sausage taco fixings

sausage taco fixings

“Any dinner requests?”
“Something sausagy.”

For hours I’d been fighting the impulse to say, hell with it, let’s go to Viva for enchiladas and margaritas. It was one of those frustrating Mexican food cravings that strike me — frustrating because it’s no easy thing to get good Mexican here in the big city. This is surprising, considering that, in nearly any restaurant in Manhattan or Brooklyn, your food is likely to be cooked by a Mexican guy. Yet this most international of cities cannot boast a taco culture that’s even in the same league as Chicago, Portland, LA, or just about anywhere in the great state of Texas. If you can swallow the caveats, there are exceptions. Don’t mind waiting a long while to have two tacos the size of silver-dollar pancakes thrown at you by a glowering hipster? Try Bedford Ave’s La Superior. Want a more authentic experience, and don’t mind mediocre ingredients? Greenpoint’s Acapulco Deli, or anywhere Jackson Heights, are calling your name. But for the kind of explosive synthesis of texture, color, salt, heat, and meat that you’ll find from the window of a taco truck or plaza stand most anywhere in Mexico proper — and which the taco trucks of the Pacific Northwest do a fair job of synthesizing — you’re out of luck. Viva, a few blocks from me on Sullivan St. in Red Hook, isn’t bad, but it’s a bit overpriced for the gringoed-out approximation that it is. Eating there, you get the sense that the cooks could really turn it on if they chose to, but that the market here might not bear it. Mind you, I like the place, and I want them to succeed. The staff is nice, the drinks are strong, and the sauces for the chips show depth of flavor, but I wasn’t feeling $10/plate chicken enchiladas with cute squiggles of cream on top and nary a drop of mole poblano in sight. And, I had a budget to stick to. And, there was this matter of sausages.For a long moment in my news-addled brain, my Mexican craving and the sausage request teetered back and forth in my mind, as if modulating in the transition between scherzo and allegro in Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.* Sausage… taco… sausage… taco… sausage… taco… Sausage Taco! It wouldn’t be authentic in the way of cecina, carnitas, or lengua, but wasn’t the point of a taco to loosely hold whatever tasty meats were available? I jumped on the basket bike and pedaled as fast as I could to the store. Limes: 10 for $2. These I’d squeeze and mix with a little simple syrup and the remains of a botte of Tequilla, unexpectedly recovered in cleaning out my upstate storage locker, to make a couple precious margaritas; another would go into an avocado salsa, made from last week’s surviving avocado, ideally ripe on my kitchen counter; a clove of minced garlic; and a little cilantro. Speaking of which: cilantro, $0.89 for a large bunch. Red onions: $0.99/lb. I found the one passable-looking red onion in the depleted bin, and promptly forgot about it while preparing dinner. Sweet Italian sausage: a little over a pound at $4/lb. I had tortillas from making migas over the weekend. I had beet greens in the salad spinner (the best salad spinner EVAR, a lever-action Zyliss, from The Brooklyn Kitchen); shredded up, they’d make a sweeter, more deeply-flavored alternative to the usual shredded lettuce. Charcoal: again, a little left, and, for a slow sausage fire, I wouldn’t need much. (Don’t want to bother parboiling your sausages to keep them from burning when you throw them on the grill? Make a low fire, pyro. They don’t need much.) Then, there were the artichokes. Without bumping my head this time, I had a small revelation: I’d split and grill the artichokes over the coals while the sausages finished on the grill. At a buck a piece, they were a relatively expensive risk, but, fueled by the margaritas I hadn’t yet made, I was living on the edge. A stop at the bodega for a can of La Morena sliced picked jalapeños and carrots — the finest dos pesos can buy — I was ready. What ensued might be gringo Mexican (huero, yo soy), but it was gonna be my gringo Mexican.

Before Missy arrived in time for Marketplace, I’d mananged to boil up the simple syrup, squeeze the limes into it, and salt and sample a margarita myself; shred  the cilantro and the beet greens; sprinkle some of said cilantro onto the cubed avocado, and mix it up with salt, more lime juice, a minced clove of garlic, and a little cayenne, for avocado salsa; slice up some still-crunchy radishes from the other week’s monster bunch; and top, par-nuke, and halve the artichokes, to be finished on the grill. Missy rolled in, received margarita, and deployed the Atlantic Monthly. I lit up the coals, and cleaned the grill by laying a piece of tinfoil on top, lidding it for a minute, then balling up the foil with a pair of tongs and scrubbing vigorously. Then it was cooking time. The sausages went on first. Over the low fire, they took two turns and about ten minutes. After the first turn, I placed the artichokes on the cool side of the grill, to pick up a little heat and smoke. When the sausages were done — burnished brown and spitting through their casings — I pulled them off, warmed ten corn tortillas, and brought the whole mess back inside, where I sliced up the sausages, and dosed the cut sides of the artichokes with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt.

The Italo-gringo tacos were pretty damn awesome. With smoky grilled sausage, soft garlicy avocado, sharply vegetal cilantro, sweet vibrant beet greens, and hot vinegary jalapeños and carrots, all piled on double grilled tortillas, it’s hard to go wrong. The artichokes, on the other hand… I’ve always steamed or fried artichokes, and, by which methods getting good results is a no-brainer. I don’t know whether it was the microwave or the grill that toughened them, or if they simply needed more time — much more time — but they took on the approximate consistency of boot leather. Since I’m on the budget and all, I saved them anyhow, to shred into a pasta or salad, which I’ll eat while watching the proverbial virtual parsley. Live and learn. All in all, I’d count the meal a success: two hungry people with divergent cravings, both well satisfied; a grill employed on a weirdly cool late-spring night; and homemade margarita mix mixed, all for the approximate cost of about $5 per person. Now those are some taco truck prices.

avocado salsa, jalapeños, beet greens, radishes, cilantro

avocado salsa, jalapeños, beet greens, radishes, cilantro

* NB: I do not meniton this great artwork to with the intention of portraying myself as some kind of budget-kitchen Beethoven. In no way are we alike. He was short, and I am tall. He was German, and I’m a Diaspora Jew. He was a musical genius, and I can barely carry a tune. He lived a life of furious disclipline and I’m, well, one of these. Resemblance factor = 0.

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