that it has "fours times the dissolved oxygen of other waters." What does that mean? It’s H2O4??? Are we expected to breath it or keep goldfish in it? It tasted pretty much exactly like tapwater, so its claim to being local is pretty credible.
This week I went to La Mexicana bakery on South First. They have a new menu which includes torta ahogada, which means "drowned sandwich." It’s supposed to be a signature of the Jalisco culinary style, but I’ve never seen it offered anywhere else. As you can see, it’s a fairly normal torta, except it’s drowned beneath salsa.
Yes, it was very difficult to pick up and eat, but it may have been the most delicious thing I’ve eaten in a long time. Partially this is due to the superb barbacoa they serve at La Mexicana which is easily one of the three best barbacoas in town. My serving had a tiny, splintered shard of tooth enamel in it, so you know it’s authentic.
And of course there were the obligatory pastry purchases. The flat one here is a fried cookie of some sort. On top of it is a puff-pastry with lemon goop inside.
This other pastry appears to be a spherical cake with goopy and sticky frosting smeared along the outside.
It was like a tragically inverted twinkie.
