I haven't always loved hot, spicy foods. Hell, I haven't always had access to them. I feel like I can confidently trace the origins of my current love of spicy foods back to weekly childhood meals with my dad in San Francisco.
My parents angrily divorced when I was a mere infant and my mother apparently lost the coin toss, so I lived with her full-time, staying at my father's apartment only one night a week. So most food that entered my face was orchestrated by my mom and my dad was only responsible for feeding me two meals a week, at most.
My mother favored
copious portions of rich, fatty foods, but generally seasoned with not
much more than salt. Usually just salt. Salty, salty salt. But as "well-seasoned" and "flavorful" and "salty" as her food would be, complex flavors were almost completely absent. She'd occasionally use some sparse pinches of basic dried herbs if a recipe absolutely called for them. And aside from some cinnamon or nutmeg toward the holidays, spices were just not a thing we had or used. In fact, while we had a dusty, battered tin of ground black pepper in the house, I don't think she ever really used it because it was "too hot". And pepper flakes? Cayenne pepper? Hot sauce? Jalapeños? They didn't exist in my world, except as something cartoon characters occasionally used to hurt each other. I grew up deep in the Land of the Bland.
A typical dinner with her would be pork chops or greasy skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs, mashed potatoes from a boxed mix, and a side of some sort of frozen vegetable cooked until it was totally mushy. Oddly, she hated canned vegetables and looked down her nose at them, but her preferred method of cooking frozen vegetables rendered an end product that was just as mushy.
Her occasional forays into "exotic" dishes were marked by comedic blandness. My father used to tease her about her "mock chili" and "mock curry" because her versions of those dishes contained the bare minimum of seasoning, if any at all. Her version of curry had just enough yellow curry powder to color it, but absolutely no more. And her version of chili had absolutely no seasoning at all, save for a dash of soy sauce on the ground beef and whatever salt and flavor came along with the liquid in the canned beans and tomatoes. And she'd serve that over rice that had been boiled in a full pot of water and then drained in a colander like it was pasta, so it came out waterlogged and bland to the point of actually sucking some of the flavor out of the "chili". I didn't learn how you were actually supposed to cook rice until I was in my mid-twenties and living away from home.
My father's default food habits embraced a whole different part of the bland spectrum. His relationship with food has always been very different than mine or my mother's, which at first made my weekly visits with him really uncomfortable and...boring.
When it came time to sort out the custody arrangement, some sort of Martian robot logic led my parents to decide that my weekly visitation with my dad should occur on Wednesday nights. Not on the weekend like normal human parents would arrange, but right in the middle of the school week. He’d pick me up from school and we’d walk to his neighborhood, which was conveniently located right down the hill in the Duboce Triangle. I’d have just enough time with him to have dinner, do some homework, be quiet while he did some work, not watch some TV and then go to bed for school the next day. Some children of divorce get visits with Fun Dad, the Overcompensator! Not me, though. I got weird, Drab Dad, whose superpower was being largely unwilling to adjust his routine to account for the presence of another human. "Oh, boy!" I would definitely not think every Wednesday morning as I got ready for school. And early on, the miserably drab food he tried to foist on me was a key part of how boring, boring, horrible, bland, boring, bad, boring, bland, bad and boring these visits were.
Thankfully, our weekly dinners evolved over time, slowly changing from abjectly shitty to decently palatable and eventually to quite delicious. One of the key improvements was a shift to eating out rather than relying on the awful food he ate on his own the rest of the week. Early stays at his apartment were marked by dinners of plain steamed vegetables and brown rice. No salt, no sauce, no meat, no flavor, no joy. Steamed fucking vegetables and brown fucking rice. Breakfasts consisted of grainy bread with unsalted butter and an apple on the side. Being a chubby American boy with a mother who tended to eat emotionally, I was vastly unimpressed. It just didn't occur to him at first to alter his usual weird Buddhist prison diet when a small child came around.
