You have only a day to give me your entries for the fabulous taco quiz, and then someone gets crowned the TACO MASTER!!!
Here’s a photo gallery of the trip that Julia and I took from Highland Mall down to Saltillo Plaza on the train. Although the trip took only twelve minutes (not counting the fifteen minutes it took to bike to the nearest station), this was a moment that will live forever in my memories.
First off, old business. I’m setting a firm end date for the fabulous taco quiz. You all have until 4pm this Thursday to give me your entries. Then I will tabulate the vast pile of submissions from wannabe taco masters and determine who is the winner.
Now let’s talk about the stuff I’ve been putting in my mouth recently.
Julia, my food-frakking deputy, and I went out to the marisco place where we had the creamy seafood platter and the octopus cocktail about a year ago. Only the format had changed, it was no longer marisco but jalisco. In practice this meant that the seafood options on the menu were cut in half, while the meat platter options were doubled. I ordered the special which was written on a piece of construction paper taped to the window, chuletas de puerco, or pork chops.
Because this was a jalisco version of porkchops, most of them were chopped up into little bits and they were fried until crisp, the outside crusted in salt and spices.
Julia ordered the second entree platter listed on the menu (the Jalisco Special is always the first in any jalisco joint). It was called alhambra, or alambra, or ahamaba, or something like that. It was a pile of fajita marinated beef, fried up with chunks of bacon and covered in melted cheese. It was the single most meaty thing I’ve ever had. I ate about a third of Julia’s portion and I wasn’t hungry until about 4pm the next afternoon.
I checked the web to see if I could find the proper spelling for Julia’s dish, and I found a couple of interesting discussion threads on Chowhound that discussed the qualities of jalisco restaurants as well as Tex-Mex. For every attribute of jalisco and Tex-Mex that they listed, I could think of a restaurant that violated that culinary principle. For instance, they said that serving meal platters with re-fried pinto beans and chopped lettuce is a only done in Tex-Mex, but every jalisco joint I’ve ever visited has done exactly that. Suffice it to say, there is no doubt a constant interplay of cultures and cuisines that’s going on even as we speak.
An example of something that is probably Tex-Mex, but barely qualifies as food at all is this Jack in the Box dish called taco-nachos.
Those things that look like tortilla chips are actually tortilla-like flaps of corn dough that have been folded around some sort of meaty/beany paste that vaguely resembles taco filling. Then the whole thing was drenched in melted velveeta. Culturally, this dish is puzzling, but on a purely "waiting for the bus and needing to eat something" level it was quite satisfying.
Julia and I went to a different jalisco place that was the restaurant attached to a hotel off of 290. It had a bizarre molded concrete roof, like some 1950s futuristic roadside diner from route 66.
It was part of the Taqueria Jaliscienses empire. When we first got there, a three piece mariachi band was serenading the group tables, their hand-held amplifiers echoing deafeningly from the peaked concrete roof. We avoided making eye contact and eventually they filed out the door, waving goodbye to the waitresses.
I ordered the mojarra frita, the whole-fried tilapia.
I was talking to a friend a couple nights ago about how he couldn’t stand eating anything that still had its head on it. He was all about the filets and the boneless. Personally I’ve gotten to the point that it seems gross to eat a fish that’s come pre-mutilated. This particular mojarra was pretty good until I got to the part in the middle that was completely uncooked. I imagine it was dropped in the fryer before completely thawing. Julia made me exchange it for a torta, which was a good idea. As a quiet Midwesterner I probably wouldn’t have said anything. The wait staff was extremely good natured about the whole thing.
Julia threw a party recently, and one of her friends showed up with a ghost pepper. You know, the bhut jolokia that the media has been talking about. This is the reputedly hottest pepper in the world, the pepper that makes habaneros look like little Japanese schoolgirls, the pepper that the Indian military has weaponized for use against angry mobs of religious extremists.
Here he is cutting off a precisely measured hunk of ghost pepper. Notice the protective latex gloves.
Of course I ate some. At first I was like, what sort of an idiot does something that they know is going to hurt really bad? And then I asked for a piece, for the same reason that the ghost pepper is selling like hotcakes at grocery stores across the country: because the very concept of a "world’s hottest pepper" is a tacit challenge to my masculinity.
But I’m not really stupid. I just took a tiny bite.
