I write here occasionally about food, gardening, politics, my kids and random things that strike my fancy. In my other life, I'm a content strategist and information architect. Learn more about my company and our work at Creek Content.
© Fixin' Supper 2012
Two years ago I had the chilaquiles rojas at Las Manitas, after I let the waitress talk me into that over the verdes. Two years later, I’ve determined it’s truly personal preference, because I really loved the verdes.
Funny thing about lunch. We were here in this really old building, at the historic restaurant, and Summer was on her cell phone and Patrick was using his phone and my computer to try to fix the Hammock servers.
He seems to have been successful because my email is running again.
We had a great meal tonight at Guero’s Taco Bar on South Congress in Austin, TX. The building is a former feed store, and it’s more than 100 years old. Sadly, they had to laminate and post a sign to that effect at our table, to admonish diners not to write on the walls.
What would inspire you to write on the walls anywhere, I’m not sure. [Yes, I was that square when I was a kid, too.]
They had so many different margaritas that I didn’t know how to choose. I had "Deep in the Heart of Texas" and I’m sorry to report I don’t remember what made it unique. It was good but not the best margarita I’ve ever had.
But my word, the food here is phenomenal. I ordered enchiladas verdes — one chicken and one cheese. I could barely get through 2/3 of my meal….lots of food. But, just absolutely fresh and homemade. There is nothing better than a homemade tortilla. Wow. I was delighted with the whole meal. Fresh, melt-in-your-mouth tender chicken, one of the most unusual cheese enchiladas I’ve had, and really flavorful rice.
Good stuff.
I couldn’t be more excited: Tomorrow midday, I fly out to Austin, Texas, for SXSW!! I first attended SXSW Interactive two years ago, and it proved to be not only one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to, but also a great culinary experience.
Some of my restaurant reviews from two years ago, in the early days of Fixin’ Supper:
Las Manitas
The Salt Lick
The County Line
Katz’s Deli
The Hula Hut
[Several of these used to have photos, but I lost them when I moved my blog to Typepad a number of months ago. I'll see if I can track him down.]
I’m definitely eating every free meal again at Las Manitas, and we’re also planning a group trip down to the Salt Lick again. I’m not sure what else is on tap, but watch this space for updates and pics.
My dad forwarded me this photo from his good friend Bobby Sain, mayor of Bolivar, TN, my hometown. Last night a fire started at Joe’s Restaurant on courthouse square and it took the whole block.
The entire block was quite old, and it included one of the oldest buildings on the square, known as the old Bank of Bolivar building. I can’t even remember if there was a bank located there in my lifetime — if so, only when I was a very small child. But what I remember is that the building housed our local radio station — until last night.
Just so terrible. At least it happened in the middle of the night….I have not heard of any injuries. As of 8 a.m. this morning, firefighters were still on the scene dealing with the fire — and the first alarm went out at 11:17 p.m. last night.
My mom or dad is going to have to help me out with the history; I can’t remember what Joe’s was called before it was Joe’s. Wait, it was Top Hat, wasn’t it? I remember going uptown with my grandmother when I was very little, probably not even in school yet….she and her friends would play bridge at Top Hat. Or meet for coffee. I don’t know exactly. I just remember the bouffant hairdos that "old" [I guess they were in their 50s, maybe 60s] ladies wore in the 70s. And smoky. Everything at the Top Hat was smoky. In fact, when I smell cigarette smoke now, it invokes a nostalgic feel: cigarettes smell like childhood to me. My parents didn’t smoke and neither did my grandmother, but everyone else did.
At any rate, the restaurant was called Joe’s by say, the time I was in middle school. Joe Robinson and his staff made great grilled cheeses and amazing pies. I’m sure there must have been other things on the menu, but that’s all I ever ate there.
This was the restaurant where the men had coffee every morning about 9 a.m. My dad was a regular for years. I guess people were still going there for coffee, pie and grilled cheeses, though I haven’t been in goodness, a decade at least.
Next door to Joe’s, a long time ago, was Brooks Auto. Owned by J. Hall Brooks, my dad’s first cousin. They moved out to the highway years and years ago. Definitely by the time I was in high school. But the smell of gas and motor oil, and the dusty smell of an old auto parts shop….I can conjure them right now, and they, too, smell like childhood. I can’t even recall now how the setup worked out front, but I remember my cousin Kevin Brooks pumping our gas and cleaning our windshield there when I was young. It’s just been so long.
Definitely a sad day in Bolivar.
UPDATE, 10:44 A.M.: The Jackson Sun has photos now, including this one. You see the old Bank of Bolivar building on the right — there’s talk at the moment that it may be saved — and then nothing else standing fully until you see [on the far left, just to the right of the firefighters in the photo] the white turret on top of the post office. The post office is separated from this block of buildings by an alleyway.
This is the hot sauce at our table last weekend at Gabriella’s, a great Mexican restaurant on the Upper West Side, with horrible service on Sunday nights.
We were all intrigued by the color. Do you know of any peppers that come in such a hue in nature? We didn’t either.
The mystery was solved by looking at the ingredients:
F&DC Yellow, F&DC Blue were both in evidence.
They’re looking into the green onions at Taco Bell. Those of you with long memories, or like me, especially paranoid about food-borne illness, will recall that green onions have been the culprit before. [In the Hepatitis A case, the onions were contaminated during their growth cycle before leaving Mexico. No final word yet on whether the green onions are guilty at Taco Bells in the mid-Atlantic states, and if so, why.]
