Nostalgia for Tacos al Pastor

by Carlos Quesada, Amateur guest blogger from Boston, MA, originally from Mexico City, Mexico

Perhaps one of the saddest things for me when I left Mexico was knowing that I would also be leaving the easy access to these tacos made so fresh, so quick and so deliciously. When I do return to Mexico for quick vacations, the first stop I make is to any taqueria to get my hands on some tacos al pastor.

Tacos al pastor – shepherd-style tacos—are a signature dish and popular street snack in Mexico City. They are legacies, it seem, of the Lebanese natives who brought them to Mexico City in a wave of immigration in the mid-20th century. Others would argue this, as it is known that to celebrate the fall of the Aztec empire and Tenochtitlan, a dish made of pork and tortilla was served to the Spanish soldiers by the tlaxcaltecas.

They are made of pork with chili-soaked pork spit-roasted beneath a dripping, slowly caramelizing pineapple and are usually referred as the “king of the tacos”. Similar to shawarma, gyros, or any other Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern preparation of spitted lamb and flatbread, tacos al pastor are prepared in a special spit marinated with pork pieces running with the amber juices of the pineapple above. The pastorero works swiftly, slicing off the hottest, crustiest pieces from the mound along with a bit of bronzed pineapple, chopped cilantro, onion and a spoonful of drippings. He quickly sprinkles on diced sweet white onion and dusts the top of the taco with finely chopped cilantro.

Pick up a taco, folding up the slides with thumb and index finger, closing the end with the forefinger. With the first bite, you should get that flavor of roast pork, the perfume of cilantro, the bite of the onion, subtle bitter aroma of chili, and the sweet heady pineapple. One more small bite and the first taco will be gone. The second and third will follow, then you will hail the waiter and ask for more.

Because the special grill and vertical spit are necessary to make the dish, no one in Mexico sees fit – or is logistically able – to make tacos al pastor at home, so they are almost always found in street stands or small restaurants called taquerias. The recipes vary from stand to stand – proprietors are loath to give away their secrets.

One of my favorite places to eat tacos al pastor is El  Huequito (which means “the little hole”), a tiny operation in this city’s Centro Histórico, founded in 1959 and among the first places in the city to serve tacos al pastor. At El Huequito the sliced meat is bathed in a moderately picante salsa of chile de árbol, enhanced with chopped onion and cilantro and rolled up in its small tortilla. Several salsas are available for serious chileros — chili lovers. The meat is juicy and succulent, the smoky grilled aroma lingering until you take the next bite. Washed down with an ice-cold horchata or agua de Jamaica, these morsels are simply divine.

Note: This blog originally appeared on Carlos's wedding website. But how could I not share good taco tips with fellow Amateur palates? Thanks for allowing me to borrow this blog!

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Don’t Be A Shrimp. Socialize!

by Jessica Young, Amateur Guest Blogger from New York, NY

Wok + Wine. NYC loves a good pop-up. The pop-up shop, the pop-up food truck, the pop-up rainstorm….not really but the verbiage is used in local weather reports. So, it should come as no surprise (slight irony) that the pop-up party would indeed, pop up. Leave it to two media and marketing veterans to tap into the zeitgeist and package a social event that exploits both the ephemeral and the exclusive – two precarious ingredients when combined creates a combustible cocktail…and then, the party never dies.

Thus, inherent is the interest in word-of-mouth whispers heralding the innovators, the early adopters, urban professional movers & shakers, the creatives, and those who moonlight as socializers. When all these desirables convene under the pretense of a fleeting experience encapsulating “the sign of our times” what do you do with them? What magical entertaining dynamics shall tantalize?