Every square millimeter of my mouth that touched the ghost pepper maxed out its pain receptors. It’s like when you look at bodily fluids smeared across a wall under a blacklight, I had a high definition sensory map of where the ghost pepper left its residue. My nose ran and I developed that painful hiccuping that I had previously only experienced from the tacos selene green salsa. And then after five minutes, I could tell that I had experienced the worst of it, and the rest would be downhill.
So, nope, not going to do that again.
Last night, Julia and I visited this Korean place, Chosun Galbi, that’s in the parking lot of the Highland movie theater. We’ve been there before, they have a reasonably-priced and quite good sushi happy hour.
I ordered the cold buckwheat noodles with fish. I was warned twice by two different wait staff that as an American I might not like it. They asked if I had had it before.
When it was served, the lady who brought it, cut the noodles with a pair of shears at the table. It came with a delicious, iced dipping sauce. Notice also the wide assortment of the traditional pickled snack dishes that you find at Korean restaurants. It was a pretty good bowl of noodles I thought.
What was curious, however, was how no-one warned Julia about her fish stew. Not a word was mentioned about the quantity of unidentified fish organs floating in the broth.
At first I thought it might be a fig. But then I put it in my mouth. It was leathery, and inflated under pressure, like a tiny football. I had to bite down pretty hard before it popped, spraying the inside of my mouth with a fluid that can only be described as tasting like fish guts. Like an idiot I continued chewing, but the deflated leather fish-organ sack was too tough.
I traded out with Julia, giving her the rest of my cold noodles. I picked out the fish organs and ate the chunks of bisected fish that floated in the broth. They had to be separated from their spines, but were otherwise quite edible.
I’m not sure if the organs were meant to eaten, or if the fish organs were just there to give the soup the taste and smell of something that was left onshore after high tide. I imagine that it’s some sort of traditional peasant dish, a nostalgic leftover from the days when you were happy to get a bowl full of fish organs.
The fish organ stew was easily the most disgusting thing I’ve seen served at a restaurant. So of course I’m going back.
When they brought us the bill, the hostess also brought a couple of delicate bowls filled with icy cinnamon apple tea. A single delicate shred of dried apple floated at the top of each bowl.
"This is delicious," Julia said as she sipped. "Palate cleansing. No innards."
First off, old business. I’m setting a firm end date for the fabulous taco quiz. You all have until 4pm this Thursday to give me your entries. Then I will tabulate the vast pile of submissions from wannabe taco masters and determine who is the winner.
So the same week that the world started to feverishly buy the iPad, I had to fix my six-year-old tablet PC. Years ago, when I was telling people I intended on buying a tablet PC, everyone clucked their tongues at me and told me that it was just one more thing that could break.
Well, they were mostly right. It broke. However, I am awesome so I was able to fix it.
First, I took the tablet apart, using my amazing beyboard invention to keep track of all the parts.
Then I isolated the problem. The swivel hinge that converts the tablet between keyboard and tablet mode is held onto the screen by four screws. There’s a lot of torque on those screw heads, and every single one had popped off.
It is at this point that I remembered finding screw heads falling out of the machine and thinking to myself, "it’s probably nothing important."
So I got to use my brand new file set to cut slots in the tops of the screws so I could back their stumps out of the holes.
It turns out the screws on the hinge were the same size as all the other ones holding the tablet together (God bless you, Gateway. Dell would have made every single screw a millimeter off). So now it works better than ever!
People always remark how odd it is that Austin hold its annual rodeo at the same time as SXSW. They are the two culturally opposite yet signature events of Austin. So last weekend, Julia and I went to visit.
We didn’t go to the actual rodeo part. They make you listen to a country band and I hear that all the cowboys wear helmets now.
But we did see something much more awesome. Whiplash the cowboy monkey. My camera phone doesn’t have much of a zoom, but you can see the monkey’s red shirt and his chaps hanging over the side of the dog.
Whiplash is a true cowboy, just like George W. And by that, I mean that he’s the monkey on the back of the animal doing all the work.
Here’s Julia, my food frakking deputy, touching a caribou.
Here she is in front of a tractor.
The highlight of any show is the carny food. I was disappointed to find that the fried cheese bore no resemblance to deep-fried cheese curds.
It was more like a corndog with processed nacho cheese instead of a dog.
The deep-fried twinkie was a little more like I anticipated.
My one complaint: the prodigious quantities of powdered sugar blew off the plate and speckled my black clothes.
Here, Julia satisfies her chicken cravings with some chicken on a stick.
Only the stick kept the food from falling apart into luke-warm and soggy wads of oil.