Similarly distasteful to child-me, when he discovered Healthy Choice meals in the frozen section and they became a staple at his place during the rest of the week, they became what I had to eat when I came over. They were low-fat, low-calorie, were slightly more complex and varied and yet even lower effort than his signature hippie steamers. I've eaten Healthy Choice frozen meals more recently as a quick, cheap option for lunch on days when I couldn't leave work, and I have to tell you their flavor and texture have improved greatly over the years. They almost taste like food you can eat, now. But my dad was an early adopter, so these were the first-gen Healthy Choices, back when you could really taste the modified food starch that made up the bulk of the "sauces" and the "everything else". And mind you, this was in the days before most people had microwaves, so we were putting those tiny, imitation meals into a gas oven and waiting a full forty-five minutes for the distinct lack of pleasure of eating them. That's a long time to sit and weigh the consequences of the choice you've made between sweet and sour chicken that tastes like cardboard and Dijon chicken that tastes like cardboard, especially for a child.
I don’t remember if I complained about the food or whether he showed an uncharacteristic level of perception about another human's feelings, but eventually he started taking me to various local eateries on the way home from school instead of continuing to torture me at home. Getting to go out to eat once a week definitely softened the blow of being without my toys and my cable TV for a night. I dare say I even started to look forward to Wednesdays, because I rarely got to go out to eat with my mother, so it felt like a treat. It also helped that there were some pretty good places for casual dining within walking distance of my dad's place.
For a while, we went to a vegetarian place which was tastier than it sounded and whose name I remember, but will not attempt to spell. I just looked it up and it’s no longer there, anyway. Even better, for a long stretch, we went to Cybelle’s Pizza rather religiously (it's still there, now called The Slice Pizza, but with the same old phone number and everything). Their pizza-by-the-slice was delicious and bigger than my head. On a wildly unrelated tangent, I once watched one of the employees there stirring a huge bucket of sauce with his whole bare arm. It was as impressive to me at the time as it is distasteful to the me that knows about proper food handling now.
"When is this wordy motherfucker going to finally talk about spicy food?" you mutter to yourself as you consider switching tabs to the porn that's been loading in the background. It's in this next part. Calm down. The porn will be there...
It was at a little burrito place on Church street between 14th
and Duboce where I first remember eating food that was way too spicy
for me and yet absolutely loving it. It was located where Taqueria El
Castillito is now, but
I think I remember the exterior being painted white instead of yellow
and I think it might have been named something different, but I can't
for the life of me remember what that name might have been. What I do
remember is ordering a chicken super burrito that was not specifically
advertised as being spicy, but that ended up burning my little virgin
mouth with such fury and vigor that I had to take multiple breaks to
breathe heavily and make hooting, hollering noises and drink too much
soda too quickly before diving back in for more. It wasn't loaded with
jalapeños. It wasn't filled with extra spicy salsa. My little
untrained mouth was just such a stranger to spicy food that the
rust-colored sauce in which the shredded chicken was stewed was like a
glowing spicy magma to me. It was a revelation!
I'd had various versions of burritos before. I thought they were tasty. But I'd still somehow been sheltered from burritos that contained any really spicy elements. When I bit
into that fateful burrito, I was only vaguely aware that spices existed. I'd only ever had glancing contact with them. And if I'd ever had spicy chiles pass my lips, it had been in such small quantities that I'd never really appreciated their true fury and glory. That was the moment I truly learned that food could be hot, spicy and really tasty all at once. Nothing I'd
eaten before had prepared me for the fiery, burning onslaught of
deliciousness that flooded my mouth as I chewed that ballistic missile
of chicken, rice, beans, cheese and sour cream, wrapped in a stretchy,
gooey steamed tortilla.
