Eating El Paso

Last week my travels took me to the city of El Paso. I had a couple days of great meetings, and my contact there, José, was an excellent tour guide who was totally willing to indulge my foodblogging idiosyncrasies.

After a very long day of meetings on Wednesday, we wanted to go out to dinner. I showed him the list of restaurants that I'd assembled from my pre-trip research, and he picked out GeoGeskes. We actually ended up at Geskes Fire Grill, which is the sister restaurant to GeoGeskes and was much closer to where we were.

Despite the five TVs surrounding the bar, this would be a good restaurant to go to with a date, as there are a lot booths that really encourage sitting next to the person you're with. In fact, it was a little difficult in one of those booths to find a seating configuration that worked for a business meeting sort of dinner. But we managed.

My initial impression of the menu was fairly "eh." Burgers and other sandwiches, some not very exciting sounding entrees (although if I was a lobster fan I definitely would have been enticed by "The 'L' Pasta - Linguine, lobster, lemon, leeks.") I was also still recovering from the giant burrito I'd grabbed in the airport for lunch, so I think food just wasn't very appealing, and the idea of ordering an entree was overwhelming. So instead I ordered the sashimi appetizer and a house salad. José ordered a bacon cheeseburger with margarita fries.

As you can see in the pic, what they call sashimi isn't - it's a seared but still very rare piece of nice tuna. This happens to be just how I like my tuna, and the menu did state that it was seared, so I knew what I was getting myself into. It was drizzled with a sweet tamari glaze and sprinkled with sesame seeds and was all in all a delightful appetizer. The house salad was similarly well executed. Despite being an awfully busy salad - blue cheese, cashew bits, parmesan crackers, dried cranberries - it actually worked really well. It was perfectly dressed - a nice light coating of balsalmic vinaigrette on every leaf and not at all soggy.

José raved at length about his burger, but I didn't taste it so can't comment. I can, however, give huge raves to the margarita fries. This huge mound of shoestring fries with citrus salt would have fed at least two more people, and they were perfectly hot and crispy with a salty-sweet-sour tang. Excellent.

Service was not so good as the food, and at times it was actually overbearing. And my mojito was perhaps a little watery. Still, the food was much better than I expected from the menu, and I suspect those margarita french fries could be downright addictive.

Geske's Fire Grill
1506 Lee Treviño, Suite C
El Paso, TX
915-593-3473

When I told José that I wanted to go to H&H Car Wash for lunch the next day, he was a little croggled. "No, really," I told him, "it's supposed to have really great food!" Later, as we walked past the people handwashing and detailing cars and into this divey little lunch counter, he made sure to remind me that he was doing this for me.

This was the first place I'd come across when I was searching for places to eat in El Paso. It seemed to be pretty high up on the lists of all the food cognoscenti. Here's a sample review from Chowhound. I knew I'd want to try some good Mexican food while I was in El Paso, so I decided to go for it. Lunch in a car wash - that would be a first!

As you'd expect, it's not much to look at. 3 tables and a bunch of stools at the counter. A stove covered in pots of this and that, which get moved out of the way to make room for other things. Menu posted on the wall.

We opted to try the chile rellenos and huevos rancheros. Both were good, although the chile rellenos were my favorite. José said they were almost as good as his mom's - high praise, indeed. He especially praised the beans, and when I asked him why, he told me that Mexican food is meant to be simple, and should taste like itself. Beans, cooked simply, mashed, and topped with just a little bit of cheese are the perfect example.

A pitcher full of potent salsa verdé added an extra kick to anything that needed it, and by the time we finished lunch, my face was bright red. A basket of fresh flour and corn tortillas on the side was the perfect accompaniment, and provided me with a fabulous revelation. Trying to tame the burn in my mouth, I finished up my lunch with a plain corn tortilla. It was amazing. I've had corn tortillas before, but they've been nothing to write home about. This one - just a locally made commercial one, not even handmade - tasted like pure, fresh sweet corn. A lovely finish to a lovely lunch.

H & H Car Wash and Coffee Shop
701 East Yandell Drive
El Paso, TX 79902
915-533-1144

Magazine Review: Imbibe

From the website:

Imbibe is the magazine of liquid culture. It is a completely new way of looking at drinks—as a distinct culinary category, deserving in-depth exploration of history, ingredients, preparation, artistry and consumption. From wine, spirits and beer to coffee, tea and everything in between, Imbibe celebrates the world in a glass. In each issue, you’ll find compelling travelogues, engaging profiles, signature recipes and useful reviews—everything you need to know about the fascinating people, places, flavors and cultures of all things potable. Imbibe is your indispensable guide to all that’s fit to drink.

