food in tx picture post
I had a hot shower this morning and i am feeling better, even though i only got about 6 hours sleep. Yesterday should've been an exciting day, my great crossing of the Mississippi! But i was too distracted by my dead phone to really enjoy it. Today is a new day, and i should end up round Lake Pontchartrain somewhere. I'm not particularly interested in New Orleans as a city, but it would be cool to at least be able to see the lights from across the lake.
Let's take a brief moment to remember the tacos of Texas.
That first Taco of Texas was the gas station in Pottsboro, which had a taqueria inside it, because of course it did. It was very tasty. It had all the things i love in a good taco - double-stacked corn tortilla, radish and lime to go with the onions and cilantro, oiliness, greasyness, spiciness... It was an awesome trio. Well, i wasn't as much a fan of the adobada, but i think that's because they made it with chicken. It was good, but i still think chicken doesn't make a very good taco filling. Too lean.
My next stop was a town called Greenville, where i found a tortillería that, naturally, sold tacos. But while i was waiting for the taco, i got a tamale and a Jarritos. It was a yummy tamale. I like when it is a bit dry and mealy and you can really taste the corn. More on that dryness later...
Hoo, check out the oil on these bad boys! This was another solid taco feed. Instead of radish, they gave grilled onions and a grilled jalapeño as additional condiments. That went down real well with the rice and beans.
Also in Greenville i found a frutería, which sold fresh fruit salad (pick your own) and a whole bunch of those snazzy Mexican fruit salads más locos, with various spices and nuts and things. This was a mango, cucumber and pineapple salad with Japanese-style peanuts and something sweet and chewy in it. I think the sweet and chewy thing might have been tamarind, or dried strawberry, or possibly just a toffee of some sort. Naturally, the dressing was chili and lime and salt. It was incredible.
In Emory i failed to find a taqueria, so i stopped in to their local Greek restaurant. I suppose the proper Texas thing would've been to order gyros, but i've had gyros all over the world and wanted something less fast food-y. I started with a nice coffee and free pita with olive oil. Oh, how i miss just plain old bread with oil on it. It's such a delight, and rare to find in the US outside of Italian restaurants.
Then came my main, which is an opening for me to rant about how fucking stupid mains are in America. This isn't actually a main. This is an appetizer of 4 different dips, a side of olives, a side salad and a side of potatoes. And together it cost more than twice as much as a main, which would've come with at least one of those sides for free. Of course, the mains only have meat, and the sides are the only vegetarian or vegan things. So for some bizarre reason, people who choose to eat cheaper and more sustainable food end up having to pay more for their dinner than people who eat meat. There's something messed up there, and either it's a result of systemic meat subsidies, or it's a massive mark-up on sides and appetizers that doesn't correspond with the actual food costs. Fuck this shit, and if you never ate vegetarian before at a restaurant that doesn't have a vegetarian main, now you know our pain.
All that said, it was a decent feed. The dips were tzatziki (meh), hummus, hummus with garlic and some kind of pesto-like thing that i think was made with white beans and basil. I never had that pesto-like thing before, and it was pretty damn delicious. The hummus was fine. The real crime here is the pitiful amount of bread they gave. I'm sure a real European would also turn their nose up at being given pitted olives, but i appreciated being able to jam them down together with the dip.
Just to go nuts, i picked up this thing for dessert. It was called galaktoboureko, and it is not vegan. Not just because of the honey, but because it is some kind of... i dunno, like a custard pudding wrapped in pastry? It is incredibly delicious. I never had it before and now it is my new favorite cheat food from Greece. It's soft and juicy and sweet but also doughy. I can't explain it, but if you like flan and you like mille feuille and you like Portuguese egg tart, you definitely have to try this.
I also picked up a baklava that i chowed down on at some random spot on the side of the road where for once there weren't any fucking dogs chasing me. It wasn't the greatest baklava i ever had, but not the worst.
Oh baby. This was so good. Some random tiny Mexican kitchen out in the Tyler suburbs. I got guisado de puerco, which is a pork stew, and a taco de jamón - ham taco. I have never had a ham taco before, but with the cabbage it really worked. Nice and fresh flavor, it reminded me of west coast fancy tacos. But that guisado, unh. It was so rich and oily and packed with flavor. Fresh tortillas too. The best.
