What I eat, apparently

Honestly, I’m not sure it’s Mexican. Mexico is pretty far away from my current location, and while I am surrounded with a plethora of delightful (and some not so delightful) Mexican restaurants, I am rather clueless as to their authenticity. Rumor has it that many (if not most) of them are Tex-Mex, in fact. One suggested measure of authenticity is to simply observe how many Hispanic-appearing people are dining around you. This could still be faulty, however, in that maybe you are simply eating at the most delicious Tex-Mex restaurant in town, which (in theory at least) would also draw a large quantity of Hispanic-appearing types. However, you’d likely also be surrounded by large numbers of people wearing cowboy hats. As these are not exactly common in the state of Virginia, I shall now move on to talk about something less silly, that being my dinner.

I have a concoction that I make on a regular basis now. It’s cheap and lasts forever, and allows me to get my essential avocado fix. Avocados, you see, are the fruit of the Gods. So I start with a cup or two of rice, cook it, and dump some canned black beans and seasoning in. Then I hack up a plethora of items, most likely including avocado, cilantro and/or lettuce, and tomatoes. And of course there’s the cheese. Cheese is extremely important to my lifestyle. The queso fresco variety work wonders here, but really, any cheese will do. And to make it truly delightful, it is then doused in chipotle sauce and/or barbeque sauce.

That last sentence I wrote, the one right above this picture? It has officially rendered the first paragraph obsolete. You see, the ultimate point (the one I never apparently came to, in fact) of said paragraph was to determine if I was even close to making authentic Mexican. However, I suspect that the mere fact that I used chipotle and/or bbq sauce on this instantly makes it Tex-Mex.

Or rather, instantly changes the ongoing debate to ‘Is this authentic Tex-Mex’? Hmm, how long does a fusion food have to exist before it becomes a genre of food in it’s own right? Or is the authenticity of the food more an extension of the culture that the food grew from? And even more importantly, how much chipotle sauce can I consume before I start burning my tongue off? The world may never know.

This is a rather bad photo.

However, the deliciousness of the smoothie overwhelmed the badness of the photo so much that I was simply compelled to post it here. I apparently had some sort of lack-of-smoothie induced arthritis, or epilepsy perhaps. Or, maybe this was a symptom of a tragic onset of scurvy, which I almost succumbed to, but escaped by the skin of my teeth with this delightful smoothie. The ingredients? Frozen banana, frozen raspberries, a peach, orange juice, and ice. It was quite delightful, really. This smoothie, like this picture, is a testament to life. A testament to one person’s ability to fight her way past the evils of photographic mediocrity as well as the travesties of a day without liquefied food. Think of this less as a poorly taken picture of a smoothie, and more as a snapshot of hope. Believe!

So at some point in the not too distant past, a large mound of ground beef crawled into my freezer. Up until recently, my thoughts toward it, when it got thought of at all, were vague and murky and took on spaghetti-like forms. Then suddenly, I was showered with gifts from the Tomato Deities while simultaneously having leftover burger buns from a cookout. It suddenly became very clear what must be done: burgers. This is quite appropriate summer fare, indeed. Too bad I had to do it the lame stove way, as I lacked a grill to make appropriate outdoor cookout smells for the neighbors to drool over. Alas, I could have used a George Foreman grill and an extension cord, but somehow it’s not quite the same.

I managed to completely overcompensate on these babies. See, ground beef patties have this tendency to shrink up when being cooked. So, something that started out as a reasonable size for a bun ends up shrinking up and fattening up until you’re left with a bloated giant meatball doing a clam impersonation. Mind you, this is still a tasty result, but those several bites of bun without burger are somehow lacking. So I made them super thin and super large. Result: I fried 3 per pan load, and they were a perfect size…for a bun that was larger then the buns I had. So the meat kind of flopped over the edges. I guess too much meat sure beats not enough (insert ‘meat beating’ joke here). In any case, it tasted good, especially with the addition of such delightful tomatoes:

So, despite having overgrown meat discs, I still have entirely too much ground beef for a reasonable person to consume in a respectable amount of time. So it just got ground up in the hopes of sprucing up some lesser dish. Which, ultimately, led to the horrible excuse for Shepherd’s Pie.

See, I somehow ended up with a largish quantity of some frozen mashed potatoes. High end, meaning you could eat them and say ‘these are not bad….for frozen mashed potatoes’. There’s only so much I can take of plain mashed potatoes, to be honest here. Thusly entered the brilliant idea of dumping some of that ground beef on top, and then dumping some frozen corn on top of that. Brilliant, I thought!

Rather mediocre, in reality. I still ate it, as there were far worse things to eat, but it just wasn’t putting the sparkle in my eyeballs, to use a ridiculous metaphor.

Incidentally, I just looked up some shepherd’s pie recipes. This is apparently rather far away from what shepherd’s pie actually is, to the point of probably offending real shepherd’s pie so much as to cause it’s friends to beat this dish up if they ever ran into this dish alone at night. Shameful, really. The last time I had shepherd’s pie was in 6th grade, which might explain things. Come to think of it, that was the only time I’ve ever had shepherd’s pie. Meaning you should probably ignore pretty much everything I say, but you’ve probably figured that out by now.

I generally enjoy ‘fusion food’. This is because of the theory that a restaurant generally does not attempt to serve fusion food unless it has a firm grasp on all of the different types of food it is attempting to merge together. While I don’t really have a firm grasp of anything, much less the cuisines of multiple cultures, it’s still fun to make jabs at it. And it is under this guise that I present my accidental blending of American and Japanese cuisines, hearty miso soup:

See, in theory at least, proper miso soup should be light and brothy. However, being an American, I apparently want my soup to be as filling as possible. Thus, my recent tendency to make miso soup that’s really more like miso stew, with vast quantities of tofu and seaweed floating about. It may quite possibly be the best breakfast ever.

Summer is a glorious time, indeed. This is because Summer is the time when all of the delicious tomatoes come out to play. They just love crawling inside my sandwiches! And where go the tomatoes, soon goes the bacon.

I have a weird relationship with bacon, see. It’s weird, or rather, it stands in contrast to the relationship that many I know have with bacon, in that it’s an in between thing. There seem to be two camps of people: those who prefer to eschew bacon entirely (often eschewing the entire category of ‘meat’ while they’re at it) or those who, if they could, would wrap everything that goes down their throats in bacon. And I’m generally just somewhere inbetween.

Take, for example, a bacon cheeseburger. I have been known to remove the bacon from one of these particular sorts of burgers. It’s not that the bacon is bad, it’s just that it tampers with the purity of a burger. Bacon is a separate item, quite appropriate in specific circumstances, but completely unnecessary when all I really want is a squishy pile of beef.

But then comes BLT time. It is a time when bacon is allowed to take the spotlight in my gastronomical life, for BLTs just might be the Sandwich of the Gods.

When frying the bacon for this wee tasty, I was totally licking the spatula. Because apparently bacon grease is just that good. I figure it balances out in the end because I pat the bacon down hardcore on some paper towels afterwards.

I’m saving the bacon grease, too. For what, you may ask? Because I want to try deep frying some vegetarian gluten balls in them. This could very well be the epitome of delicious right there.