Chillax

It is no secret that I have an ongoing love affair with Mexican breakfast cuisine.  In my previous post Lost In Translation, I hinted briefly at one of my favorites here in Houston known as Jarro Cafe.  I first became aware of this little gem from an article in Texas Monthly suggesting the 50 best Mexican restaurants in the state.  Jarro may be known for its tacos which you might find in the trailer out front...

 and crazy salsa tray but I have fallen in love with this brightly colored joint for other reasons.

This is the home of not only numerous homages to the Beatles and a good selection of classic rock, but an amazing breakfast known as Aja Baraja.  The Aja Baraja is a version of my favorite breakfast chilaquiles, fried tortillas soaked in salsa, on steroids.  The plate comes loaded with chilaquiles covered in Mexican cheese, two eggs, and a thin strip of fajita meat.

The flavor is intense to say the least, a green tomatillo salsa with some kick to it really just ties the entire dish together and has me coming back as often as I can.

Mas Desayuno

Once again I have found myself in a hole in the wall Mexican joint scarfing down a delicious breakfast, perhaps I have a problem.  But if it is a problem, I am okay without finding a cure for the time being.

The last time I wrote about a Mexican breakfast for you I was at El Hidalguense on Long Point in North Houston, this time we are cruising west down Long Point (yes it is a hotbed for quality hole-in-the-wall Mexican food) to a restaurant in a strip center called Tacos Del Julio.

The restaurant is brightly painted, almost so bright that it burns the retinas.  The pain however, is quickly forgotten when a bowl of beans magically showed up in front of me.  Now you may be wondering “Who the hell would want beans early in the morning?” 

I had those thoughts at first, but as some condiments showed up, I quickly began to doctor the beans up with onions and cilantro and next thing I know the bowl was empty.  Surprisingly beans go quite nicely with a giant cup of coffee.

When it came time to order I was torn, the menu is nothing fancy, but there were enough appetizing options to make me go back and forth.  Finally, I asked the waitress for guidance through my difficult decisions and sure enough she led me down the right road, huevos divorciados.

The name is in reference to the fact that one egg is covered in green salsa, while the other is in red, thus they are divorced eggs.  This plate was served up with some bacon, bland potatoes, and some decent refried beans (yes more beans).  As you can see here it is almost set up like a Mexican version of Eggs Benedict, with corn tortillas on the bottom, a layer of ham steak, and then the eggs with the salsa.

As I mentioned, the potatoes sucked, but by taking the corn tortillas that were delivered to me I combined them with the beans and covered them in a few squirts of salsa and that issue was quickly alleviated.

Tacos Del Julio is a good cheap place to go and get a Mexican breakfast while rocking out to Mexican pop music with a dash of Justin Bieber sprinkled in.  However, there is one fatal flaw, there is a small play area off to  one side of the restaurant, and it leads to demonic behavior.  Go figure, a few piece of cheap plastic back yard playground equipment can turn a nice quiet breakfast into a migraine.  So do not linger too long here but it definitely is not stopping me from coming back in the future.

If it looks like a taco, and smells like a fish...

I am sure that I have said this before, but one of my favorite things about living in Texas is the abundance of Mexican food.  There is just something magical about chips and salsa and the wide variety of dishes that there are to choose from.

That being said, one of the best aspects of Mexican food is of course the cerveza.  Mexican beer may not be the best quality, but that is why we have limes, and boy do they go down easily.  In my blog post about brunch I gave you a hint about one of my favorite drinks, the Michelada.  This delicious beer drink is mixed up with tomato juice, Worcestershire, hot sauce, and spices…  Basically a bloody mary mixed up with beer, lime, and a salted rim.  This beautiful concoction works for every meal of the day from early in the morning to late at night, you can find one these in my hand if I wander into a Mexican joint or am sitting on a beach in Cozumel.

For dinner one night I wandered down to the local Taqueria Arandas, one of many of a chain that is found throughout Houston, Dallas, and a few places in between.  These restaurants are open early and close late, a good option for a cheap breakfast or a hearty dinner.

Like many other places around the Houston area, Taqueria Arandas rocks the double salsa, a robust red and smoother green.  Now in the past I have found these salsas to be irresistible (ok so maybe I have a slight salsa addiction issue) but this night they were a little out of control.  Don’t get me wrong this is a good sign, when a restaurant makes their salsa from scratch you tend to have a few variables once in a while so I would rather suffer a little (and have to drink more beer) in order to get some good fresh salsa.

Now traditionally my dinner at this place has been the Arandas Special (theory:  if a place is willing to stick their name on it they better do it right), a plate full of fajita meat, veggies including tomatoes, avocadoes, beans, and a pleasant surprise side of cactus. That’s right folks those prickly little plants you find in the desert make a tasty side dish, nopal as it is referred to in Spanish is a dish similar in texture and flavor to a green bean with a slight twist.