I digress on purpose:
Did you know that San Francisco is know for its own style of burrito? Dubbed the "Mission burrito" or sometimes the "Mission-style burrito" or "San Francisco burrito", the style became popular in the Mission District in the 1960s and is pretty much just the way burritos are made everywhere in San Francisco now. They're characterized by their large size, their everything-on-it approach, and by their steamed tortilla. Steaming the tortilla renders it stretchier and helps keep it from tearing as it holds the overabundance of delicious ingredients it's tasked with containing. But I find the steamed tortilla also adds a lot to the party from a texture standpoint. Dry, hard tortillas just aren't that fun to chew on, whereas a good stretchy, gluey steamed tortilla sort of melds with the cheese and other moist ingredients to give you an experience akin to eating a filled glutinous rice ball popular in various parts of Asia. There's this little zone where the savory meat and sauce blend a bit with the sticky outer shell and become a new thing in between. I didn't know that my home town had its own style of burrito until I left and couldn't find it anymore. And since I first moved away to Nevada, I assumed that what I was looking for but not finding was a California thing. Only years later did I learn that what I was craving was really mostly relegated to the Bay Area, much to my chagrin. I'm currently living in Southern California and I'm surrounded by really good Mexican food. But the thing I just can't get here is a really good Mission burrito and I miss it. I miss it so much. Some places around here will throw in some of the extra bells and whistles, sure, but nobody in this area steams the tortillas. Nobody.
Anyhoo...
For the longest time after my youthful initiation to a mouth full of burning satisfaction, burritos were my go-to conveyance for spicy flavors. I just didn't have the context to know what else to seek out. In high school, my friends and I would frequently walk over to Gordo's on 9th Avenue (still there, still running), which was about eight blocks from school, and therefore a little too far to walk there, eat a burrito and walk back in time to not be late for class. Eventually, when the principal would chide us for walking in late as a group, we'd just reply "Gordo's" in explanation as we passed him. At Gordo's, I'd ask for the hottest salsa option on my burrito and then have them add jalapeños as well. The chile verde was delicious, but I became a loyal fan of their carnitas. They'd slap a hunk of it down on the counter and chop it to hell with a big cleaver right in front of you. Because it was roasted, then fried, you'd get chunks from the inside that were moist and juicy and chunks from the outside that were dry, dark and crisp. And eating it swimming in sour cream, gooey cheese, beans, rice, pico de gallo, spicy, spicy salsa and tart, hot pickled jalapeños was just wonderful.
Pickled Jalapeños actually became something of a gateway for me to making other foods spicy. There was a little pizza and sandwich place that was cheaper and much closer to my high school, so we'd often stop in there and grab a slice or a sub when we didn't have giant burrito money. One of the pizza toppings they offered was jalapeños, so I started adding those to pizza slices. And then I figured out that I could get jalapeños on my sandwiches as well. Heck, I could even grab a jar of pickled jalapeños at the store when shopping and start putting those on stuff at home, too. Amazingly, I never had indigestion in high school.
I was a total hot food novice. I was a spicy n00b, figuring things out pretty much on my own. The road was slow and I was timid, but if it weren't for that spicy burrito, which I'm 100% sure I would not find all that spicy today, I may not have developed the deep love of hot and spicy foods I enjoy today.
What's funny to me is that I've eaten meals with my father as an adult during which he expressed that some dish or another was too spicy for him. I had to point out to him that I attribute my current love of spicy foods to the foods he took me out to eat during my formative years. To be fair, though, I've also always attributed my dark, dry sense of humor to him, yet I now find him numbingly humorless and stiff.
I guess the student has become the master now, in a number of ways.
My parents angrily divorced when I was a mere infant and my mother apparently lost the coin toss, so I lived with her full-time, staying at my father's apartment only one night a week. So most food that entered my face was orchestrated by my mom and my dad was only responsible for feeding me two meals a week, at most.
A typical dinner with her would be pork chops or greasy skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs, mashed potatoes from a boxed mix, and a side of some sort of frozen vegetable cooked until it was totally mushy. Oddly, she hated canned vegetables and looked down her nose at them, but her preferred method of cooking frozen vegetables rendered an end product that was just as mushy.