I picked up the inaugural issue of Imbibe on a whim one day, and liked it enough that I've continued to buy each new issue. I'm even considering a subscription. It's a magazine that my husband and I can both appreciate. I take the wine and non-alcoholic drink articles, he takes the coffee geek and beer articles, and we split the cocktails down the middle. Imbibe offers a lot for us both to enjoy.

The design is clean and modern and easy to read. There are ads, but not pages and pages of them, and they're focused to the subject matter. Each issue features lots of different cocktail recipes, and every time I pick one up to read I find myself contemplating a cocktail party. maybe featuring some home-infused spirits (but not weenie-cello, thanks). While the focus is definitely on the alcoholic side of things, recent issues have included reviews of sparkling ciders, ginger ale, and a recipe for Thai Iced Tea.

Some of my favorite articles are about the people behind the drinks. Even though I'm not a coffee drinker myself, I loved the great profile of Tom Owen, home-coffee-roasting guru and founder of Sweet Maria's, which is the web's premiere source for green beans and coffee roasting supplies. I also enjoyed learning about the world of "Auction Coffees" and the difference this is making in the lives of coffee growers in some of the poorest areas of the world.

And I always enjoy reading people's travel adventures, and each issue so far has included a drinks-oriented travelogue from an exotic locale - Thailand in the July/Aug issue, and Jamaica in Sept/Oct. Closer to home was an article identifying the go-to bars for cocktail fans in several big cities throughout the US.

It's not perfect, of course. I haven't been very impressed with any of the wine articles I've read, finding them to be kind of shallow. While I'm no expert, wine is the area of drink culture that I know the most about, so it's possible that people with deeper knowledge than I have in coffee or cocktails or whatever might be similarly disappointed.

But with a cover price of just $4.95, there's not a lot to lose by checking it out.

Quick Food

I love this cookbook. I'd forgotten about it for a while, when I wasn't cooking much, and recently rediscovered it, complete with many post-it-note marked recipes to try. Leafing through, I was reminded of how much I like it. It's a very stylish cookbook. Each recipe takes up only a page, with the opposite page containing a beautiful and appetizing picture. There are rarely more than 10 ingredients, but they're all real ingredients. Unlike most "quick" cookbooks, it doesn't rely on a convenience foods to make things fast. And best of all, it's a cookbook written for cooks - with only a single (small) page for each recipe, the instructions are sparse and assume you know what you are doing.

The roughly 200 recipes in this small chunky book are organized not according to ingredients or place in the meal, but by method of cooking. Pot. Pan. Wok. Grill. Oven. With the exception of a small section called Dessert, they are all main dishes. It's a little gimicky, but I think it works.

According to this article, Quick Foods is just one of a larger series of books originally from Australia (which would account for the larger than American standard number of lamb recipes). Other titles include Comfort Food, Cool Food, Veggie Food and several more. I'd say that I needed to rush out and pick up the rest of the series, but instead, I think I'll try to get through a few more of the post-it notes in this one first! On my first pass through the book, I marked sooo many recipes that I gave up marking halfway through the book, knowing that I could pretty much just open a page at random and find something interesting.

Some of the recipes I've made and enjoyed so far have included:

• Orecchiette with mushrooms, pancetta and smoked mozarella
• Salmon and dill potato patties with lime mayonnaise
• Chicken breasts with mustard cream sauce

Tonight I tried out a new recipe, and was very pleased with the result. Given that I've written about both paprika and sherry vinegar recently, it's not a surprise that it jumped off the page at me and insisted on being cooked.

Pork with Smoked Paprika, Potatoes and Shallots
(adapted from Quick Foods, from Laurel Glen Publishing)

1 tbsp paprika
1/4 tsp each salt and pepper
4 thick pork loin chops
2 tbsp olive oil
1/4 sherry vinegar
1/2 c crushed tomatoes in puree
1 c hot water
1 lb potatoes, cut into 1/2-3/4 inch pieces
8 shallots, peeled
6 handfuls of arugula

Mix the paprkia, salt and pepper, and sprinkle over both sides of the pork chops. Heat the olive oil over medium in a deep pan large enough to hold all the chops at once. Sear the loin chops until browned, about 2 minutes on each side. Remove from pan and set aside.

Deglaze the pan with the sherry vinegar, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add the tomatoes and the water, and bring to a boil. Add the potatoes and shallots, lower heat and cover, and simmer for about 20 minutes, or until potatoes are tender.

Add pork chops back to the pan and cook for 6 minutes or longer, until they are done to your liking. Remove from the pan. If necessary, bring the sauce back up to a boil and reduce slightly.

