Oh, The Places We've Been

Masala Art Indian Restaurant in Needham. Yum! The Border Cafe in Cambridge. The blackened catfish was to die for. And the really giant sized glass of wine. Mon Dieu. I had to come home and take a nap. The Big Apple Circus with the trapeze artists, the jugglers, and the fun dog act. We had a busy week. I made potato pancakes and my vegetarian asparagus and pasta casserole and we even concocted up bananas Foster. And the frog exhibit at the Museum of Science was soooo topical because the frogs in the slough started their very noisy chorus last week.

Migrating birds are coming through and the vegetable garden is planted with some cold-loving veggies.

Spring is bound to come soon. Seemed like it on Thursday but now the cold is back and in the meantime the rains came. It's a full life, Charlie.

The Californication of Mexican Food

You are reading a one-woman crusade against flour tortillas, effete, tasteless, showing-up-everywhere flour torillas. I expect that one of these days our New England supermarket will not even stock corn torillas but you will be able to buy seventy-seven varieties of flour torillas in white, yellow, orange and green, bland, white bread offerings. May I say just one word? Yuck!

I will be the one throwing a screaming fit in the International Foods aisle or at the dairy case. The red-faced, profanity shouting woman flinging the big, ungainly packages of flour tortillas at the hapless clerk.

At the Border Cafe in Harvard Square I have to ask for the fish tacos to be served in corn tortillas. The staff is very obliging and the fish tacos are mega-tasty.

There are new chains like Qdoba that only have corn tortillas in the hard crust out-of-the package variety. Everything else is wrapped in, well, you know what.

Today I was heartened to read in the Dining Out section of the NY Times about a place in East Hampton (did I say effete?) that has true south of the border food. And most of the locals like the unspiced inspidid variety. But not everyone.

I applied my eagle flour-tortilla spotting eye to the photos and guess what? Not a flour tortilla in sight. Thank you, God, thank you. Recipes look delicious. Spicy, too.

Did you know the heat (capisicum) in hot peppers in a POWERFUL Anti-oxidant. So put the kleenex on the table, have some sour cream and cold cerveza ready, and pile on the hot peppers. Wrap everything in corn.

Note: corn torillas have fiber and not too many carbs. Ha! Ha! Take that you mealy-mouthed flour eaters.

The only place a corn tortilla belongs is in a burrito. End of story. I mean, can you imagine a tortilla casserole made with flour tortillas. It would taste like unseasoned gravy made with water.

Viva corn tortillas, the true taste of Mexico. Down with wimpy flour tortillas! Down with tasteless wraps. Why don't you just use a few layers of paper towel? Tastes about the same.

My mom was a Kansas farm girl and I like bread and the amber waves as much as anyone, but not in my Mexican food. Give me corn, lots of corn.

Grapeshot, whose guerilla name today is Pilar.

The next rant will be about sugar in corn bread. Ye gods, even a good Southerner like Paula on the Food Network is spooning sugar into corn bread, flour too. No. No. Omigod, what are things coming to? Where is purity? Where is authenticity?

Whither?