All aboard Big Truck Tacos
The big truck behind Big Truck Tacos has already been out on a few test runs, so now it’s time to open the doors to its headquarters. Big Truck Tacos, 530 NW 23, is open this morning for breakfast, lunch and early dinner.
Tacos will be served on Serapio’s tortillas with fillings like lengua, buffalo piccadill, pork chile verde, coffee-rubbed skirt steak, house-made chorizo, tilapia with jicama slaw, and vegetarian bean. Other than tacos, they will offer gorditas, tortas, burritos, huevos rancheros, migas, tortas and quesadillas.
Serving fresh homemade salsas, the home base will be open from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. with the truck venturing out evenings. You can follow the truck’s route via Twitter (BigTruckTacos) and facebook (search Big Truck Tacos).
About those sandwiches
Those sandwiches in today’s story by April Choi make you hanker for deli?
The seafood salad, or in this case more of a seafood Louie, and the egg salad came from N D Foods, 2632 N Britton Rd. Their bakery items are stunning. Brilliant, huge sandwiches. Give them a try.
The rest were from Winston MacDoogal’s, 12301 N May. Don’t miss the bacon, avocado and cheese. They’re also not afraid to offer a little PB&J.
Johnnie’s Grill crowned state’s burger king by Food Network
Food Network’s Web site is currently featuring a a state-by-state breakdown of its top burgers nationwide, naming Johnnie’s Grill in El Reno No. 1 in Oklahoma.
They don’t describe how the spots were chosen, but I can tell you that they had a number of interns and young would-be food reporters scuttling around by telephone to gather opinion.
A couple years ago, Bon Appetit named the Meers store in Meers as one of the top 3 burgers in the United States, and Food Network ran a 60-minute special.
I guess Bon Appetit didn’t convince them. Anyway, burgers are subjective. You see, I put onion burgers in a completely different class to a hamburger. To me, it’s apples and oranges. I love them equally, choosing between them is based on mood.
Personally, I’ll take a burger from Flatire burgers inEdmond over just about any of them. Where do you get your burger on? Let me know, and I’ll check them out.
Farmer’s Market moves to health department
Fresh tomatoes will be available at the Farmer's Market in northeast Oklahoma City
The Farmer’s Market sponsored by the Oklahoma City Safe Community Coalition is now at the Oklahoma City-County Health Department, 921 NE 23rd Street in Oklahoma City.
The market will offer fresh fruit and produce to residents of Northeast Oklahoma City. Hours of operation for the market are 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through October 13.
Vendors will offer fresh produce, salsa, bakery products, landscape plants and more. Booths will be in the west parking lot of the Oklahoma City-County Health Department.
Coalition partners include the City of Oklahoma City, the Dept. of Justice, Oklahoma City-County Health Department, Oklahoma City Police Dept., the Weed and Seed program and Women in Agriculture.
According to Elton Rhoades, Market Manager and Supervisor of the Healthy Neighborhoods Initiative with the Oklahoma City-County Health Department, “The purpose of the market is to provide residents of northeast Oklahoma City with an opportunity to purchase locally grown, fresh farm products. We are anticipating a great turnout from our neighbors in the community”.
For more information on the Farmers Market, call 425-4441 or 250-2685.
Return to El Pollon
Rotisserie chicken plus steak and eggs, Peruvian style.
OK, so I’m officially stalking a restaurant. I’ve already made El Pollon de OKC, 2106 SW 44 St., Lunch of the Week but now I fear I’m venturing into something untoward.
El Pollon serves Peruvian cuisine, which as I’ve stated before means you won’t get chips and salsa on your table and you won’t find fajitas on the menu. Yes, you will find is what might be the best chicken in Oklahoma City, bar none. You will find skirt steak strips with fries as their version of lomo saltado. You’ll also get papas huancainas, simple boiled potatoes in a luxuriously creamy and spicy sauce. But now, I have visual evidence.
Papas Huacainas, eat this before you die.
I’ve eaten at this little hole in the wall with three of the city’s finest chefs: Jonathan Stranger, Ryan Parrott and the Big Kahuna himself, Kurt Fleischfresser. This potato dish has, in each case, been a stunningly successful start to each of these meals. The sauce is somehow both bold and refined. It is a marriage of dairy and chile, or aji as they call it in Peru, that none of us have ever quite tasted. It’s fun to watch a chef’s reaction to something they find truly unique as it takes some doing.
This time, I ventured away from lomo saltado and went with a skirt steak dish that was accompanied by fried plantains, sliced avocados and topped with a fried egg. And some steamed rice with vegetables was thrown in for good measure. All you need to know is all the components were simply prepared and executed.