That was my plan as I walked into the restaurant, but that was stopped cold in its tracks by a sign hanging on the door for a new special reading, Chipotle Fish Tacos.  I LOVE FISH TACOS! They are quite possibly one of the greatest dishes ever invented, chunks of flaky fish grilled up with flavor filled up into a corn tortilla, topped with some garnishment, and a side of limes.

Chipotle is one of my favorite seasonings in food these days, a chipotle is a smoked jalapeno that goes from a ripe red (yes jalapenos are red when ripened not green) to a nice brown dried pepper full of all sorts of flavor.  It covered up whatever low quality fish may have been used in these tacos (let’s be honest we don’t want quality fish going in cheap street style tacos), and went perfectly with the onions and cilantro that were packed in these tortillas.  Squeeze a little lime on them and you can do no wrong.

Fish tacos and beer, as our friends to the south say “muy bueno”.  Oh yes, and to complete the opening phrase, first I must admit that I did not come up with this on my own but instead stole it from Fuzzy's Taco Shop in Dallas, so in conclusion:

... it's got to be a tasty dish.

Not only can this guy eat... he occasionally cooks too

So up until now I have been sharing my foodventures in restaurants with you loyal food fans.  Today we are doing it a little different,  I am sharing with you my adventure in cooking.

The best part of living in Houston is a wide variety of groceries and markets where you can get better ethnic foods than you could find at your average run of the mill grocery store.  Between the numerous Mexican, Asian, and many other ethnic stores that cover this diverse metropolis, you are bound to find something to suit your needs.

My adventure led me to El Tiempo Fajitaria the other day, this little market is a part of the Laurenzo family chain of operations here in Houston consisting of multiple restaurants and this gem.  I had a craving to grill up some killer fajitas, and who better to buy them from than a restaurant that knows how to make them right.

I had never wandered into this place in my life, and it was yet another one of those experiences in which I realized it would not be a bad idea to brush up on my Spanish.  Sure I have two years in high school, but when I cannot even order a slab of skirt steak what good does that really do me?   I am covered for beer and well beer when it comes to ordering other places, especially when I find myself stranded on a beach in Mexico.

The meat counter was something to behold, a row of meats you find in authentic Mexican cooking that you often have to search harder to find elsewhere, sure there were your usual cuts of steak and chops, but then there was the tongues, livers, tripe, and feet that you find in the real deal.  Basically a lot of food you will never see me attempting to cook.

So I settled on 2 pounds of marinated skirt steak (the preferred choice for fajitas, yes it is a low quality cut, but it works great for the delicious little tacos), and in my issues with translation it suddenly became 2.5 pounds and a long exchange in which he tried to explain butterflying and how large to make the cuts. 

As I prepared to leave the store with my sack of meat I saw a cooler with “Tortillas Caliente” written on the side and my mouth instantly began to salivate.  There are few things better in this world than fresh hot tortillas in my opinion and this cooler was like a beacon of joy calling to me from the corner.  Unfortunately, I opened the cooler only to be greeted by the warm shadow of what was once a cooler full of tortillas but was now simply a cooler full of warm air and good smells.  In the pits of my sorrow I looked up and saw shelves full of tortillas made in local tortillarias (tortilla shop in gringo talk) here in Houston, such a better idea than buying a pack of Mission tortillas at the neighborhood grocery.

So I make it back to the work zone, let my meat warm up to room temperature and began to prep some sides for the fajita feast.  I was in charge of the grilled onions (no fajita is complete without a delicious side of soft grilled onions), the secret to onions as with most items is butter, I put the slices in foil with garlic, pepper, and cumin.  My cohorts also created some guacamole and set up the other fixings including cheese, sour cream, and some of my personal favorite chips Tia Rosa Mega Thin Tortilla Chips.

So after a few minutes on each side on the grill the skirt steak was ready to be sliced up and created into little masterpieces wrapped up in love.  There isn’t much more that I can say about it so just enjoy the pictures.

Tex-Mex to the Max

Houston is full of family names that have spawned chains such as Landry’s, Laurenzo’s, Ninfa’s, and of course the Pappas family.

Some people out there are anti-chain restaurants, striving to find the more local dive or hip rebel restaurant, but in my mind if a restaurant has been able to become a chain it certainly means they are doing something right.  This is most definitely the case in my mind for Pappasito’s Cantina, the awesome Mexican restaurant spawned by the Pappas family here in Houston that has found its way all over Texas.

