Half Baked: Mexican Dinner Taco Night Is Tonight!

There has been a request for Mexican recipes, as it is Cinco de Mayo. You have come to the right place. (My co-worker, Mr. Balk, suggested he might write one but I discovered it had Velveeta in it and he was denied.) Instead, lemme hook you up with fake Mexican holiday real Mexican dinner time!

I am presuming you do not own a tortilla press, because you are lazy. I also do not, as I will never make my own corn tortillas. But I will drive 25 miles to the edge of a local farming community where many migrant Mexican workers live and there I will purchase massive amounts of tortillas (and dried chiles and whatnot) from them. Ruinously, and first worldly, the gas to get there costs more than the tortillas, I think. I am never going to tell you where to buy tortillas, because I don’t want any white people in my tortilla shop, but if anyone in the place that is selling you tortillas speaks English very much, you are buying them in the wrong place. (THAT’S NOT RACIST, I AM DEADLY SERIOUS. I mean, when I see a ramen bar full of white people, I’m out of THERE too, after all, right?) And besides, you should support small Mexican-American-owned businesses, with their incredibly slim profit margins, because that is where the people shop who keep our economy functioning and they need these stores.

Also buy some stuff to eat on the way home, because, this will be the best Mexican food to be had EVER.

So if you have gone to get the tortillas, you’re halfway there. Dinner is nothing without good corn tortillas.

Okay now if it gets found out that I’m giving away this recipe I might be in some trouble but I care about you eating, so here we go.

You get your pinto beans. Like, you know, some! A couple cups, a couple handfuls. How many people are you having over? A bunch? Then make more. PINTO BEANS. There are no other beans. You do actually have to go through them as if this were 1862 and make sure there are no rocks and stuff. It’s weird, you actually still do find stones in your pinto beans.

Then you put a pot on the stove with the beans and a couple cups of water and a couple cups of chicken or vegetable stock and a few slices of (good) bacon and half an onion and some pepper and salt and maybe half a dried ancho chile. And then you cook it until it’s done! It could be like an hour and a half. Could be more, could be less! Don’t let it get dried out. In the end it should be, you know, soft and beany and the house should smell like YON DAYS OF MEXICAN YORE.

During that extremely prolonged time, I whip up some salsa. (Um, chop up a tomato or two and maybe a tomatillo and half an onion and a handful of cilantro and a TINY bit of hot pepper, usually serrano, or whatever you have, and some salt and pepper and a ton of lime juice. It’ll taste like SALSA when you’re done. THIS is the world’s NUMBER ONE DISH THAT YOU CANNOT RUIN. But go on, try! You know, you can put anything in there. Garlic, mango, pineapple, ginger, bell pepper, parsley, key limes, whatever doesn’t sound too gross.)

Also you should put some sour cream in a bowl. May I recommend Wallaby organic “European-style” sour cream? That stuff is GOOD. I eat it with a spoon.

If you eat fish or meat, now would be a decent time to either:

1) Throw some olive-oil and salt and peppered mahi-mahi on the grill (which you should have lit, then!) and/or

2) Throw some hamburger into a pan with salt and pepper and a chile negro and a little this and a little that.

Also you could make guacamole! Do you know HOW HARD this is? Avocados. Lime juice. Salt. A little cilantro again. A little cayenne or cumin? A little garlic? If you spice it, add a tiny bit of VANILLA. Shh! Don’t tell. You should also put vanilla in the hamburger meat. The thing is? Never forget when cooking Mexican food just where vanilla came from. MEXICO BABY. You can actually put it in nearly everything Mexican. Did you know that the vanilla orchid can only be naturally pollinated by ONE SINGLE BEE? A wee little bee, called the Melipona bee!

Almost all of the vanilla you eat is either chemically synthesized (FAKE) or from hand-pollinated orchids (AND REAL), because that bee is TOO LAZY to cross the border out of Mexico, so suck it, Arizona. You can fix this, but it involves moving to a tropical climate and learning how to hand pollinate vanilla planifoliia, one of the GREATEST PLANTS IN THE WORLD.

Not so hard, right? You too can have sex with plants!

I appear to have become slightly distracted, however we are pretty much done? Except the most important part.

Put all the stuff up above on the table in dishes and, as everyone’s ready to eat, then, to prepare tortillas for the table, you get a little bowl or napkin-lined basket and you get your tortillas out and you put them on the stove burner until warmed and/or slightly burnt. The end. Toast ’em on the burner, toss ’em in the basket, take them to the table and ASSEMBLE THESE FOOD ITEMS into ONE FOOD ITEM. If you need directions on that part, you’re beyond my help.