Un poco de calor a muy caliente

One of the highlights of a trip that reaches California is Mexican food. Since Faye was born and raised in San Diego, she has a decided preference for the style that is found there. Greasy tacos are her special favorite choice of nourishment.

I am not a taco fan. I blame this on the first taco I ever ate. The shell was crisp and the first bite basically shattered it, spilling the contents all over my shirt and the ground. Major turn-off. I later discovered burritos and all was well.

I soon discovered The Food of the Gods, aka guacamole. It is an acquired taste, I am told, by those who do not like it. Of course, that is because it looks amazingly like baby poo. And, perhaps, because those who do not like it probably have never tried really good guacamole. Such as what I make. I use the very secret ingredients I found at a grocery store chain. Lawry's is the brand. They suggest using two medium or small avocados. That's just silly. I use one moderately large one or sometimes one medium one. It doesn't matter what type (I didn't know there were several types and still do not care), diced tomatoes (about a half a medium size tomato), and add salsa that is marked with a radioactivity symbol and which should be handled with well insulated gloves. I add only a spoonful or two. Just enough to cauterize your tonsils, assuming you still have them. You can add cilantro and/or diced onion for extra taste. Some people add sour cream or other filler but these people are properly called Philistines.

I put guacamole on everything Mexican and many things that aren't. Faye will attest to this but not publicly... or without blushing.

I also like rolled tacos, sometimes referred to as "taquitos", if they are smothered in good guacamole and cheese and there is some tasty salsa handy. These are best purchased at small take-out stands with names ending in "berto" or "tia". I am not sure why. Most seem to have no health department approval.

I am partial to chicken or pork dishes. They seem to have more flavor than beef. My favorite pork dish is called "carnitas". I think that only translates to "little meat" and I am not sure why it is called that. But it is roasted pork chunks and that's all I need to know.

Contrary to popular belief, refried beans are not really fried twice. Just once... with a unhealthy load of lard. After they were already cooked the usual way and then mashed a bit. Of course, spices are added. Guacamole is not usually added to refried beans... except by me.

When I was a young man-child at school, a teacher impressed me with an explanation of why spices were important enough to lead to the "discovery" of America and had made Marco Polo famous. It seems that back in the 11th to 16th centuries (and even later, I am told) no one had refrigerators. This meant that meat and other foods went bad before all of it had been prepared and eaten unless it was a hard winter. Spices helped preserve the meat and covered up the taste of what went bad. Spices were most popular in warm climates like the Mediterranean area. You will notice that Norwegian food is not spicy. This is because they live in refrigerators.

Spices became so popular that it spawned an age of exploration which eventually led to Christopher Columbus hocking Queen Isabella's jewelry to finance a trip westward in search of a new route to India, China, and the Far East where the spices could be had. As we all know, Chris stumbled into the Americas instead and ruined things for the natives for the next few hundred years until they got permission to build casinos.