Her occasional forays into "exotic" dishes were marked by comedic blandness. My father used to tease her about her "mock chili" and "mock curry" because her versions of those dishes contained the bare minimum of seasoning, if any at all. Her version of curry had just enough yellow curry powder to color it, but absolutely no more. And her version of chili had absolutely no seasoning at all, save for a dash of soy sauce on the ground beef and whatever salt and flavor came along with the liquid in the canned beans and tomatoes. And she'd serve that over rice that had been boiled in a full pot of water and then drained in a colander like it was pasta, so it came out waterlogged and bland to the point of actually sucking some of the flavor out of the "chili". I didn't learn how you were actually supposed to cook rice until I was in my mid-twenties and living away from home.
My father's default food habits embraced a whole different part of the bland spectrum. His relationship with food has always been very different than mine or my mother's, which at first made my weekly visits with him really uncomfortable and...boring.
When it came time to sort out the custody arrangement, some sort of Martian robot logic led my parents to decide that my weekly visitation with my dad should occur on Wednesday nights. Not on the weekend like normal human parents would arrange, but right in the middle of the school week. He’d pick me up from school and we’d walk to his neighborhood, which was conveniently located right down the hill in the Duboce Triangle. I’d have just enough time with him to have dinner, do some homework, be quiet while he did some work, not watch some TV and then go to bed for school the next day. Some children of divorce get visits with Fun Dad, the Overcompensator! Not me, though. I got weird, Drab Dad, whose superpower was being largely unwilling to adjust his routine to account for the presence of another human. "Oh, boy!" I would definitely not think every Wednesday morning as I got ready for school. And early on, the miserably drab food he tried to foist on me was a key part of how boring, boring, horrible, bland, boring, bad, boring, bland, bad and boring these visits were.
Thankfully, our weekly dinners evolved over time, slowly changing from abjectly shitty to decently palatable and eventually to quite delicious. One of the key improvements was a shift to eating out rather than relying on the awful food he ate on his own the rest of the week. Early stays at his apartment were marked by dinners of plain steamed vegetables and brown rice. No salt, no sauce, no meat, no flavor, no joy. Steamed fucking vegetables and brown fucking rice. Breakfasts consisted of grainy bread with unsalted butter and an apple on the side. Being a chubby American boy with a mother who tended to eat emotionally, I was vastly unimpressed. It just didn't occur to him at first to alter his usual weird Buddhist prison diet when a small child came around.
Similarly distasteful to child-me, when he discovered Healthy Choice meals in the frozen section and they became a staple at his place during the rest of the week, they became what I had to eat when I came over. They were low-fat, low-calorie, were slightly more complex and varied and yet even lower effort than his signature hippie steamers. I've eaten Healthy Choice frozen meals more recently as a quick, cheap option for lunch on days when I couldn't leave work, and I have to tell you their flavor and texture have improved greatly over the years. They almost taste like food you can eat, now. But my dad was an early adopter, so these were the first-gen Healthy Choices, back when you could really taste the modified food starch that made up the bulk of the "sauces" and the "everything else". And mind you, this was in the days before most people had microwaves, so we were putting those tiny, imitation meals into a gas oven and waiting a full forty-five minutes for the distinct lack of pleasure of eating them. That's a long time to sit and weigh the consequences of the choice you've made between sweet and sour chicken that tastes like cardboard and Dijon chicken that tastes like cardboard, especially for a child.
I don’t remember if I complained about the food or whether he showed an uncharacteristic level of perception about another human's feelings, but eventually he started taking me to various local eateries on the way home from school instead of continuing to torture me at home. Getting to go out to eat once a week definitely softened the blow of being without my toys and my cable TV for a night. I dare say I even started to look forward to Wednesdays, because I rarely got to go out to eat with my mother, so it felt like a treat. It also helped that there were some pretty good places for casual dining within walking distance of my dad's place.
For a while, we went to a vegetarian place which was tastier than it sounded and whose name I remember, but will not attempt to spell. I just looked it up and it’s no longer there, anyway. Even better, for a long stretch, we went to Cybelle’s Pizza rather religiously (it's still there, now called The Slice Pizza, but with the same old phone number and everything). Their pizza-by-the-slice was delicious and bigger than my head. On a wildly unrelated tangent, I once watched one of the employees there stirring a huge bucket of sauce with his whole bare arm. It was as impressive to me at the time as it is distasteful to the me that knows about proper food handling now.