I know that some people truly hate this restaurant for multiple reasons, I have seen comments ranting against the evils of this chain, but to those people I say “Great more room for me”.

I started my night off right, with a couple of glasses of XX, yes I stay thirsty my friends, but the Mexican beer is always a nice relief on a warm Houston summer night.  Of course my greatest indulgence here is never far behind…

Pappasito’s makes some of my favorite salsa that I have found in Houston (definitely top 3), the flavor is great, but the real kicker is the fact that the salsa is hot (temperature more so than spice).  This is one of my favorite things I wish more places would do; a nice warm salsa is so much more enticing to me than stuff that feels like it has been sitting in a fridge.  This warm and thick salsa goes excellently with the nice thin and hot chips that keep showing up at the table as fast as I can cram them in my mouth.

Then of course comes the piece de resistance, the beef fajitas, tender meat cooked medium rare, piled high on a bed of onions, please tell me how this can be wrong?

The tortillas are made in house, they are little warm pillows from heaven sent down by angels on the backs of unicorns and drizzled with gypsy tears, or in other words they are amazing.  They also come with some of the best rice and beans around, I recommend you order the Charro beans over black but that is just me, and let’s be honest I am usually right.  Here are my instructions for construction:

1. Grab a tortilla
2. Layer on some guacamole
3. Layer on some onions
4. Layer on some beef
5. Sprinkle with cheese
6. If you want an extra filling fajita feel free to add some rice or beans in

After working my way through the fajitas and savoring every last bite we were distracted by the small plastic sign on the corner of our table and quite frankly, we could not say no.

Sopapillas are fried piece of tortilla dough, covered in honey and powdered sugar, how can you not get in on that?  Of course they were delicious and by the end everyone was full and happy, life was good.

Lost in Translation

 At last, a food review that can benefit so many more people than those of us blessed to be in Houston, or even the great state of Texas (yes it is that awesome).  Today’s post is over the most important meal of the day, breakfast, or as they call it in these joints desayuno.  

Now I will come clean that this breakfast was sort of an accidentally awesome kind of experience but then again those usually turn out to be the best ones.  The other day I went to El Hidalguense (which means someone from the Mexican state of Hidalgo), located on Long Point Road in Houston, and every review I read about this place focused on one menu item that I had myself salivating for, cabrito.

Yes, for those of you not familiar with the food or the term, cabrito is baby goat (as delicious as it is cute), succulent little goat that is slow cooked until it is falling off the bone good.  I understand that this is not for everyone and I first was unsure about it myself, until as a bus boy at an On the Border in high school I worked an early Saturday morning shift, and the Mexicans who were working the prep had some cabrito they had cooked up and basically forced me to try.  Of course I loved it; the rich meat wasn’t covered in spices or sauce, just allowed to explode in flavor of its own making.

Unfortunately, cabrito was outside of my morning breakfast budget and it appeared that it was actually a dinner meal (another misconception caused by that first experience), so that review will have to come another day when I am willing to part with $25 and maybe have a brave soul to split it with.

That pain was easily soothed though with the appearance of a free flauta (some of you may know it better as a taquito), some delicious smoky salsa, and a Mexican Coke (yes the recipe is different, much sweeter since it uses cane sugar instead of one of those syrups).  The salsa was thicker and smokier than most, almost an oil compared to a salsa that I am used to at other restaurants, but the chipotle, chile del arbol, garlic, and other flavors made it a good addition to all of the food.

So after pouring over the menu (a three ring binder with pagers slipped in plastic sleeves all written in Spanish) I settled on a familiar friend of mine from past breakfasts at places like Taqueria Arandas or Jarro Café, the delicious plate known as chilaquiles.

  Here is a picture of chilaquiles from Jarro Café, so good it will be getting a write up the next time I make it there.

Somehow this simple order got lost in translation, and I had a plate of scrambled eggs and beef show up in front of me.  I decided to roll with it rather than fighting it and that was definitely a smart move on my part, the flavor was great, especially once I started putting the eggs with beans in tortillas and pouring the salsa over it.

Sure the atmosphere was simple and the restaurant was empty, but the food was definitely good and basic.  These in my experience have always been the best Mexican breakfast joints, ignore the decor and sometimes the levels of cleanliness and find you some good meals whether it be huevos divorciados (two eggs one in green and one in red salsa), migas (eggs scrambled with tortilla strips), anything with chorizo (the “healthy” Mexican sausage that may require extra sopping up of grease with a napkin), or once again my personal favorite chilaquiles (tortilla strips in salsa, usually with eggs, and if you are lucky some fajita beef). 

As a preview of my next post, my meal ticket (mom) and sister went to a Houston landmark this weekend that has been on none other than Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives itself, check out the video here for a heads up of the next posting.