Normally i wouldn't show a picture like this because i get a lot of little baked snacks and sugary drinks along the way to keep my calories up, but this is a fun Latin American treat for people who might never have seen it before. In Tyler i also found a palatería, which is an icecream/popsicle shop. I ordered two things - an agua fresca (water with blended fruit) and a raspada (shaved ice). The best thing about these places is that they actually blend the real fruit to order, so when you eat the thing you are actually getting water, sugar and fruit and not just some kind of syrup with artifical colorings and flavorings. Watermelon on the left, tamarind on the right.
Well, i suppose it had to happen. I went to a Tex-Mex place. It was the only restaurant open on Sunday in Alto. I am not a huge fan of Tex-Mex cuisine, because it's very similar to the kinds of "Mexican" restaurants you will find not just all over the US but all over the world. Hard taco shells, lots of ground beef, shredded chicken, cheese on everything, you know the drill. But it does have its own unique flavors, more salt-and-pepper-y, more cooked-on-the-grill kinda thing. This is a great example. The beans are more like a small bowl of chili than the usual side beans. The salsa for dipping is not spicy, it tastes more of black pepper than chili pepper. The tortillas are fried, so they're almost like a hard taco shell. This was fish tacos, with cabbage and onion and avocado like a west coast fancy taco. It was fine. Not really my thing.
Here is another photo i normally wouldn't take because it's just a snack, but for the folks who don't have a Mexican bakery nearby... This is a haul from a Mexican bakery. There are three pastries inside the bag. The one that looks like a jelly donut is actually a bit more like a shortbread. The one that looks like a gingerbread man is something similar to a gingerbread pig. The last one is a twisted puff pastry a bit similar to a Danish without any filling. The "bee honey" palanqueta i included because it amusingly does not contain any honey. Palanquetas - the ultimate vegan snack.
Anyway, i want to get back to the topic of dryness again, because Mexican pan dulces ("sweet breads") are often quite dry compared to American or French pastries. I suspect you are supposed to eat them with coffee, but i don't mind them on their own. I think one of the big differentiators in Mexican pastries is that they really celebrate the grain. Like, they are still sweet, but they don't feel overpoweringly sweet like most American pastries. And they don't have that fatty, buttery flavor either. It really feels like you are eating bread which happens to be sweet, instead of a suspension of egg/butter/sugar with a tiny bit of flour thrown in to bind it. This is why i love Mexican pastries. I am not a sweet tooth, and i really love bread. Proper bread, with some texture and weight to it. So this type of baking is something that really works well for my taste buds. I want to eat all of the pan dulces!
Unf. More tacos. Just looking at these pictures is making me sad for Louisiana that the people here just don't know how good it could get. This was from a little mercado in Corrigan. Everyone in there was a construction worker wearing hi-vis vests, and at first they thought i was too because of my vest. They were amused when i said i was cycling. Or maybe they were just amused to see someone who wasn't Latin American in there. I think this was the place where i ordered a barbacoa taco, which is BBQ, usually beef. Like chicken, i don't much care for beef in my tacos, but this one was so fatty that it kinda worked. Still somehow blander than the pork, but a nice change from my usual al pastor/carnitas/chorizo party.
Ah, the Trumpy diner in Kountze. They had the usual American/southern cuisine, and the very best thing was this deep-fried mushrooms. First of all, they gave me lots of them, which was awesome. But the great trick was slicing the mushrooms before battering, so there was more crispiness per inch than the places that just fry a whole button mushroom. Also, i'm not sure whether they were using dried mushrooms or oyster mushrooms or what, but the mushroom had some texture, a sort of chewiness that you don't normally find in western mushroom dishes. Very good.
The main was less exciting. I got a po' boy, which is a sort of sandwich from Louisiana. I will be talking more about those in the Louisiana food post, but basically what makes it a po' boy and not a sub is the bread, which is white, soft and poofy like a hamburger or hotdog bun. This had catfish and came with utterly shit fries. I hate fries where it seems like they battered the potato to make it more crispy on the outside. I'm not sure if it's because they use the same oil as for frying battered things, or if it's that stupid "double fry" technique that chefs rave about, but you end up with something that tears up the roof of your mouth and tastes more of batter than potato. And it seems to be very popular in East Texas. But the real disappointment was not getting enough of them.
