Monday, June 27, 2011

An Introduction

 
Howdy, I call myself  the “Hungry Texican”.  I’m glad you stumbled on my blog  and hope that you share your thoughts, memories or advice on cooking.  When I thought about creating this blog, my intent was to share with you the recipes that I grew up with.  In order to introduce my blog to you, I will supply you with some background information on my quest for culinary knowledge.  I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas and transplanted to Las Vegas, Nevada after 37 years of my somewhat naïve life.    Things that I grew up eating (like beef head barbacoa and Big Red Soda on Sunday morning or drinking warm champurrado on the first cool weather day for good luck)  can appear foreign to folks around here.  I'll be going on three years here in Vegas and still adjusting.  I've managed to replicate just about everything I miss from home although some of the ingredients are strictly sold in Texas, which I have compiled a decent list of, but my entire familia is in Texas, so shipping normally isn't a problem. 
 
Let me introduce my first memory which is as follows:  being twirled  in my father’s arms at the age of three during the Christmas holidays in our small barrio Southside kitchen with the radio on and Jose Feliciano blaring in the background “I want to wish you a Merry Christmas” .  Pop held me in one arm and a spatula in the other as he took  a batch of “Chinese Cookies”  from the pan to cool.   Now, to this day I don’t know what a “Chinese Cookie" is but ours had a pecan half in the center and was a cross between a sugar and an almond cookie.  Pop was brewery guy and was always bigger than life to me and had calluses on both hands the size of quarters to prove it.   He delivered beer for a big name brewery in the sixties and seventies.   When the economy took a downturn he found himself out of a job after  fifteen years of unloading beer .  Now when he lost his job, I hardly considered us poor because we always had food on the table.  Pop loved to cook and garden.  He considered it a refuge from his worries a trait I think he passed onto me (he made everything  from his mom’s “masita”  which years later I learned is also known as polenta to Quiche Lorraine). We put just about anything in a tortilla from potato and egg to meatloaf.  Pop needed to work and he wasn’t going to sit back and take unemployment lightly, so every morning he woke every one up (my ma, two brothers and I) at 3:30am to assist with rolling out tortillas and at least 5 different tortilla fillings a day.  By this time I was the ripe age of 10.  He would load a Styrofoam ice chest with the tacos and was on the road by 6am to sell them to the local construction company crews for $1 each.  By 10am his large ice chest was empty.  The workers bought and he played with the idea of opening a TexMex restaurant.    Well the itch to become his own boss got the best of him and he opened “Chito’s Barbacoa and Cafetria” in 1982. 
 
Now you must wonder where my mom was in all of this.  She and my pop were high school sweethearts and met while bagging groceries at Centeno’s grocery store. Both had military ambitions.  My mom was one of the few Hispanic females to serve in the army in the 50’s and I kid you not was the spitting image of “Rosie the Riveter” (I’ll share pics later).   When she joined the military, she did not know what to do with the fork that was provided to her at mealtime as she  was raised with tortillas as her only utensil.  This has always seemed strange to me as she was born and raised in Texas.  Well, she quickly learned table etiquette and after raising us kids, she went onto earn a Bachelors degree in Sociology.  Unfortunately, she suffered from many ailments including diabetes, severe rheumatoid arthritis and was confined to a wheelchair for most of my life.  She hoped that one day I would sit with her and write her life story, and I hope this blog one day fulfills that wish.  I remember she would sit in her wheelchair at the entryway to the kitchen and read the recipes out loud to pop.  I still have her Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks from the 50’s and have started a small collection of my own,  but if I had to rescue one book from a fire it would be her BH&G copyright 1958.  She used to say Pop was the strength and she was the brains, so what more could a person want?  Ma commanded respect in her kitchen and no one questioned her. 
 
So this for me is a new beginning and is a refuge from my 9 to 5 desk job. I have left out chunks here and there as I still consider myself a novice of sorts and will fill in the blanks throughout our journey.  In the meantime, I hope to hear your comments and learn from you along the way….