Divide arugula between four plates. Top each with a pork chop, some potatoes and the sauce. (Contrary to my picture above, we found that we liked this best when the arugula got wilty, so do go ahead and mound everything up together.)

Serves four.

Heirloom Tomato Dinner

Zingerman's Roadhouse holds a special dinner about once a month. There's always a theme, which might be connected to a special guest (like Bill Niman or Andy Quady) or a particular style of food (California BBQ) or - as in the most recent dinner - a specific ingredient. The ingredients in this case were more than 30 different kinds of heirloom tomatoes, plus heirloom varieties of potatoes and carrots as well. To take things even a step further, all the vegetables served at the dinner were grown in Chef Alex's own garden. Given that there were over 100 people at the dinner, one imagines that it's a heck of a garden!

I've already written about the cocktails, so I'll go straight to the food. Dinner was served buffet style. (Side note: I greatly prefer the special dinners that are served as a number of plated courses - they allow for better pacing, more focus, and some really well thought out wine pairings. But I decided to attend anyway, because I had a friend visiting.) The buffet line started out with two different kinds of gazpacho, a green and a red. The green had some heat and sharpness to it, and I prefered the mellower red. Then we entered into the realm of the "bruschetta bar." Bread, piles of sliced tomatoes in a rainbow of color, several different olive oils, and even multiple salts and peppers to choose from. Then several different cheese presentations - simple slices of made-that-day fresh mozarella from Zingerman's Creamery, and a couple of different marinated goat cheeses. These were all excellent.

The hot items included two different recipes for fried green tomatoes (one with bacon, one without), the aforementioned heirloom potates and carrots, roasted patty pan squash, "Three Sisters Succotash" (green beans, corn, and early winter squash), grilled California sardines with tomato sauce, risotto with leeks and celery, two different stuffed tomatoes - one with tuna and one with Italian sausage, and an incendiary green tomato pie with roasted cayenne peppers.

A lot of food. All of it excellent, except maybe the green tomato pie, which was hot enough to burn out the tastebuds you wanted to use on the rest. The risotto was probably my favorite, if I had to pick one. Oh, and my take on the bruschetta bar, where I topped a variety of tomatoes with Pasolivo olive oil, some variety of pink salt, and Balinese long pepper, then a slice of fresh mozarella. Mmmm. The freshness of all of the vegetables really shone through in all of the items.

The buffet selections were accompained by pours of three different "summery" wines:
Sauvignon Blanc, Matetic Vineyards, 'EQ,' San Antonio DO, CHILE, 2003
Vernaccia di San Gimignano DOCG, Riccardo Falchini, Toscana ITALIA, 2004
Tempranillo, Bokisch Winery and Vineyards, Lodi CA, 2002

The Sauvignon Blanc was really excellent. Very classic, aromatic sauvignon blanc nose (I always love the way these smell) with tropical fruits and green grass and grapefruit, and then nicely rounded on the palate, not as one-dimensional in flavor as even some of the best smelling sauvignon blanc can be. So I was very pleased to have a chance to taste it and will have to look for it. The Tempranillo was also much liked at our table.

But one of the highlights of the dinner was yet to come. Dessert was a delightful cookie with cornmeal, lemon zest, vanilla and (perhaps?) pinenuts, served with an assortment of three different gelatos - tomato, basil and olive oil! The tomato was flavored with a tomato butter, so had a little bit of heat and hints of nutmeg or cloves or some other sweet spice. The basil was really basil-y. And the olive oil tasted like, well, olive oil, and was just excellent - but I'm definitely a fan of odd flavors in my ice cream. Very clever and memorable dessert. Olive oil and other savory ice creams aren't unique (in fact, they're becoming downright trendy), but these were very well executed examples of the genre.

The Art of Eating

The Art of Eating is a quarterly publication by Edward Behr, and it is my favorite food periodical. There are recipes in it, although I've never actually made one. And there are restaurant reviews, sort of. But mostly it's just a deeply contemplative look at food. Each issue has feature article that looks closely at a particular food or place. One recent issue included an in-depth look at Comte cheese - how and where it's made, the people who make it, what you can do with it. The next issue (pictured here) was all about the wines and winemakers of the Jura region where Comte is made. Earlier this year, the feature article was a near poetic ode to the Olympia Oyster. And recent "place" themed issues have talked about restaurants and food producers in Montreal and Beaujolais.

The feature articles are generally quite dense - this isn't a magazine to read while your mind is really somewhere else. It requires - and rewards - concentration and focus.

Each issue also contains a handful of briefer articles, and usually a number of book reviews for both cookbooks and other writing about food. At $39/year for a 4-issue subscription, it's not cheap, but I find myself resubscribing every year anyway.