Okay, the next few pictures are of my two day pause in Port Arthur to weather the storm. I was in the mood for Chinese food, but unfortunately the only restaurants nearby were full-blown American Chinese places. I decided to go with this one, which had 家常豆腐 homestyle tofu (i asked for extra chili) and steamed dumplings. You don't often find steamed dumplings in America, so i was excited to get it. The sad news is... the dumpling filling was ground beef. What the fuck, Texas. I wasn't expecting anything super exotic, but you'd think it'd at least be shrimp or pork and chive or something. That said, the homestyle tofu was on a par with the more mediocre ones you find inside China, which is about as good as you can hope for from an American Chinese place. Essentially satisfying, but not a place i'd go back to.
Now this is more like it. As the storm was tailing off, i splish-splashed my way across a mile of parking lots to get to this Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall. Unfortunately they didn't have any tofu, so i embraced the meat and went with a char siu bánh mì and a couple of thịt nướng spring rolls. Thịt nướng (i have no idea how to pronounce it) is pork kebabs grilled on a skewer, what outside of America people would call BBQ. Vietnamese char siu seems pretty similar to the Cantonese one, which is a sweet rub on a slow-roasted pork that they use for pork buns. This was such a good meal. The meat was so flavorful, and the vegetables were all crisp and fresh. Cilantro, basil, carrot, rice noodle vermicelli, just everything was perfect. The oil on the peanut sauce... Oh man. What an awesome meal.
Unfortunately pretty much anything i followed the Vietnamese feed up with would suck by comparison. This was just a bog standard American black bean burger with avocado and salsa and those annoying french fries that are somehow a bit too crispy on the outside and a bit too soft on the inside. It wasn't bad, but it was basically the same dish you could get at any dive bar anywhere that gets their Sysco black bean pattie deliveries.
I'll finish it up with a quick glimpse at some more pan dulces, nabbed from a panadería in Port Arthur before heading down the highway to Louisiana. The one that's mostly covered up is the same twisted puff pastry thing i got last time. The thing that looks a bit like a British sausage roll had strawberry jam inside. It was fine, but not different enough to the twisty thing to be worth it. But the highlight here was that dark rock-looking pastry. It was about as heavy as a rock too. It was dense and dry and extremely satisfying. Like, it filled your stomach. I think it was seasoned with ginger or cinnamon. Very good.
Oh Texas, i do not miss your dogs or your antagonistic conservatives, but i miss your food. I always said the best food i ate in America was in California and Texas, and that continues to be the case now. Louisiana is such a disappointment by comparison. Perhaps it wouldn't've been if i had traveled in the other direction. But, it is what it is. I have been typing this entry for entirely too long, so it's time to pack up and head. Till next post!
Let's take a brief moment to remember the tacos of Texas.
That first Taco of Texas was the gas station in Pottsboro, which had a taqueria inside it, because of course it did. It was very tasty. It had all the things i love in a good taco - double-stacked corn tortilla, radish and lime to go with the onions and cilantro, oiliness, greasyness, spiciness... It was an awesome trio. Well, i wasn't as much a fan of the adobada, but i think that's because they made it with chicken. It was good, but i still think chicken doesn't make a very good taco filling. Too lean.
My next stop was a town called Greenville, where i found a tortillería that, naturally, sold tacos. But while i was waiting for the taco, i got a tamale and a Jarritos. It was a yummy tamale. I like when it is a bit dry and mealy and you can really taste the corn. More on that dryness later...
Hoo, check out the oil on these bad boys! This was another solid taco feed. Instead of radish, they gave grilled onions and a grilled jalapeño as additional condiments. That went down real well with the rice and beans.
Also in Greenville i found a frutería, which sold fresh fruit salad (pick your own) and a whole bunch of those snazzy Mexican fruit salads más locos, with various spices and nuts and things. This was a mango, cucumber and pineapple salad with Japanese-style peanuts and something sweet and chewy in it. I think the sweet and chewy thing might have been tamarind, or dried strawberry, or possibly just a toffee of some sort. Naturally, the dressing was chili and lime and salt. It was incredible.
In Emory i failed to find a taqueria, so i stopped in to their local Greek restaurant. I suppose the proper Texas thing would've been to order gyros, but i've had gyros all over the world and wanted something less fast food-y. I started with a nice coffee and free pita with olive oil. Oh, how i miss just plain old bread with oil on it. It's such a delight, and rare to find in the US outside of Italian restaurants.