Let’s check out the stellar stats for Wok + Wine: invitation by application or personal recommendation – check, obscure locale – check, maximum admittance of an intimate forty – check, forty enthused strangers – check, forty bottles of wine to lubricate small talk – check, forty pounds of whole jumbo shrimp – check? Checking out? Nope. Heads, legs, and tails all drenched in GARLICKY, greasy, orangey-red staining al ajillo sauce. Their little beady eyes just minor dots in a sea of slipping and sliding mountainous piles on a center collapsible (for pop-up purposes) communal table. The crowd circles round. Some dive elbows deep in the critters. Some cling to their wine glasses for self preservation – heads are gross! Some concentrate on conversation due to shellfish allergies because hey, it’s hard to pass up a pop-up. At varying levels of embrace for the full-bodied food, the guests perk up and the party livens. Perhaps it’s the alcohol hitting the blood stream. Or, perhaps it’s the novelty of novice beheading and de-legging shrimp that has Mr. Lawyer and Ms. Jewelry Designer chatting it up in the mutual awkwardness of achieving one laborious yet satiating bite. Logical reasoning would infer that serving guests shrimp al ajillo with nothing other than whole (unsliced) loaves of bread as the sole sidekick would be soiree suicide. The smell! Garlic certainly clings to breath and clothes alike. The mess! Throw conventional propriety out the window when shelling shellfish. There’s no pretty method to the madness. The sauce! Bright orange-red splatters incriminate shirts involved in the crustacean carnage. Yet, the party continues. Eventually even the most finicky abandon their wine glasses to get down and dirty.

There’s something about unusual experiences that when shared by a group automatically forms a bond, a commonality. A quintessential “we’re all in this together” situation. Beyond the event naturally garnering an outgoing segment of the population, the forced participation in an activity, especially an activity that pushes the boundaries of comfort for some, creates immediate camaraderie. The ultimate of ice-breakers, inhibitions crumble and connections arise when shrimp shrapnel flies. Make people do something weird together and, guess what, nothing weirder can happen. It takes the focus off of the tendency to be “on point”. Of course, after several glasses of free-flowing wine it’s a slippery slope into the succulent swamp, regardless. A welcome round of limoncello shots and refreshing pineapple slices later, the crowd is rollicking in conversation.

Of course, no ordinary experience would suffice. Although a pop-up draws demand from its time sensitive nature – poof it’s here, poof it’s gone - that in itself would not be enough to placate NYC’s notorious appetite for novelty. Mix in a bit of the unexpected with the ephemeral and the exclusive then ta da memories are made! Guaranteed Mr. Digital Start-Up can put a face to the name of Ms. I’m Wearing A White Shirt he inadvertently sprayed with sauce. Way to spice up the networking/dating/drinking/social scene! Oh, and the shrimp is damn delicious.

More on Wok + Wine.

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Yikes! Brooklyn Restaurant Serves Big Bowl of Slime

by Jesse Riggle, Amateur Guest blogger from New York, NY
(Photo on left is one of Jesse's work. His paintings appear in galleries from LA to NYC. Check out his work)


Hello there, my name is Jesse (not to be confused with your regular host). Jessica asked me to guest blog, so here are the words I have written.

I recently learned a valuable food-lesson, a lesson specifically of a food to avoid. The food in question: Okra. Now, before I get to far along I'd like to clear one thing up, I don't actually have anything against okra. In fact I have had okra that I quite liked. Pickled okra, okra at Indian restaurants, delicious. But, I still may never order it again. Let me tell you why (and some other stuff too).

First a brief back-story. A couple of my friends started a Brooklyn/Queens-centric eating club about a year ago. We ate at a great many restaurants with an abundance of good and interesting food. Nothing any of us would call a lemon ever cropped up, not a bad record for a year of new restaurants. Well, a week back (which happened to be nearly the 1 year anniversary) we went to a new place that was also across the street from the first place we ever went to, fortuitous? Fateful? Frightening? eh... The restaurant is called Buka and deals in Nigerian food.

The restaurant itself is perfectly nice. Roomy, a swell wait staff, a comfortable davenport, what more could you want in your first 5 minutes? They also presented us with a very intriguing cocktail list. I myself did not partake, as I have old-man tastes in alcohol (whisky, beer, and gin, please), but everyone else at the table thoroughly enjoyed their fare. A promising start, spirits were high.

Next up came the appetizers. I ordered some- thing. I don't really remember what it was but it had honey and cake in the name. What they gave me had no honey and was not very cake like either. In fact, upon my first bite I thought to myself and verbally stated, "This tastes like the zoo." Now, I have never eaten a zoo, but I imagine if you could eat a zoo it would taste like my appetizer. That might sound like an unpleasant flavour, but really, when the strangeness of it passed I quite enjoyed it. I like zoo's, they make me happy, and as it so happens, I would probably like to eat one. The rest of the appetizers on the table were also generally delicious. So far so good.

