Memorial Day Breakfast Tacos And A Visit To LACMA
May 30th, 2011
Today I made famous breakfast tacos. Today is Memorial Day, a holiday in the USA when people go to the beach if it is hot enough, or shopping if it is not. It is supposed to be a day to honor those who have fallen in America's imperialist ventures overseas and our domestic civil war and wars of extermination against the Native Americans. Only a couple of these wars would be considered even remotely justifiable, perhaps World War 2. Not much to honor, except the valor of the poor guys caught up in the machinations of the rich and powerful. Perhaps if the War between the States had been a war to free the slaves it would have been more justifiable, just as WW 2 would have been more reasonable if it had been a war to free the Jews and Gypsies from extermination.
But back to my tacos. So this is how I make them, for one very hungry guy or two moderately hungry people. Take some chorizo, maybe a two or three inch length throw it into a heated frying pan with some olive oil. I use a gas stove with a cast iron frying pan. I like the slow controlled heat. Chop up some bell pepper, onion, zucchini, garlic and throw them in the pan, I would use about 1/4-1/3 of a pepper, 1 fat slice of an onion, maybe half of a zucchini, and one piece of garlic, all chopped up into medium bite sized chunks. Add a pre-cooked potato, 1/2 to a whole one, sliced up again in chunks. Add perhaps half a Roma tomato, again bite sized chunks, a little squirt of catsup and some spicy mustard, throw in a whole lot of red pepper, some basil and oregano, saute' until warm, not to long, you don't want to burn anything or get it too soft. Then cut a slice of extra sharp cheddar cheese and cut it up into small pieces and throw it in. Throw in your eggs last, one or two per person. With the eggs sometimes I scramble them and mix with the rest of the food, sometimes I poach them separately and put them on top of my tacos as a whole egg. Finally I heat the tacos, removing the rest of the food from the frying pan first. Usually two or three tacos per person. I like to use white or yellow corn tortillas, heated, not hardened. I throw these on the plate with the scrabble mix, and you have breakfast tacos. If you want you can sprinkle a little hot sauce, pepper, salt and lemon on each taco and I like to put a little New Mexico style hot salsa on it also. This should make your head sweat and tastes great!
Yesterday I was at LACMA, (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and there was a Pacific Islander exhibit with human skulls artfully arranged in glass cases presented in such a sterile environment that it seemed perfectly reasonable to use the head of your dead opponent as a fetish object. Museums take the mess out of such things and present them as abstractions. Interesting comments on the curators perhaps, but not much is really said about the culture of the head hunters. This is a case of artistic representation, misrepresenting something that has meaning in a cultural context, as if it were some form of rarified aesthetic. Imagine the head hunter sitting in his study pipe in hand with an exhibit if Nazi lampshades made of human skin, all neatly displayed behind glass in a neutral white room, in this case air conditioned by a gas generator in the hut next door. Anyway I was entertained, not appalled. The skulls had about as much connection to a real live human being as the meat in the supermarket does to a cow, or a pig or some poor butcher's missing finger. Bon appetite.
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