East to West Eats: Tacos

After reading Greg's post today and mentioning tortillas it left me craving tacos. Fortunately, I had to go downtown today and I knew just the red truck to stop at on my way home.

I ordered two tacos, one chorizo and the other carintas. I love this truck because of how quick it is and how delicious the tacos are. Generous portions of meat, delicious corn tortillas, lime and salsa picante take me back to the time I was in Mexico City and had the best tacos of my life off of the street.

It only took 10 minutes out of my day and $5 out of my pocket. No wonder I love this place.
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Greg Responds:

This reminds me! A few weeks back Hannah and I were in the Mission district of San Francisco for Carnaval. For lunch, we stopped into a busy tacqueria that had been along the parade route and ordered one of each of the following tacos: al pastor, pollo asado, lengua, and cabeza. It was the first time I've tried cabeza -- head meat -- and I expect that I'll be ordering it whenever I have the chance to in the future. Just imagine incredibly tender chunks of pork!

Quesadilla with the kitchen sink

Fresh food expires. As it idles in my fridge, its biological clock ticks down with the passing of every hour. So it's always my goal try to use any leftovers or open ingredients before they grow fuzz or rot.

Meanwhile, Hannah and I attended Oaklavia on Sunday, an open-street festival in downtown Oakland. There, we popped into a busy Mexican restaurant to check it out. While Hannah went to the counter to order some horchatta, I was attracted to the grocery in the back of the restaurant, which stocked fresh corn tortillas cooked in Oakland earlier in the day. They were still warm! $1 for a dozen and we were back in the street to enjoy the rest of the festival.

We had some tasty black bean tacos with the tortillas later that afternoon, but that's not what I'm getting at here. Yesterday for lunch, I rounded up what remained of an old block of cheddar, a few slice of salami, some chickpeas (from the can I opened for the pasta dish below), and some tomatoes. Then I constructed a quesadilla using the still-incredibly fresh tortillas and fried it in the cast iron pan with grapeseed oil. I salted the finished quesadilla and ate it with some plain yogurt. What needs to be said: the freshness of the tortillas made for a super crispy and flavorful meal. Not a bad use ingredients that were just waiting to go bad.

Quick Friday night dinner?

By Friday night, I usually have to get creative when it comes to feeding myself. I venture into the pantry trying my best to use up ingredients that have been sitting in the fridge all week. This past Friday was no exception.

I ended up falling back on a recent favorite quick meal which I have yet to have the chance to write about: pasta with garlic, bacon, and fried chickpeas.

Fried, whole, chickpeas (garbanzo beans, whatever) are a recent discovery of mine that I made on a whim a few weeks ago while search for some accompaniments to pasta. I didn't much care for the texture or flavor of the bean straight out of the can, so I figured I should just fry it up along with some garlic.

Wow! The chickpeas, fried in a combination of olive oil and bacon fat that had rendered from cooking the bacon, were crispy on the outside, light and fluffy on the inside, and had a great beanie taste to them. This dish has quickly become a go-to dish when I have nothing sitting around but pasta, garlic, bacon, canned chickpeas, and some Parmesan cheese. When I made it last Friday, I served it with some steamed broccoli.

Beer-glazed black beans

So I would have posted Tuesday night's dinner of pork chops and polenta, but I forgot to take a picture. Then I thought my lunch yesterday of the leftovers would make a cool post about reheating food without a microwave. But a second look at that photo made me realize that polenta with corn doesn't photograph well on a Blackberry. Let's say it didn't look very appetizing.

So after the Gucci pork chop dinner, I went for a more economical meal centered on beans and rice. I thought I would make just a normal rice and beans sort of dish, but leafing through How To Cook Everything, I came across an interesting variation on that: beer-glazed black beans with bacon and tomatoes served over rice. I used canned beans, so it was a pretty quick meal, done in under an hour. Satisfying and hearty, too.

Mexican Eats

For the past week I haven't blogged as I was in Palenque, Mexico. The best meals I ate were those that were out of the hotel and at little spots in the town. This is one of those meals. We ordered a lot of food including chicken enchiladas with mole and a torta with steak milanesa. Also ordered were delicious tostadas, guacamole, and a friend plantain dish which made an amazing dessert.

The simplest, home-made style foods are often

the most delicious. There was nothing fancy about this meal and the food was great.

New York Italian, Via Chicago

Greetings from the Midwest! At Greg's request I am doing a bit of a guest post since I've had some free time recently. In this free time I've been getting into working out, and as any athlete knows, the best way to get your energy back is stocking up on carbs... delicious carbs! If I learned to make anything growing up in Staten "Italy," New York City's most Italian borough, it is tasty pasta. So, behold, the most decadent and delicious classic, Penne Vodka.

Hardcore chefs will take the time to carefully choose and chop each tomato, but since I'm more about the eating and less about the preparing, I simply use a 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes. This is surprisingly easy to make, actually. Simply melt some unsalted butter in the pan (2-3 tbs), then toss 2-3 cloves of chopped garlic on there and brown. Next, throw in the tomatoes and some crushed red pepper if you like things on the spicy side, and simmer for about 5 mins. Add about 1/2 cup of heavy cream, simmer for a minute or so, then about 1/4 cup of vodka, and simmer for a few more minutes. You can add some salt to taste here too if you like. After that, toss with your pasta (I used whole grain to rationalize that this was "healthy") and some parm cheese and you're done. Delicioso!

Another baking success: Sourdough...ciabatta?

A while back, I mentioned that I had started a sourdough starter along with my attempts to brew ginger ale and bake a more straight-forward yeast bread. Fast forward one failed starter attempt over about 10 days later, and this morning, my first sourdough loaf was ready to go into the oven.

After my first starter attempt, from How to Cook Everything, failed to impress me, I did a little Google research and found a much more detailed explanation of sourdough with more thorough instructions. Unlike the HtCE method, this method didn't use yeast in the starter, only water and whole wheat flour. I let these two starters go side-by-side for a few days until the HtCE starter looked mostly dead and the new starter was starting to come to life.

After about a week, the starter finally began to thrive and would, as advertised, double itself shortly after a feeding. After a couple days of feeding it twice a day in this state, it appeared to be ready to bake with. Also, my new digital scale had just arrived in the mail, and I was excited to try it out.

Staying with the same website for a recipe (hey, his starter worked, so his bread recipes probably work, too! Also, there's value in consistency, since his recipes are based on using his starter), I went for a classic San Francisco-style sourdough. However, something may have gone awry during the mixing. The dough was pretty wet, and I had to work with it a good twenty minutes before seemed ready to use. And it was very messy.

I wasn't too worried, though, since some reading on bread-making suggested that some of the better types of bread are made with a wet, difficult-to-handle dough. In fact, I was originally tempted to make the ciabatta recipe on the website, but decided against it as too complicated for my first sourdough.

Why do I mention that? Well, after giving the dough some time to rest, I shaped it into a boule, and let it rise overnight. And this morning, it had risen...err, more horizontally than vertically. Was the wet dough too heavy to gain any height? I was a little worried, but was already realizing that I might have accidentally made a somewhat ciabatta-ish loaf, and decided to roll with it.

Well, it came out of the oven about an hour ago, and my verdict is: amazing. It's a little flat, but its horizontal rise did give it a light density, and as you can see to the right, there are some good air pockets throughout the loaf. And the sourdough flavor -- though I'm no connoisseur -- is delicious. The crust is a little crispy, but I expect it to get even better after a few hours exposed to the air. Best bread yet! And as long as I keep my starter alive and happy, there will be more to come.