Then came my main, which is an opening for me to rant about how fucking stupid mains are in America. This isn't actually a main. This is an appetizer of 4 different dips, a side of olives, a side salad and a side of potatoes. And together it cost more than twice as much as a main, which would've come with at least one of those sides for free. Of course, the mains only have meat, and the sides are the only vegetarian or vegan things. So for some bizarre reason, people who choose to eat cheaper and more sustainable food end up having to pay more for their dinner than people who eat meat. There's something messed up there, and either it's a result of systemic meat subsidies, or it's a massive mark-up on sides and appetizers that doesn't correspond with the actual food costs. Fuck this shit, and if you never ate vegetarian before at a restaurant that doesn't have a vegetarian main, now you know our pain.
All that said, it was a decent feed. The dips were tzatziki (meh), hummus, hummus with garlic and some kind of pesto-like thing that i think was made with white beans and basil. I never had that pesto-like thing before, and it was pretty damn delicious. The hummus was fine. The real crime here is the pitiful amount of bread they gave. I'm sure a real European would also turn their nose up at being given pitted olives, but i appreciated being able to jam them down together with the dip.
Just to go nuts, i picked up this thing for dessert. It was called galaktoboureko, and it is not vegan. Not just because of the honey, but because it is some kind of... i dunno, like a custard pudding wrapped in pastry? It is incredibly delicious. I never had it before and now it is my new favorite cheat food from Greece. It's soft and juicy and sweet but also doughy. I can't explain it, but if you like flan and you like mille feuille and you like Portuguese egg tart, you definitely have to try this.
I also picked up a baklava that i chowed down on at some random spot on the side of the road where for once there weren't any fucking dogs chasing me. It wasn't the greatest baklava i ever had, but not the worst.
Oh baby. This was so good. Some random tiny Mexican kitchen out in the Tyler suburbs. I got guisado de puerco, which is a pork stew, and a taco de jamón - ham taco. I have never had a ham taco before, but with the cabbage it really worked. Nice and fresh flavor, it reminded me of west coast fancy tacos. But that guisado, unh. It was so rich and oily and packed with flavor. Fresh tortillas too. The best.
Normally i wouldn't show a picture like this because i get a lot of little baked snacks and sugary drinks along the way to keep my calories up, but this is a fun Latin American treat for people who might never have seen it before. In Tyler i also found a palatería, which is an icecream/popsicle shop. I ordered two things - an agua fresca (water with blended fruit) and a raspada (shaved ice). The best thing about these places is that they actually blend the real fruit to order, so when you eat the thing you are actually getting water, sugar and fruit and not just some kind of syrup with artifical colorings and flavorings. Watermelon on the left, tamarind on the right.
Well, i suppose it had to happen. I went to a Tex-Mex place. It was the only restaurant open on Sunday in Alto. I am not a huge fan of Tex-Mex cuisine, because it's very similar to the kinds of "Mexican" restaurants you will find not just all over the US but all over the world. Hard taco shells, lots of ground beef, shredded chicken, cheese on everything, you know the drill. But it does have its own unique flavors, more salt-and-pepper-y, more cooked-on-the-grill kinda thing. This is a great example. The beans are more like a small bowl of chili than the usual side beans. The salsa for dipping is not spicy, it tastes more of black pepper than chili pepper. The tortillas are fried, so they're almost like a hard taco shell. This was fish tacos, with cabbage and onion and avocado like a west coast fancy taco. It was fine. Not really my thing.
Here is another photo i normally wouldn't take because it's just a snack, but for the folks who don't have a Mexican bakery nearby... This is a haul from a Mexican bakery. There are three pastries inside the bag. The one that looks like a jelly donut is actually a bit more like a shortbread. The one that looks like a gingerbread man is something similar to a gingerbread pig. The last one is a twisted puff pastry a bit similar to a Danish without any filling. The "bee honey" palanqueta i included because it amusingly does not contain any honey. Palanquetas - the ultimate vegan snack.
Anyway, i want to get back to the topic of dryness again, because Mexican pan dulces ("sweet breads") are often quite dry compared to American or French pastries. I suspect you are supposed to eat them with coffee, but i don't mind them on their own. I think one of the big differentiators in Mexican pastries is that they really celebrate the grain. Like, they are still sweet, but they don't feel overpoweringly sweet like most American pastries. And they don't have that fatty, buttery flavor either. It really feels like you are eating bread which happens to be sweet, instead of a suspension of egg/butter/sugar with a tiny bit of flour thrown in to bind it. This is why i love Mexican pastries. I am not a sweet tooth, and i really love bread. Proper bread, with some texture and weight to it. So this type of baking is something that really works well for my taste buds. I want to eat all of the pan dulces!