Austin now has train service! Here’s some more photos of this beautiful and expensive contraption.
For a long time, the train was aloof, whisking along the tracks on test runs, empty and unapproachable.
Then during SXSW, I saw it daily, resting by the convention center, finalizing the preparations for passengers.
Notice the sleek, futuristic yet retro-art-deco lines of Austin’s very own train!
Then the big day came! The train was here! Our very own train to ride!
Notice the happy passengers, thrilled just to be included.
This guy is blind, and even he can see how great the train is!
Looking through the list I was a bit shocked by how few movies I actually caught. Last time I went through the SXSW movie wringer I caught about twenty-five. I guess I just had a lot of other stuff going on.
As it turned out, most of the films that I did catch, were later on in the evening, and that was when they scheduled most of the Fantastic-Fest tie-in screenings. I’ve been repeatedly harangued by certain individuals to attend the yearly Fantastic Fest, but I never have. Now I have more of a motivation I guess, because I was generally pretty pleased with the fantastic bent of the movie selection this year.
Higanjima is your standard manga turned live-action film.
There’s a mysterious island overrun by vampires and a bunch of high school kids have to defeat them. The best part about this movie is that their vampires only seem to die if you completely splatter their heads with a blunt object. The heroes use a weapon that seems to be a giant tree trunk with some ropes wrapped around it as handholds. Then the trunk is picked up and used like a battering ram on hapless vampire heads. Splorch!
Jimmy Tupper vs. the Goatman of Bowie is a ruthlessly realistic single-take found footage from a camcorder horror movie.
The characterization is wonderful and there are some seriously scary moments. But considering that it’s got some shaky hand-held footage made by characters who were falling-down drunk in scene — well, let’s just say that I wish I hadn’t sat in the front row. This was the first time that I actual felt motion sickness at a movie.
I’m Here is a Spike Jonze not quite a short and not quite a feature.
Imagine a mumblecore film that stars robots.
Successful Alcoholics was part of the same bill as "I’m Here."
It was about people who manage to be brilliant despite being totally wasted. Which is reasonably funny.
The movie that I’ve been recommending to everyone is Monsters. And it’s got distribution, so you’re likely going to have a chance to see it.
This is a British-produced roadtrip romance sci-fi thriller kaiju film. It’s about a couple of Americans travelling through a Mexico that has been infected by alien spores. The cinematography, directing, production design, and CGI were all beautiful and impeccably flawless. Which is extra impressive when you realize that all that was done by one guy.
Outcast is a joint Scottish/Irish production.
Which means that there’s incomprehensible dialects of several slightly differing flavors. The best part about this movie is the fantastic magic system, which involves, blood, hair, runes, tattoos, and no little amount of haruspicy. The heroine is a fairy/witch woman who has had an affair with a mortal, and then has to hide her offspring from a number of organizations. The take home message from Outcast: "Cross-racial coupling is WRONG!"
Originally I wasn’t going to comment about Earthling. Because I didn’t have much nice to say about it.
I had plenty of warnings. When the director introduced the film (technically a "video" in more than one sense of the term), he described it as "esoteric sci-fi." Then he said that it was about two hours long and that we should have already gone to the bathroom. Ninety minutes in, I walked out of the screening, realizing that I really had to go to the bathroom, and that it probably wasn’t going anywhere, and if it was, I didn’t care. Considering that probably only the director will read this, let me just say: Edit it down next time! All the parts with the teacher co-workers hanging out in the bar? You didn’t need that at all. Quit noodling around and just make a fifteen-minute short next time.
Cargo is a low-budget Swiss sci-fi epic. In space, everyone speaks German.
It gets some mileage out of its budget, and there’s some unfortunate plot telegraphing, but you should definitely check it out when it hits Netflix instant view a year from now.
Those wacky Canadians. They think they can rock. Suck is a vampire rock and roll movie, where vampirism is a transparent metaphor for your bandmates taking up hard drugs.
There’s some impressive cameos. In particular, Alice Cooper steals the movie. The screening Q&A had Jessica Paré, reputedly one of the top 25 most attractive Canadians, and Dave Foley, who is not.
Dave Foley arrived at the screening drunk and funny, and after the screening was even drunker and funnier. It’s like a super power or something. The other members of the crew watched him like snake handlers, wondering what hilarious venom he would spit next.
Elektra Luxx is film festival bait if anything is.
It’s about a retired porn star. There’s overlapping narratives, risque banter without a hint of nudity, and serious, yet inexpensive Hollywood actors.