I will say this: our nationwide food distribution system is making me rethink how supposedly dangerous it is to eat raw produce abroad. I’m thinking it’s dangerous to eat raw produce here. Obviously I’m exaggerating a bit — of all the millions of people eating raw produce every day, very few are getting sick. But food-borne illness is much more common than you think. And our current distribution system makes us very vulnerable there.
If you’re not scrupulously washing your fruits and vegetables, you’re asking for it. And think very carefully about what you eat raw — and especially what you let your children eat raw.
That’s all from the paranoia department for today.
Because shortly after seeing that NYC banned trans fats in restaurants, I stopped by McDonald’s for fries while I was out running errands at lunch.
Please note: While I will be the first in line [well, second, right after Marion Nestle] to tell you how bad trans fats are for you, and that you should avoid them at all costs — and I go to great lengths to do so myself, except for fast-food fries — I have mixed emotions about NYC banning them. I am not yet convinced that they are a health scourge on the order of dangerous chemicals. And hey, while we’re at it, why don’t we ban dangerous chemicals instead? See, we make no sense as a people. So, I’m not sure what I think about the NYC ruling. I think instead, we should all eat better and exercise more. So I guess I better go walking tonight since I ate those fries at lunch and at Taco Bell yesterday, eh?
But I read about people who ate at ONE Taco Bell having E. Coli yesterday and I — a person who is so E. Coli-phobic that I won’t let my children eat ground beef until they are 7 unless I see it being cooked — proceeded to eat lunch at Taco Bell.
Then I woke up to the news that 39 people who ate at MULTIPLE Taco Bells throughout New York and New Jersey are ALL sick with E. Coli. Umm.
This tells us two things:
A. I must be on crack.
B. It wasn’t the beef, because those restaurants didn’t all undercook their meat. (I suspect no Taco Bell in the country, ever, undercooks its meat, but that’s just a supposition on my part, being a long-time connoisseur of the brand.)
To those of you [and I have family members who fall into this category] who sneeze at food-borne illness, let this be a lesson. If you didn’t grow it, you don’t know where it came from. And it can kill you.
Here’s a nice long list of tips from the FDA on keeping your food safe at home.
As for me, Taco Bell has been my favorite fast-food restaurant for, say, forever. But I didn’t eat there for the longest when the Immokalee Workers wanted a penny-per-pound increase in the price of tomatoes, and then I had the infamous Taco Bell-while-driving incident this fall. This latest incident will probably turn out to be a supplier issue, but it starts to add up, you know? So I hereby declare I’m done with Taco Bell.
Marché Artisan Foods is open in the Walnut Exchange on Main Street! I just heard the news. More as soon as I know it. I can’t wait to check out this new venture from my fellow Vandy alum Jay Frein and his partner Margot McCormack, who own Margot Café.
People ask me all the time if it’s hard being a single mom. Oddly enough I don’t remember lots of people asking me that several years ago when I got divorced. Hell, that is so long ago who knows what people said or what I said? And I’ll agree that a single mom going out and adopting another child is not exactly commonplace. So everyone likes to know how it’s going.
I guess something you should know about me is that I’m one of those crazy people who likes to take on extra challenges just for fun. So when I already have three volunteer committees working full speed ahead, I’ll see if I can’t chair something at church or at the 7yo’s school. That kind of crazy. The better-dead-than-bored crazy.
I don’t mean to make light of it. Sure, it is a lot of work. But the rewards — of motherhood [or of volunteer work] are always greater than the hassles. You don’t remember the hard parts after the fact. But to all of you to whom I’ve ever said, "Things are perfect," I thought I would hold out tonight as the occasional example of when they are not.
So I am tired. I figure, since I really need to go grocery shopping before we can eat anything half-decent, instead of dragging the kids along to do that, we will just go out to eat tonight. This begins well enough. I pick them up fairly early and we are seated at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants by 5:45 or so.
Unfortunately, we are seated around the corner from where the servers can see you when they wander out of the kitchen. I think service is always slower in this little nook. It was slothlike tonight.
By the time the food arrived, the Hungry Toddler was ready to lose his mind. Though he had earlier amazed me by holding the styrofoam-cup-with-lid all by himself, by the time the food arrived he had already tried to throw all the chips into the floor, about 10 at a time; tried to destroy his water cup; and also committed various other infractions, shrieking in anger each time I stopped him.
Food mollified HT for approximately seven minutes, perhaps a world record.
Now, our favorite Mexican place has one major problem: television. I don’t care what’s on, from the time she was say, the age of HT, if there was a TV in the room, the 7yo was hypnotized. So of course she was just watching TV during this whole circus, taking an infrequent bite of her taco. Finally I said to her, "Eat now. We are leaving because your brother is at the end of it." [Translation: We are leaving before I lose my mind.]
We made it out just fine and on the drive back home, I reflected that "taking a night off" by eating out was just as difficult, if not more so, than cooking, even if I ostensibly had nothing to cook at home.
I suspect that by the time HT is 3 or 4, this will all be over because he’ll have that slightly increased patience level — and more than the 15-20 words he can currently sort-of say — than will enable all of us to make it through dinner out a little more frequently. At least, that’s the plan.
