The Q Taco and Saturday Morning Fieldtrips

In my past life as an after-school club sponsor, and before that as a soccer coach, I often had to get up early on Saturday mornings to shepherd a small flock of bleary-eyed high-schoolers aboard a yellow school bus and off to some meaningful event: tournament, museum tour, historical reenactment. When you've already worked a 50+ hour week, it's hard to get out of bed on Saturdays before noon. So often in the Valley, I would motivate myself to rise, if not shine, with promises of a Q Taco or two on my way to dutiful service.

In Texas, we're proud to have taquerias on every other street corner, but in the Valley this plentiful supply is taken to a whole new level: gas station tacos. All along the border, even north to some places like Kingsville, gas stations have a partnership with something called the Laredo Taco Company (there are a few other off-brands). This means that not only can you get a tank of gasoline, a case of beer, a ceramic bald eagle statue, a straw beach hat, a pack of Bic lighters, and an armful of brightly packaged, highly processed food-like items from your gas station's goodie bag. You can get tacos. Breakfast tacos. Fresh breakfast tacos in fresh tortillas made by hand right there! There is always a small army of women, occasionally a man, rolling out tortillas, grilling them, filling them with the array of offerings at the customer's request. I've been in such gas stations plenty of times when the line stretched around the store, past the fresh salsa bar, and the wait was over 20-minutes. You can be skeptical. I certainly was at first. They are undeniably delicious.

So, what kind of taco to get when it's finally your turn? Well, first up, you better speak Spanish if you've got any funky requests or are looking to make conversation. Here, the gringo is definitely the outsider and no one is going to pander to you by greeting you in English. Spanish speaking or not, it's best to order the Q Taco, named for a perhaps no-longer-existent radio station? Radio stations come and go, but there is no way this taco is becoming defunct any time soon: potatoes and egg, beans, cheese, in a fresh flour tortilla. Dress it with a little pico de gallo and salsa, a little salt and pepper, and enjoy. My limit is three (those flour tortillas pack a deceptively heavy punch) and I enjoy every bite. I'm sort of sad writing about them right now... Oh, Q Taco. We will meet again.

My love for the Q Taco was widely known in my friend group. So much so that my (then future) girlfriend dressed up as a taco for a border-themed Valentine's day party. I had no idea she was courting me at the time, but it was clearly pretty effective.


I'll disclaim here that our other friend in that picture is yes, dressed ironically as a minuteman militia member. I guess they do love the border... otherwise where would they direct all of that irrational hatred?

I thought of Q Tacos today as my co-worker Amanda and I arrived at school at 9:00AM to help lead a MLK service-day project helping in the nursery of a non-profit that does urban forestry. It was a pretty cool place, though our presence tipped the adult to student ratio to 5:3 which was a bummer. As was having no Q Taco with which to begin my Saturday morning. It did feel good to celebrate Dr. King though, which is something we never did on the border.

Tacos Are for English Class

The remarkable Aurora I mentioned in an earlier post has had a tough life. Her husband is dead, she's raised six children and now has... have I lost count? Eleven grandchildren? She walks her way to work each day. No car, no use for the bus, even showing up drenched one rainy morning because, as she explained, her umbrella is a piece of crap. She has wild tales to tell of coyotes and quicksand in Arizona, which I have to follow intently, sifting through her rapid Spanish for the words I recognize and cognates I can understand, while carefully watching her facial expressions for clues to help me grasp her remarkable past.

Aurora was elated to learn that I might be teaching an ESL class after school, insisting that this would be the year she would learn English. When that did not come to be, I promised her we could have classes anyway, any time she wanted, in my office. This Monday, I made good on that promise for the first time and Aurora brought me, of course, tacos de papa con huevo... a favorite of mine, potato and egg breakfast tacos, in handmade flour tortillas.

It's hard for me to imagine this woman, rising early, knowing she must work late, seeing that her littlest granddaughter gets ready for school, patting out balls of tortilla dough, rolling them flat and toasting them over the stove, finally packing up the finished tacos in paper towels and foil and walking her way to work to see me. It's humbling, frankly.