Then the main course... The moment when things started to get iffy. There was an equal split of people ordering whole fish or some variety of meat in a stew/sauce type setup plus fufu. Fufu is a starch, their answer to bread, it is pounded yam or cassava, formed into a ball. Myself, I ordered the goat with the fermented cassava fufu. I also ordered the okra sauce (remember when I mentioned I probably won't order okra again?). Well, in my excitement for the big bowl of food infront of me, I grabbed my fork, gave it a quick stir, and lifted said fork. A nice string of melted good came up with my fork, and I said, "Hey, there is cheese in this!" I love cheese, it might be my favorite. Then I thought about what I had said and it dawned on me there was probably no actual cheese in my bowl. Upon further inspection I discovered the whole thing was a big ol' bowl of slime. We're talking Ghostbusters slimer-slime here. Serious slime. I stared at it in disbelief, vaguely remembering an episode of Top Chef where Mr. Colicchio mentions his distaste for okra, for it being slimy.

I went full on squint-eyed suspicious staring at my food. I decided to go for it though. I got a big ol' scoop of okra on my fork and moved it toward my mouth. A long un-broken strand of slime still connected my fork to the bowl as I shoved it in my mouth. It was a mistake. My mouth and brain could not wrap themselves around this... stuff. I might have tried to spit it out but I think it was afixed to my tongue by this point. I did not give up though, I tried eat my food. I ate as much goat as I could, it still had the skin on it near as I could figure, and there was a bone in my bowl I could not identify. It looked like a check mark. I went so far as to look up anatomical drawings of goat skeletons trying to find this bone, I could not. A mystery. The saving grace to this whole debacle was the fufu. I was able to dunk the fufu in the slime and eat some of it. The flavours were all fine, but the solids and I guess liquids (of the non-Newtonian variety), were not in my palatablity-range. I was not alone in this, most people around the table agreed, that maybe the food was a little to authentic for our American mouths to handle.

After we finished, we all walked down the street to a soul-food restaurant for dessert. Good times. Seriously, good times, I enjoyed the whole night. The restaurant was a totally new food experience for me, and I am glad I went. If for nothing more than my appetizer that tasted like the zoo and my new found knowledge to never ever order okra again. Would I recommend the place? Sure why not, just stay away from the okra, and probably the goat too (and if you hate the food, there is soul food down the street).

The end!

*As a side not, I looked up Nigerian cuisine on the internet, and learned of a food they quite enjoy, that being draw soup. According to wikipedia: "typically [made] from okra or melon seeds. It gets its name from the thick nature of the broth; it draws out of the bowl when eaten". So it would seem this is what I had.

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Potato and Aubergine Curry

by Milesh Gordhandas, Amateur Palate guest blogger from Brussels, Belgium

I'm a Portuguese-born Indian and a vegetarian. I have been an "amateur chef" since September 2001. At that time, I left my family in Lisbon to start a new life abroad--first in London to study and work, and now in Brussels. Indian food is not cooked everyday as it takes some time and energy. Here is a report of one of those evenings where suddenly I had a lot of energy and drive to produce this amazing--yes, it tasted really good, so why be modest?--yet simple curry. It was, of course, my Mum who taught me this recipe.

This humble potato and aubergine curry serves one pretty well. You need one potato and one aubergine of these sizes, half of this onion, and one garlic clove...

In a saucepan, put some oil, heat it up, chop the onion and saute them until they are crisp brown. Cut the potato and the aubergine in cubes, and add them in the saucepan.

This is the "critical part." Spread one teaspoon of curry powder blend onto the pan. My Mum made this powder from a mix of spices. These include red pepper powder, saffron and cumin. You may get this in your local supermarket, but you'll find a better range in specialty Indian shops or grocery stores.

Cover the food in water, and cover the pan with a lid. Let it cook on high heat for half an hour. Half-way through, you will need to put some tomato sauce. You can either put two big spoons of tomato sauce or--like I did--grate half of a tomato onto it. This helps to add colour and consistency. Cover it again and let it cook for the remaining time.

Have the curry with some nice, warm Indian breads, like chappatis or naans. And, of course, eat it with your hands! At the end of the dish, you can have the curry with rice.

Enjoy your meal (cooking and eating it) by listening to some nice Bollywood beats!

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