More please
They also came with two more creamy, spicy sauces — one green and a different version of the yellow. With that in mind, I think you get the picture. If you don’t, take a look. It’s as good as it looks, probably a little better.
I don’t really think it’s imperative that I continue with superlatives. All you need to know is that the lunch conversation with Kurt centered around doing things simply, learning the basics and building on them regardless of the artform you’re practicing and that if this place were in Edmond, they would be dangerous.
Check it out.
Local tomatoes abound
Kamala Gamble has stolen my dream home. Wait, can something be stolen from you if you never owned it in the first place? Quibbling.
Bottom line, her Guilford Gardens home at 2834 Guilford Lane has pretty much everything I would need to never leave home again. A monstrous kitchen, backed by an industrial kitchen, an enormous banquet table, beautiful tile floors and smart wood tables and counters with Mexican tile edging. It’s like a lodge for the food-obsessed.
And then there’s the almost one acre of land in the back and to the sides that is home to some of the city’s finest produce: tomatoes that come in heirloom, early girl, juliet, sun gold, big beef and pretty much any other variety you can imagine. Squash that is born yellow, white, green and sometimes a mix of all three. Golden beets as well as red. Small, medium and large potatoes that breach the earth brown, yellow and purple. Canteloupe, sweet potatoes, hot and sweet peppers, herbs and leafy lettuce, chard and arugula. You get the picture, and here are a few more…
Information about Kamala’s community supported agriculture operation is available on her Web site.
Another excellent source is the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, which offers food, clothing and gardening tools and equipment.
The summer basket include potatoes, onions, tomatoes, peppers, squash, eggplants and okra plus supplements from other local growers such as tender, fresh corn from Millers Farm and juicy, sweet cantaloupe from Peachcrest Farms.
Kam also does cooking classes and dinner parties. More information is available here.
Kam recommends juliet tomatoes to anyone who plans to embark on their own tomato garden. She also beseeches you use organic methods, which will be kind to your soil over time and ultimately the flavor of your yield.
Big Beef, golden and heirloom tomatoes. Kam says heirloom seeds are prolific in vegetables like squash but the yield is weak but worth the patience with tomatoes.
Juicy, plump sun gold tomatoes are the perfect compliment to your summer garden salad. They offer a burst of flavor and color.
All hail the mighty heirloom. Find local producers like Kam or John Leonard in El Reno (422-2890) to enjoy the best the tomato nation has to offer.
Producers like Dev Vallencourt of High Tides and Green Fields specialize in heirlooms and peppers and are available through the food co-op. She can be reached at 405-485-2943. These producers are supported mostly by restaurants, but public support is crucial to growth, which ultimately creates competitive marketplace and cheaper prices for everyone. I’m no economist, but that’s good, right?
Victor’s Mexican Cuisine Shows Positive Signs
Puerco rojo with borracho beans and papas fritas from Victor's Mexican Cuisine in Quail Springs Plaza.
Quail Springs Plaza has a new tenant, though it’s tough to tell. Other than some Sharpie-on-white displays taped in the windows, Victor’s Mexican Cuisine, this new eatery enters the local lunch landscape like a lamb.
With that kind of signage, or lack thereof, it’s not an ureasonable reaction to dial down the expectations of culinary artistry in favor of some good ol’ taqueria-style flavor over flash.
But if you do that, you’re in for a big surprise.
Though the restaurant has no sign, the lunch I had showed signs of hope for the future of local-Mex. The food wasn’t perfect, but the care put into the plating and the ambition of the menu gave me hope that others besides Adobe Grill, Las Palomas, Las Palapas and Iguana Mexican Grill are attempting to elevate the current level of lamp-lit cheese-and-bean buckets with cookie-cutter enchiladas and soggy-bottomed tacos.
Though Victor’s exterior doesn’t announce it’s presence with authority, don’t be surprised if the waiter shoves a hubcap-sized T-bone in your face before he breaks it to you that they serve Pepsi products instead of Coke.
Victor’s, 10904 N May, Suite F, opened June 13 in the space formerly occupied by Boomerang and before that by Super Onion Burger.
The menu contains the Okie-Mex fare we’ve come to expect, including chile con velveeta and an uninspired but workmanlike table salsa. What makes it intriguing is the emphrasis on grilled items.
When I sat down, the waiter introduced me to the aforementioned steak big enough to have a surname that was on special. The T-bone, a standard menu item, is butchered thin as is typical of carnicerias. While I didn’t order it, I could almost taste the garlic as it wafted off the plate.
