Mexican Food

We are safely home from our Corpus Christi excursion, and I have lots to blog about in the upcoming days. Permit me for one brief moment to wax rhapsodic about the indispensable part of any trip south of Austin, Texas…the food. Once you start going north of Austin, the food gets Anglicized. It starts to lose some of the Mex in the Tex-Mex. In my humble opinion, Mexican food should never be snooty, should never cost more than $8 a plate and should always be made by hand. If you can hear the music from the kitchen and see someone’s abuela (grandmother) doing the cooking, then you’ve found the spot.

Our favorite in Corpus is Taqueria Jalisco. (For those of you from north of the Red River, that’s pronounced Tock-a-ree-a Ha-lees-co.) The Computer Guy and I went there for dinner on Thursday night without the children, thanks to my mother-in-law for watching the five.

We tried so hard to eat slowly. We wanted to savor every bite, taste every mouthful. We sucked it down before the waitress could even come back and check on us. We couldn’t help it. It was like a man who’s crawled across the desert and found water at last. It was heavenly. What I wouldn’t give for two stomachs to have been able to eat twice as much.

The tamales were made the traditional way from the head of the pig (don’t turn up your noses, you eat weird stuff too), the tortillas on the enchiladas were made by hand, and the refried beans…oh, the beans. I don’t think I have words to do justice to the beauty of refried beans when they’re made right. Not the glop from a can, but real true beans that were simmered all day yesterday, and then fried today with a bit of onion and garlic and I don’t know what else. They are slap-your-mama good. People in the Land of the White Man don’t make beans like that. They don’t even know enough about it to dream of making beans like that, but they should. That cook is getting into Heaven on the merit of her beans alone.

When we finished this gargantuan meal in less than the time it normally takes me to put the napkin in my lap, I almost cried. It was over already? I actually sucked the traces of perfection off of my fork and leaned over to my husband who was wearing a smile of supreme satisfaction and said, “Would it be a bad thing if I leaned over right now and licked my plate?”

“I think that’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever heard.” He replied. “Only if I can watch.”

Oh. my. goodness. Is it any wonder I love that man?