Monday, January 7, 2013.
Thinning It Out.
The Marys went to lunch at La Carreta, their favorite place. Immediately after telling of that plan, MA said that I was not welcome to join them, because they would be spending all the time at the table in important girl-talk post-mortems of the previous week, in which ML's wonderful boyfriend was in residence at the Cool Water Ranch. I'm not dumb or curious enough to insinuate myself into that.
The Mexican flavor of their meal triggered something in my mind, and I fetched up at Mi Casa, a small Tex-Mex place in a strip mall behind a bank. I'd eaten there a few times and liked it okay. But it's been a year or two. And a sign in front announced new management. Okay, sold.
A good but oversized lunch followed. It began with a cup of chicken and tortilla soup. Despite large amounts of actual chicken meat and a big, complex flavor (the chicken, the herbs, the lime-corny flavor of the tortillas, and a taste of actual lime juice), this was a great light soup.
It allowed me to pack away too much of the entree. A trio of enchiladas, with different fillings and salsas. Chicken with green chile. Beef chunks with tomato. And cheese with a thick, interesting chipotle pepper salsa. Good rice and beans. Twelve bucks. Couldn't finish it.
At this price it's unseemly to complain, but I will anyway. A little. maybe you've picked up on my preference for thinness in certain foods. Thin pasta. Thinly-sliced roast beef or ham. Thin onion rings. My theory is that a unit quantity of food that winds up being layered, even in in a haphazard way, will release more flavor than thick layers because there's more surface area exposed.
In this case, the soft corn tortillas were thicker than optimum. They wound up getting clumped up in a heavy mass, particularly in the cheese enchilada. This is not a big problem--in fact, it's a very fine point.
I'm just asking chefs to think about this. If you cook anything that could be thick or thin, depending. . . try doing the dish with the thinnest example of the ingredient you can find. I can almost guarantee it will taste better. And have a better mouthfeel.
Another challenge: can someone come up with a better word than "mouthfeel" for that phenomenon?
Mi Casa. Covington: 109 Crestwood Blvd . 985-892-8969.
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