I went for the puerco rojo. When trying a new Mexican restaurant, I invariably try traditional dishes to get an idea of the chef’s sensibilities. Carne guisada and it’s many cousins are ideal.
This red guiso mixed tomato sauce with a mild chile plus onion and tomato. While the flavor worked, I did have to extricate more than one morsel of fat from the poorly trimmed pork. Guisos are tricky in that they need extended cooking times. This dish fell into the trap that many do, not enough cooking time. A low-and-slow approach, which isn’t ideal for restaurant cooking, would’ve tenderized the meat and made that fat melt away. Not a fatal error but a missed opportunity.
Borracho beans were better than usual, and I loved the preparation of the potatoes a little more than I loved the execution as it lacked the crunch I seek. Many would disagree, so take that for what it’s worth.
Most impressive was the presentation. Rather than the standard cheesy mess on a dull platter, this cheesy mess was served on a concave, square platter with sour cream squiggles along the edges.
Because the menu offered more than your average number of fish, steak and grilled chicken items and the artful presentation, I will doubtlessly return to Victor’s to monitor their progress…and see if they ever get a sign.
Try it, and let me know what you think.
Lunch of the Week; Lunch of the Weak
Lomo Saltado with steamed rice. Or as I like to call it, Steak Fries.
It’s not too early to start making lunch plans for next week. I’ve already got a date with the esteemed John Estus, who makes his triumphant return to Oklahoma and Journalism on Monday.
For that date, I’ve identified one possible destination and one place we will definitely avoid.
Lunch of the Week: El Pollon de OKC, 2106 SW 44 St.
El Pollon serves Peruvian cuisine, which means you won’t get chips and salsa on your table and you won’t find fajitas on the menu. What you will find is what might be the best chicken in Oklahoma City, bar none.
Eischen’s gets all the hype for its whole fried chicken, but El Pollon will be getting my money for its whole rotisserie chicken.
These beautifully bronzed specimens are served quarter, half or whole with two sides. I took pal Justin Billinger over last week for a little story research and conversation about the future of newspaper.
If you think the newspaper industry is in trouble, you should’ve see how the half chicken we shared fared.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We started out with the papas huancainas, a mound of simply boiled potato wedges slathered in a yellow cream sauce that looked like Indian Mango pudding but tasted like a chile patch growing two doors down once you enter the pearly gates. I don’t know what’s in this sauce, but I have a team of chefs working on it.
We also shared lomo saltado. Now lomo saltado I’ve had at various Mexican Restaurants. Zarate’s in Edmond, which is owned by a Peruvian family and serves dishes from all over Latin America, serves a nice version. At El Pollon, their version is steak and fries with a few onions, sweet peppers and roasted tomatoes thrown in for good measure. Genius.
I couldn’t help but wonder how a glorious a site this dish would be to one just dispatched from Edna’s or Cock of the Walk along with the other spirits having flown.
Much as JB and I like to solve the problems of our little world when we eat, the conversation centered around the food before and eventually within us. Can’t wait to go back.
Lunch of the Weak: Louie’s.
Here’s the deal: Burger with overcooked blue cheese crumbles, french fries from the same supplier as Freddie’s Custard Stand (not a bad thing) and an iced tea served in a plastic cup cost more than $10, not including tip.
Never again.
Raw Food Event in Noble
Oklahoma Botanicals Farm in Noble, 8751 E Maguire Road, is hosting a raw food event Saturday July 11 with free smoothies, vendor booths and speakers.
Attendees will get to taste some of the dishes that will be offered at a new Oklahoma City restaurant, 105degrees, that opens in September.
The event is 5 to 10 p.m. , and include a juice bar, raw vegan dishes and wheatgrass shots. Speakers will discuss herbal detox, super foods, raw food nutrition and healthy living.
This one’s for the ladies…
Ingredients
- 2 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 2 tablespoons flour
- 2 cups milk
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg
- 1/2 teaspoon of white peppercorns, toasted and ground.
Instructions
- Slowly melt the butter in a medium sauce pan. Stir in flour until you’ve created a creamy, yellow roux. At medium heat, cook the roux until it turns sandy brown, 5 to 7 minutes. Meanwhile heat milk to the verge of boiling and remove from heat. When roux is proper color, add a cup of milk at a time and whisk constantly until the sauce if fully integrated. Cook at a low boil for another 10 to 12 minutes. Add salt, white pepper and nutmeg.
Culinary tradition: French