Unf. More tacos. Just looking at these pictures is making me sad for Louisiana that the people here just don't know how good it could get. This was from a little mercado in Corrigan. Everyone in there was a construction worker wearing hi-vis vests, and at first they thought i was too because of my vest. They were amused when i said i was cycling. Or maybe they were just amused to see someone who wasn't Latin American in there. I think this was the place where i ordered a barbacoa taco, which is BBQ, usually beef. Like chicken, i don't much care for beef in my tacos, but this one was so fatty that it kinda worked. Still somehow blander than the pork, but a nice change from my usual al pastor/carnitas/chorizo party.
Ah, the Trumpy diner in Kountze. They had the usual American/southern cuisine, and the very best thing was this deep-fried mushrooms. First of all, they gave me lots of them, which was awesome. But the great trick was slicing the mushrooms before battering, so there was more crispiness per inch than the places that just fry a whole button mushroom. Also, i'm not sure whether they were using dried mushrooms or oyster mushrooms or what, but the mushroom had some texture, a sort of chewiness that you don't normally find in western mushroom dishes. Very good.
The main was less exciting. I got a po' boy, which is a sort of sandwich from Louisiana. I will be talking more about those in the Louisiana food post, but basically what makes it a po' boy and not a sub is the bread, which is white, soft and poofy like a hamburger or hotdog bun. This had catfish and came with utterly shit fries. I hate fries where it seems like they battered the potato to make it more crispy on the outside. I'm not sure if it's because they use the same oil as for frying battered things, or if it's that stupid "double fry" technique that chefs rave about, but you end up with something that tears up the roof of your mouth and tastes more of batter than potato. And it seems to be very popular in East Texas. But the real disappointment was not getting enough of them.
Okay, the next few pictures are of my two day pause in Port Arthur to weather the storm. I was in the mood for Chinese food, but unfortunately the only restaurants nearby were full-blown American Chinese places. I decided to go with this one, which had 家常豆腐 homestyle tofu (i asked for extra chili) and steamed dumplings. You don't often find steamed dumplings in America, so i was excited to get it. The sad news is... the dumpling filling was ground beef. What the fuck, Texas. I wasn't expecting anything super exotic, but you'd think it'd at least be shrimp or pork and chive or something. That said, the homestyle tofu was on a par with the more mediocre ones you find inside China, which is about as good as you can hope for from an American Chinese place. Essentially satisfying, but not a place i'd go back to.
Now this is more like it. As the storm was tailing off, i splish-splashed my way across a mile of parking lots to get to this Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall. Unfortunately they didn't have any tofu, so i embraced the meat and went with a char siu bánh mì and a couple of thịt nướng spring rolls. Thịt nướng (i have no idea how to pronounce it) is pork kebabs grilled on a skewer, what outside of America people would call BBQ. Vietnamese char siu seems pretty similar to the Cantonese one, which is a sweet rub on a slow-roasted pork that they use for pork buns. This was such a good meal. The meat was so flavorful, and the vegetables were all crisp and fresh. Cilantro, basil, carrot, rice noodle vermicelli, just everything was perfect. The oil on the peanut sauce... Oh man. What an awesome meal.
Unfortunately pretty much anything i followed the Vietnamese feed up with would suck by comparison. This was just a bog standard American black bean burger with avocado and salsa and those annoying french fries that are somehow a bit too crispy on the outside and a bit too soft on the inside. It wasn't bad, but it was basically the same dish you could get at any dive bar anywhere that gets their Sysco black bean pattie deliveries.
I'll finish it up with a quick glimpse at some more pan dulces, nabbed from a panadería in Port Arthur before heading down the highway to Louisiana. The one that's mostly covered up is the same twisted puff pastry thing i got last time. The thing that looks a bit like a British sausage roll had strawberry jam inside. It was fine, but not different enough to the twisty thing to be worth it. But the highlight here was that dark rock-looking pastry. It was about as heavy as a rock too. It was dense and dry and extremely satisfying. Like, it filled your stomach. I think it was seasoned with ginger or cinnamon. Very good.
Oh Texas, i do not miss your dogs or your antagonistic conservatives, but i miss your food. I always said the best food i ate in America was in California and Texas, and that continues to be the case now. Louisiana is such a disappointment by comparison. Perhaps it wouldn't've been if i had traveled in the other direction. But, it is what it is. I have been typing this entry for entirely too long, so it's time to pack up and head. Till next post!