![]() ![]() When you’re homesick and Mexican is your comfort food, this can be a tough adjustment. Don’t get me wrong the food was good it was just different. But most of all machaca, the spicy shredded beef dear to my heart, was nowhere to be found. There was salsa but it was chunky and there was none of that smooth incendiary hot sauce. Huh? There was no chili Colorado or adovada, no green chili sauce (predominate in New Mexican cuisine). The chimichangas, deep fried burritos said to originate in Tucson, I was served were what we called flautas in Arizona – long thin cigar shaped filled and fried corn tortillas. This Mexican food looks like nothing from my childhood. When I first moved to Chicago half a life ago, I quickly realized that the Mexican immigrants in these parts came from somewhere else in Mexico than my AZ compadres. ![]() Say what you will about pollo fundito, a sort of square fried chicken burrito in a jalapeno cream cheese sauce that’s never seen the light of day in Mexico, but it’s pretty delicious and something with which every Phoenician is familiar and I’ll take a cheese crisp with green chilies over an ordinary quesadilla any day. “Our” Mexican food was influenced from the northern part of the country, just south of our Arizona borders, with a lot of local specialties thrown in. I grew up in Phoenix and though I’ve now lived in Chicago for a good long while, my ideas of Mexican food were formed early in that hot, desert community at a lot of small mom & pop corner restaurants.
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