"When is this wordy motherfucker going to finally talk about spicy food?" you mutter to yourself as you consider switching tabs to the porn that's been loading in the background. It's in this next part. Calm down. The porn will be there...
 |
| The Burrito of Destiny - Try the Salsa of Fate! |
I digress on purpose:
Did you know that San Francisco is know for its own style of burrito? Dubbed the "Mission burrito" or sometimes the "Mission-style burrito" or "San Francisco burrito", the style became popular in the Mission District in the 1960s and is pretty much just the way burritos are made everywhere in San Francisco now. They're characterized by their large size, their everything-on-it approach, and by their steamed tortilla. Steaming the tortilla renders it stretchier and helps keep it from tearing as it holds the overabundance of delicious ingredients it's tasked with containing. But I find the steamed tortilla also adds a lot to the party from a texture standpoint. Dry, hard tortillas just aren't that fun to chew on, whereas a good stretchy, gluey steamed tortilla sort of melds with the cheese and other moist ingredients to give you an experience akin to eating a filled glutinous rice ball popular in various parts of Asia. There's this little zone where the savory meat and sauce blend a bit with the sticky outer shell and become a new thing in between. I didn't know that my home town had its own style of burrito until I left and couldn't find it anymore. And since I first moved away to Nevada, I assumed that what I was looking for but not finding was a California thing. Only years later did I learn that what I was craving was really mostly relegated to the Bay Area, much to my chagrin. I'm currently living in Southern California and I'm surrounded by really good Mexican food. But the thing I just can't get here is a really good Mission burrito and I miss it. I miss it so much. Some places around here will throw in some of the extra bells and whistles, sure, but nobody in this area steams the tortillas. Nobody.
Anyhoo...
For the longest time after my youthful initiation to a mouth full of burning satisfaction, burritos were my go-to conveyance for spicy flavors. I just didn't have the context to know what else to seek out. In high school, my friends and I would frequently walk over to Gordo's on 9th Avenue (still there, still running), which was about eight blocks from school, and therefore a little too far to walk there, eat a burrito and walk back in time to not be late for class. Eventually, when the principal would chide us for walking in late as a group, we'd just reply "Gordo's" in explanation as we passed him. At Gordo's, I'd ask for the hottest salsa option on my burrito and then have them add jalapeños as well. The chile verde was delicious, but I became a loyal fan of their carnitas. They'd slap a hunk of it down on the counter and chop it to hell with a big cleaver right in front of you. Because it was roasted, then fried, you'd get chunks from the inside that were moist and juicy and chunks from the outside that were dry, dark and crisp. And eating it swimming in sour cream, gooey cheese, beans, rice, pico de gallo, spicy, spicy salsa and tart, hot pickled jalapeños was just wonderful.
Pickled Jalapeños actually became something of a gateway for me to making other foods spicy. There was a little pizza and sandwich place that was cheaper and much closer to my high school, so we'd often stop in there and grab a slice or a sub when we didn't have giant burrito money. One of the pizza toppings they offered was jalapeños, so I started adding those to pizza slices. And then I figured out that I could get jalapeños on my sandwiches as well. Heck, I could even grab a jar of pickled jalapeños at the store when shopping and start putting those on stuff at home, too. Amazingly, I never had indigestion in high school.
I was a total hot food novice. I was a spicy n00b, figuring things out pretty much on my own. The road was slow and I was timid, but if it weren't for that spicy burrito, which I'm 100% sure I would not find all that spicy today, I may not have developed the deep love of hot and spicy foods I enjoy today.
What's funny to me is that I've eaten meals with my father as an adult during which he expressed that some dish or another was too spicy for him. I had to point out to him that I attribute my current love of spicy foods to the foods he took me out to eat during my formative years. To be fair, though, I've also always attributed my dark, dry sense of humor to him, yet I now find him numbingly humorless and stiff.
I guess the student has become the master now, in a number of ways.
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