Sunday is for fleeing Manhattan

Ah, Chuchifritos, you make the Barrio complete.
About a block from my apartment is this great restaurant that is open all the time and sells pretty much only fried food. I took my friend from Philadelphia on her way to her bus home. My favorite grease ball (quite literally) is the papas rellenas, a deep-fried ball of mashed potatoes stuffed with seasoned beef much as you might find in tacos. One of those and a "beef patty" made for a greasy, heart-clogging, deeply satisfying breakfast. The beef patty is similar to an empanada, but their dough is a little flakier and extends well past the pocket of seasoned beef so that the end result is about twice as tall as an empanada, with all that extra height providing a flaky wonderland of heart failure. I try not to eat there too often, but the appeal of a brightly lit buffet sporting a plethora of fried food is hard to resist. It doesn't help that the food is so cheap, filling and gratifies my deepest, darkest grease-yearnings. We're talking deep fried pork ribs with the layer of fat still on the meat. Even if your religious views don't condem consuming swine, these probably qualify as pretty damning. They were a bit much for breakfast, though, so I'll wait for a later blog to elaborate.

I washed all that fried crap down with a Energy VitaminWater because I like B vitamins. I'm not really sure what the deal with guarana is, but I have this image in my mind of tribal shamans wrestling panthers on a bed of orchids, and then pressing the orchids to collect the panther sweat and orchid tears, allowing it to ferment for a few months, then distilling it, drinking it and screaming out long run-on sentences, actually a form of prayer as well as their leading literary tradition. That probably doesn't have much to do with guarana at all, but Grant Morisson is writing my cultural speculation for the week, so that's what I got.

Then I headed down to New Jersey to check in on my girlfriend on the mend. Her mother made us a great dinner. I'd never had Portugese food before dating her, but now it's one of my favorite foods ever. It has a lot of the rich, meaty qualities of provincial French cooking with a slightly bolder palate at times verging on Mediterranean.

I don't know how terribly I'm butchering these accounts, having watched the first 30 minutes of Mirrormask instead of watching the food being prepared. I really should help in the kitchen more, though, because I'd really like to put some of these recipes together myself. I apologize in advance for butchering these recipes with inaccuracy.

There was a stewed pork chop in a tomato sauce that I have had at their house very often. It's very simple but one of my favorite things. The pork gets very soft and tears apart, similar to the texture of corned beef or the Philipino dish Adobo Pork.

Then there was a chicken breast that had been broiled, I believe, with vinegar and diced peppers. The texture was perfect and the bright flavors played very well with the somber tones of the marinated portabello mushrooms on the side. There was also a rice pilaf and oven fries which helped to balance the vinegar in the rest of the dinner. All in all it was a very hearty, satisfying dinner.

Afterward my girlfriend and I went for a walk and ended up stumbling upon a small fair near her house. Though we were very tempted by the prospect of deep-fried oreos, we decided to pass on the carnival fare. We ended up meandering through a K-Mart and I got a slurpee on my way out. I hadn't had one in a long time. I layered squirts of cola with squirts of the red flavor that has nothing to do with the fruit they slandered when time came to market it. I topped it off with a little root beer to raise the fluid to ice ratio and away I slurped. It proved to be a little too syrupy for my grown-up palate, though, and I tossed the last third when we got back to her house.
I had a very crispy flaky cookie that looked like a butterfly wing that I can't remember the name of, although I've seen bigger versions of similar cookies called "elephant ears." This box probably said "butterfly cookies" and I only retained that information as a descriptive memory, not a categorical definition. My brain is like that.

Much later, when I got home, I had a few potato chips just because they were there, and then crawled into bed and fell asleep in the middle of still digging chip-mush out of my molars with my tongue.