taco with sekrit beans, revealed below

Ladies and gentlemen, you’re about to bear witness to history, one of the most stunning inventions in my culinary life in the last six months, at least. As with all great inventions, necessity was its mother; and what a hot mama she was…

Here in New York City, we were finally smacked with our first ninety-plus-degree day of the summer. Normally, this kind of climatic crap starts in late June, but, somehow, we got lucky. Probably, we were experiencing a side-effect of global warming roughly equivalent to the euphoria of a pleasant buzz before it takes a turn toward the dark side. When Portland, Oregon, where the summer is perfect all the time and there ain’t no weather they can’t love each other through, hit a hundred and seven the other week, a blindfolded visitor could have been forgiven for mistaking Brooklyn for San Francisco. But, as with all chance events that we’d like to think we deserved, our luck ran out.

Your New Yorker is a great complainer about the weather. Not for us, the quiet suffering. For us, the loud suffering. So the complaining began, loud, but, somehow, not so long. “Hot…” went Facebook. “Again with the heat…” went Twitter. When the weather is so enervating that we end our complaints in ellipsis, you know there’s serious trouble.

I’d cooked a nice meal on Sunday: whole-wheat lingine, with sausage, onion (caramelized, natch), butter, and a bunch of saved red chard stems, which cooked down to sauce surprisingly well. I’d preceded it with the semi-traditional pitcher of margaritas that do so much to set the ambiance for backyard Scrabble-playing. A whole pitcher was a bit more than either Missy or I could handle, so I stuck the rest in the freezer, having noted that, with occasional stabbing and stirring, the liquid would form itself into something of a margarita slushie. Saturday night’s meal had been a good one, too, what with the Burgers of Shalom and all. But now it was Monday, hot, muggy Monday, and, as I dragged myself by the fingertips through the gelatinized air, I couldn’t imagine cooking. I wanted takeout. I wanted a pizza. I wanted someone else to cook my food. Yet I would not — could not — succumb to temptation. No pizza till Pizza Night. No takeout till… well, no takeout this week. I had to make something.

I leashed up September the dog, and walked outside. The humidity hit us like a limp dishrag. Somehow, so did inspiration. Taco night. Meat: check, in the form of a leftover Burger of Shalom. Tortillas: check, left over from the slow-grilled pork shoulder. Lettuce: check, from the CSA. Cilantro: check, from an experiment in sandwich-making last week. Onion: check, because, if you don’t have onions in your kitchen, you’d better get your head checked. Cheese: Missy would pass by TJs on her way home, so I could fob that off on her. Beans: I had none soaked. It was too late to soak beans. That meant one thing: Goya. There they were, in the bodega, two shelves away from the pickled jalapeños of my beloved La Morena: Goya pinto beans, $1.79 for the 1lb. 13oz. can, with “Frijol de Olla” on the front, and a recipe for refried beans on the back. Carrying the beans, a six-pack, and a perfectly nice 40-lb. PowerMac G4 that someone was giving away in one hand, and yanking along September, who was about five minutes from plotzing from humidity-stroke with the other, I returned to the apartment, and set about goofing off.

When Missy came by an hour later, I gave the recipe for refried beans on the Goya can a sideways glance, and started in. I diced an onion fine, and fried it in a couple tablespoons each of oil and leftover pork fat until translucent, lidded at first so it’d retain its moisture, then unlidded so it’d begin to brown. When it did, I added three minced cloves of garlic, and a little tarragon and pimentón, to remind myself that this was my cooking. I drained about three-fourths of the liquid from the beans, added them to the pot, and brought them to a simmer.

Meanwhile, I crumbled up the remaining Burger of Shalom, and mixed in by hand a little salt, a handful of chopped cilantro, and a squirt of harissa. I tasted. Missy tasted. It was missing… something. Lime. I squeezed in half a lime, and the dish came to life. The cool, crumbled, zinged-up meat made a kind of cooked tartare, or an exploded kibbeh. It was truly delicious. Now this was some hamburger help to be proud of.

I sliced up the cheddar that Missy brought over, shredded some lettuce, and prepared to mash the beans. Never mind that the recipe on the can said to do that before frying; mashed is mashed, right? Not when you don’t have a masher, it’s not. I used to have a masher. I had it for years and years. Now, I don’t know where it is. Maybe in Cari’s basement. Maybe in the Land of Lost Implements. I couldn’t come up with anything else to to the job, short of spreading the beans in a baking pan and going at them with a spatula. Not worth the effort. I’d leave the beans whole. That’s when innovation came a-knocking.

I remembered reading an article in the NYT about Nuyorican rice and beans. About how the beans were flavored with citrus, often orange juice. I flashed on a sign I’d seen on Saturday, a stolen supermarket shelf-talker, at a friend’s place in Queens: “Lemons: Perfect for Orange Juice.” (Me: “Where the hell did you get that?” Friend: “It was above the lemons at the Pathmark. I had to pocket it.” Me: “It’s for real?!” Friend: “Uh-huh.”) I had citrus: I had half a lime. I squeezed that into the beans. Not enough. I had more citrus (can you feel it coming?): I had frozen margaritas. I ran to the freezer (ok, turned around and took two steps), and drew forth the great margarita beaker (ok, a vase I bought for a buck at a yard sale), smoking as though filled with some deep-frozen culinary secret (which, it turns out, it was), stabbed at it with a kitchen knife a few times to free up the slush, hefted about a cup’s worth into the beans, and cranked up the heat. I then spooned in a little chicken bouillon paste, for good luck. When the liquid in the bean pot was reduced to a thick syrup, I called them done, and heated half a dozen corn tortillas over a low flame.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the birth of Margarita Beans. I assure you that, if you try them, they will rock your world as hard as they did mine.

The results are what you see before you. From bottom to top: tortilla, beans, cheese, meat, lettuce. I can’t explain to you why they were so fucking good, but, take my word for it, they were. Maybe it was the rich, sweet beans, with that subtle tang of tequila and lime. Maybe it was the lively cold beef and lamb. Maybe it was the way the cheese melted into the beans, the slightly burned taste of the tortillas, or the way the crisp CSA lettuce sat above it all. Whatever it was, it was all that and then some. I don’t recall much about the ensuing moments. They were a frenzy of the kind usually associated with extreme athletic exertion or really good sex. I drew breath, and, with it, thought, only once. My thought was this: since I had to reseason the iron pan anyway, why not put a quarter-inch of oil in it, fry a couple tortillas, and make tostadas? So that was exactly what I did, and welcomed myself to the next level.

tostada

Lounging around in the afterglow of dinner, it struck me that everything that had seemed to be wrong with that Monday had been wiped away, as surely as the wind that rose with the night blew away the day’s sticky heat. The beans were so good, I’d have licked the pan, but that was someone else’s business.

designated dishwasher