In self-isolation, a new festive Friday
Pandemic changes weekly Tex-Mex adventures in scope and meaning
Friday feels different heading into Month 3 of self-isolation. We’re getting a start on what “weekend,” exactly?
Still, though the days blend together in a listless stew, when Friday rolls around on the interactive cardboard kitchen calendar I ritually adjust each morning, toggling the wheels for number and day, I feel the ancient urge to celebrate.
With Tex-Mex, to be specific. I’ve always been fascinated by the correlation of Fridays and Tex-Mex feasting in Texas. I’ve felt the connection since I first got taken to Spanish Village on Almeda as a college student in the late 1960s, there to cut my
ritual Friday-night teeth on cheese enchiladas and illicit margaritas.
My friend Mimi Swartz, the Texas Monthly writer who grew up in San Antonio, always maintained that Fridays and Tex-Mex became intertwined culturally because Friday was Tex-Mex day in school lunch programs across the state.
That seems as good a theory as any. I’d intertwine it with the 1971 invention of the frozenmargarita machine by Dallas restaurateur Mariano Martinez. Once frozen margs caught on, the slightly wild Friday TexMex extravaganza really took off.
I have several sets of friends who have standing Friday-night, thankGod-it’s-the-weekend Tex-Mex dates everywhere from El Tiempo to Gloria’s to Ninfa’s on Navigation, and I bet you do, too. The urge is strong.
I felt it last week, hunched over my laptop as Friday afternoon wore on. I shall have Tex-Mex, dammit, I swore to myself.
Texas restaurants were allowed to reopen that day, by edict of the governor, but that option was out for me. I’m of the cohort prone to the direst COVID-19 outcomes, and my instinct for self-preservation runs strong, so I needed curbside pickup. From a place I trusted. Preferably contactless.
“With great queso,” croaked a voice deep in my lizard brain. So it was that I pulled my car into the parking lot at Little Pappasito’s Cantina at 5:45 p.m., to be greeted by an off-duty policeman wearing a blue surgical mask. “Have you prepaid?” he asked me.
I had. The Pappasito’s website allows you to create an account, order online from the trimmeddown takeout menu — complete with adult beverages and all manner of a la carte trimmings, if you like — and roll through an outdoor sanitizing station where a masked attendant will deposit your food in the backseat.
The setup inspired confidence, and it ran like clockwork, which didn’t really surprise me. The Pappas family goes long on detail at its various restaurants. The prices can make me wince, but the professionalism factored into the cost really mattered to me right now.
So did the queso. I’d been missing the blessed stuff piercingly over the past two months. I don’t make my own — it’s best left to the pros, I figure — and I love the Pappasito’s version at this Upper Kirby location. Supple and laced with pico de gallo that has just the right quotient of crunchy onion, salty but not too salty, this queso tastes like celestial baby food to yours truly. Delivered in a plastic pint tub, the essence of comfort, it was the primary reason I picked Pappasito’s in the first place.
Well, that and the fajitas. I very much admire the Pappasito’s version, with their laid-back marinade and twinge of woodsmoke — both the skirt steak and the shockingly good chicken. (I’ve given up ordering chicken fajitas elsewhere, pretty much. Too dry and disappointing.)
I feared the rosy, medium-rare doneness I so admire in the restaurant’s beef fajitas might not survive the drive home, sweating under a plastic lid. It did. You can even specify exact degree of doneness you want on the online order form, I noted approvingly.
The bottled watermelon frozen margarita kit, which came with its own little plastic bottle of tequila, proved less roadworthy. By the time I decanted the rose-colored contents at home, it was half slush and half liquid. I’ve concluded frozen drinks are best consumed in-house.
Pappasito’s combo medium fajitas is pretty dear at $36.95, but I found the portion was generous enough to last for days and days. It’s Monday as I write, and I still have a little left in the refrigerator, which I plan to combine with pico de gallo scraps and leftover Spanish rice for Pandemic Fried Rice, Tex-Mex style. Even my two dogs got a few tidbits.
“A big order from Pappasito’s is the gift that keeps on giving,” wrote my editor when I marveled at how much mileage I was getting out of my order. I had two big bagfuls of thin, crackly tortilla chips and two containers of that roasty red salsa Pappasito’s does so well. I had enough queso to gorge on half a container Friday evening, then eat it again for breakfast the next day because what is time anymore, then polish it off for a Saturday cocktail order, when I shook up my own house Mezcal margarita with the key lime juice I had frozen weeks back.
I rolled up sprawling flour-tortilla fajita tacos loaded with caramelized onion and pico de gallo and red salsa and guacamole. (At least until Day 2, when I gazed upon the gray, exhausted guac leftovers and cursed myself for not eating it all at once.) At one point, I just grabbed chicken slices and onion flaps and popped them into my mouth as a snack.
“It’s like tapas,” I told myself. For breakfast on Sunday, I mashed some charro beans and refried them and made lovely bean and cheese tacos with some Cabot cheddar, red salsa and onion that I chopped. Next, I’m contemplating chilaquiles pan fried with leftover chips and salsa, with some fried eggs on the side.
Just devising these meal plans seemed as satisfying as finishing the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle or a devilish game of Sudoku. Eating at the top of the food chain was fun in my old life, but my new one provides different pleasures.
Ordering from Pappasito’s, I figure I got my money’s worth not just in food but also in the festive Friday-night feeling that I was rewarding myself for another seven days deposited in the psychological bank.
Where there’s Tex-Mex, there’s life, I told myself, toasting the week behind me with a half-melted frozen margarita with which I could, for once, find very little fault.