A walking food tour of Echo Park, and a papalo postscript

At the beginning of this week, I moved to Los Angeles.

I have always loved L.A. unconditionally.  Though I was born and raised in Chicago, attended college in Colorado, and went to graduate school in Orange County, my family took trips here two or three times a year and I always knew in the back of my mind that this is where I'd end up.  Every cross-country move I made brought me closer.

I constantly find myself hotly defending L.A. against those who view it as an engorged, vapid, shallow extension of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, but I have only one firm rule.  That is: if you consider yourself both a food lover and an L.A. hater, you might need to readjust one of those attitudes.  You can't hold both.

L.A.'s dry sweeping winds, droughts, and brown desert cliffs only charm me and clear my skin; its sprawling vastness only makes for more expansive mountain views for me to enjoy, and its choked traffic and exorbitant valet parking just tempt me to walk or bus everywhere, discovering neighborhoods most people never see speeding (or crawling, as it were) by on the freeways.

One of those neighborhoods, Echo Park, is my home now.  Today, I took a walk.  And I was hungry.

Luckily, hungry is the best thing to be in L.A.!

There's apparently a cart where a lady makes terrific Oaxacan-style blue corn quesadillas on the corner of Sunset and Echo Park - but this cart remains the stuff of fables for me because I have never been able to find her.  Today was no exception.  The dusty and largely abandoned parking lot where she supposedly sets up was empty even of men selling chili-salted fruit bags, jangling and clattering ice cream/popsicle carts, and the heavy, greasy smoke of the bacon-wrapped hot dog lady's cooking.  Unusual.

So I kept walking.  I wandered into a Mexican grocery sandwiched in between two discount clothing stores.  The first thing I saw?  Papalo!  99 cents per bunch.  The second thing?  Manila mangoes: four for a dollar.

$1.50 poorer, baking in the sun, trying to peel a mango with one hand, and taking big juicy bites that dripped mango juice all over the concrete, I kept walking.

Sticky-faced, I passed an extraordinarily foofy-looking raw vegan café on the same block as a place that sells hot dogs, quesadillas, 'bibim noodle bowls' and licuados all for less than $8.  Pozole from Costa Alegre, trout from Taix, and a machaca burrito from my childhood burrito-serving giant, Burrito King, also failed to beckon me, and my stomach growled ominously.  It was too early for Tacos Arizas and its seductive lengua tacos, so I sadly bypassed the Walgreens parking lot.

But hark!  What gleamed rainbow-colored from the Vons parking lot?  Could it be... an earlier-rising taco truck?

Yes, it could!

The man inside the truck, friendly in an easygoing, chatty way, recommended the carnitas and the cabeza tacos, a recommendation I gladly took.  Within two minutes, I had a sturdy plate of meat piled high, fresh, moist tortillas, and liberal sprinklings of cilantro and onions.  The bar provided me with two types of green salsa, and I sampled one on each taco.

The darker, waterier tomatillo was deceptively spicy and heavily seeded, and filtered down through every pore of my carnitas, while the creamier cilantro-based sauce sat atop my cabeza like tzatziki.  I pulled my bag of papalo from my purse and padded each taco with a few leaves.  The taco truck proprietor tilted his head curiously: why is that girl adding secret purse ingredients to her taco?

Why are meals eaten perched on a curb so often the most satisfying meals?  Is it the constant redirecting of ants from one's feet, or the telltale dusting of dirt on the backside?  Is it the knowledge that there is nothing enhancing the quality of the meal, no wall paintings or ceiling hangings, no ingratiating service or padded back cushions, and yet it still makes you smile?

Sun-addled now, with remnants of mango juice, cow and pig parts, and grease likely speckling my face despite multiple wipes with a napkin, I stumbled towards home, but was arrested by the sight of a 300 square foot market featuring such attractions as $7 fig and olive crackers, artisanal olive oil in a giant jug, and prosciutto lined baguettes.  Spotting some enormous cookies with the moniker 'Not Nutter Butter', I shrugged.  Why not?

And thus did I stagger up the steep, winding incline towards home, letting the granola-like cookie flake away under my tongue as the fine, silky peanut butter melted on top of it.

This is the same hill where I, as a child, I stole loquats from the neighbor's laden trees in April, where I learned that nasturtiums were edible (and spicy), and where I looked out on the San Bernardino mountains while eating lox on bagels on Sunday mornings.

I finally feel, culinarily, very much at home, but it's almost time to be thrust into a completely foreign flavor environment: I leave for Japan in just under a week.

Lengua and other 'secret' meats

I'd never been too fond of the idea of beef tongue before this past Saturday.  Or any kind of tongue, for that matter.

Maybe this sounds weird, but the thought of another tongue in my mouth next to my own tongue made me cringe a little.  I mean, what if I forgot which tongue I was supposed to be chewing?  What if my teeth couldn't tell the difference?  It's hard enough not to bite my tongue when it's numb from Novocaine - how would my jaw manage differentiating between multiple tongues?

So, there's been a taco truck that sets up shop next to the Echo Park Walgreens for as long as I can remember.  It's called Tacos Arizas.  Now, I've always been curious about it, but whenever I was in Echo Park it meant I was visiting my extended family, and that meant one thing: meat.  Grandmas and aunts and mothers and cousins all cooking ridiculous amounts of meat.  Chopped liver.  Borscht (yes, this has beef all over the place according to their recipe).  Enchiladas verdes con pollo.  Essic-fleish.  Spareribs - Korean or European style.

The last thing I ever wanted on top of all of that was a meaty meat-taco.

But Saturday, I had my chance.  I had fifteen minutes left on the parking meter from shopping and I was starving.  I ran over to the truck and ordered three tacos: buche, carnitas, and yes, lengua.

I didn't take a picture because: a) I was too busy spilling salsa all over my car as it was, and b) it was in my stomach before I knew it.

Tongue is like a cross between tender muscle meat and liver!  It's juicy, not chewy at all, and much, much more forgiving to chew on than, say, many steaks.  Why did no one inform me of its wonders earlier?

I feel like being raised in the States - for most of us, anyway - is like being raised in a parallel universe where animals just magically lack certain body parts.  They have flanks, they have breasts, they have ribs and muscles and bellies, but their heads have disappeared into the air.  And their hearts, and their organs, and their intestines, and their feet, and their spines too - when the animal is killed, these parts just shrivel up and disintegrate in little puffs of smoke.

And that makes me feel like for most of my life I have been complicit in a supreme conspiracy of waste, of toddler-like pickiness.  What is inherently wrong or gross about eating these invisible parts of the animal?  If you don't like the flavor or texture of a certain part after you've tried it, that's just fine.  But I doubt nearly an entire country would spit out a sashimi-like smooth chunk of tendon or a chewy, fatty intestine if its source were hidden, or sugar-coated.

It sounds like I'm frustrated, and admittedly there is a bit of that, but the overwhelming feeling is that the world of unexplored meat cuts is like an endless platter of potential favorites laid out before me.

What cut next?