The funniest movie I have seen in years is Four Lions. It’s about an Islamic extremist terrorist cell in Britain.
But that’s not funny!, you protest. There’s nothing more serious than Islamic extremism and terrorism. Silly, that’s exactly why it’s so amazingly funny. Imagine Laurel and Hardy, but with explosives and security forces.
The super-secret midnight screening was Neil Marshall’s Centurian. You probably remember Marshall from his previous work, Dog Soldiers. Centurian is much like Dog Soldiers, but with Picts instead of werewolves.
Yeah, the Picts are scarier.
I can’t tell you how sad I am that Silver Street is no longer on the BBC Asian Network. Silver Street was my stories. I’ll miss all you guys.
Don’t forget about the fabulous taco quiz, which is still open for entries.
Here’s some of the hot dogs and hot-dog-esque foods I consumed to keep my energy up while enjoying SXSW last week.
The Best Wurst sells a number of sausages from their 6th Street carts. They are at the center of the live music universe. Now, their Italian sausage can’t strictly be called a hot dog anymore than megaladon can be called a great white shark, but there is enough similarity to list it here.
This is a two-handed sausage and a filling repository of grease and animal protein, exactly the sort of food one needs just before going in to see a Japanese all-girl punk band.
Best Wurst Italian – Grade A
When one has to walk out of a two-hour long meandering art film, one immediately heads for the concession stand outside the theater. There you are presented with the choice of over-priced popcorn, or a single, overpriced hot dog. When I ordered the hotdog, the man picked the pre-wrapped foil pouch out of the steam drawer and then pointed to their condiment bar: a single plastic cocktail glass with a handful of mustard packets.
The bun was stale from a whole day, or perhaps longer, spent in the drawer. The meat was an off-gray color and slightly rubbery. It looked like something you would find a raccoon washing in a mud puddle. This hot dog squarely earned the lowest grade I have ever awarded.
Convention center concession stand hot dog – Grade F minus
Champions is a Texas-themed sports bar in a downtown hotel. As you might imagine, the food is something like having a Chilis menu re-designed by a high-school gym teacher. This is some seriously filling food. The chili dog plate came with not one but two hotdogs, smothered with beany chili (Texas chili must NEVER have beans!!), and about two pounds of spicy waffle fries. The waffle cut is used to increase the surface area that the fry oil can soak into.
The meat was pretty substantial, flavorful and crisp to the teeth. And the buns were nothing to complain about either.
Champions Chili Dog – Grade B
It looks like I might have to hold open the Fabulous Taco Quiz a while longer. I’ve been informed that at least one competitor is actively going around to taco carts in order to research the meats. How can I not support that sort of dedication to taco education?
In the interim, this would be a good time for you to register to leave replies on Zombie Lapdance.
Meanwhile, it’s about time that I caught up on all the SXSW material that I hadn’t been blogging because I was too tired after SXSW. Anyone who has time to blog about SXSW as it’s happening shouldn’t be credited as a reliable source.
Here’s some of the Food Frakker experiences I had while bumming around downtown, trying to experience as much culture as Texas ever allows in one place at one time.
My single most favorite music venue during SXSW was the St. David’s Episcopal Church. Why? Because they had a bunch of church volunteers, each wearing matching tie-dye T-shirts with the church’s logo, selling food and beer in the fellowship hall. I liked their home-style salsa and chips.
It’s not a conference unless you eat in a hotel sports bar. This is from the Marriott’s Champions restaurant, the single most ornate Frito pie I’ve ever eaten.
But the chili had beans in it, which is pretty audaciously incorrect considering that it’s served by a supposedly Texas-sports themed bar.
The Hilton bar had a delicious calamari bowl. The greasy, tender rings of squid flesh came with two dipping sauces.
And from a Hotel hospitality lounge, one of the least ornate versions of Frito pie. Soggy and greasy Frito chips that you scooped out of a steam tray.
Which, when you think about it, is pretty true to the spirit of Frito pie.
Don’t forget that the Fabulous Taco Quiz is rounding down to its last few days. You need to put your entry in NOW! There’s only one entry at the moment, so you’ve got a good chance of winning a fabulous prize.
Space Squid is a sponsor of today’s 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast, but sadly we didn’t get Dr. Pamela Gay to mention us in the introduction. No doubt because the suggested dedication was a little risqué. I can’t say I’m not a little heartbroken, but at least the money is going to support a fine organization with the catchiest theme music around.