Aurora sat and ate with me, although only half of a taco since she said she had already eaten a large breakfast. She lamented not bringing any chile, but proudly told me that she had made the tortillas by hand. The tacos were delicious, as my office-mate, Amanda, attested later on when she ate hers. It took an enourmous amount of willpower not to eat the tacos leftover for Amanda, but I persisted and shared. My kindergarten teacher would be so proud.

After tacos, Aurora and I pored over paper, scratching phrases in English and Spanish and practicing pronunciation. Phrases like, "I have six children, three boys and three girls" require drilling. Hardest is the pronunciation of girls, which to Aurora's ear sounds like "gros" which is what she writes on her paper to help her pronunciation. I laugh and tell her that this means something else entirely... It will not be without a lot of hard work that Aurora learns English this year, or that I learn Spanish, but she is already, undoubtedly, one of the best parts of my day.

Tacos Are for Weekend Getaways

In the first few years of my professional life, when I worked full-time as a high school teacher, we had a name for the month that stretched endlessly from the adrenaline-laden excitement of the first few weeks of school to the state-sanctioned respite of Thanksgiving break: Black October. Black October means that the honeymoon period of a new year is over, but it'll be a good long while before any prolonged separation. Now, even though I work managing a non-profit site, I'm still in education and the workload and wild mood-swings of the high school environment haven't gotten any easier. What has gotten easier is my ability to take a mini-vacation. My girlfriend insisted we needed the break (and she's usually right). Marfa was considered, but tossed out as too far for a relaxing three-day weekend. We headed to Fredericksburg, a Hill Country hit that's remodeled itself as the heart of Texas' wine industry, a little more than an hour west of Austin.

For lunch on the way, we were seeking out the kind of home-style road-side diner that's too often been swallowed by a Denny's or a Cracker Barrel. We chose the Hill Country Cupboard in Johnson City:


The Hill Country Cupboard advertises itself along the side of the road as having the World's best chicken fried steak. Neither one of us were game for trying it, but I heard, as we were finishing up perfectly average plates of migas, an older woman clearly say, "that was the best chicken fried steak I've ever had!" That seems like a pretty bold claim to me but it's true that this is a part of the country where people eat a lot of chicken fried steak. Probably she knows what she's talking about. I swear there was a version on every menu I saw this weekend, but no other place claimed to be the World's best... just saying.

We stayed at the lovely and adorable Kerrine's Cottage through the Main Street Bed and Breakfast. My girlfriend was ready to move in, except that said cottage is located in Fredericksburg which is populated primarily with knick-knacks and 65+ tourists.


Getting breakfast delivered to your private cottage: very rock star.


And my goodness! That looks like a breakfast taco! Part of my delicious rock star breakfast included tasty potato, egg, sauted onions and peppers, and bits of bacon that I picked out of my tortilla before diving in. The eggs were the perfect consistency, juicy but not runny, and everything was deliciously flavorful, especially the salsa which had just the right tinge of cilantro. The tortilla was just so-so, but maybe that had more to do with the fact that it was delivered rather than served fresh, but the trade seemed worthwhile.

We also had a fabulous time sampling Fredericksburg's wine offerings from their own local winery to Lincoln Street, a wine bar that takes itself rather seriously and where I ate about a pound of delicious cheese and olives while getting tipsy on some very nice Italian Cabernet.


After the cheese (and giggling over Stephen Colbert's assertion that he can't eat a twelve-egg omelet every morning for breakfast because sometime in the future his heart will explode) we decided to move around a bit. About fifteen miles directly north of Fredericksburg is Enchanted Rock, a domed mound of exposed granite that's just begging to be climbed.




Tacos in the Hill Country? Tasty. Retirees? Plentiful. Chicken fried steak? Supposedly the best in the world, but heretofore untasted.

Los Jalisciences #2

I try not to buy too many meals out during the week. Those little debit charges add up and it's more healthy and satisfying to eat at home. This week though the weekend was busy enough to keep me from grocery shopping and I'm planning an early weekend get-away to Fredericksburg on Friday, so I haven't bothered to plan a week's worth of meals. Well, whatever the justification, I had no milk for my coffee this morning and I bought breakfast tacos out.

Ever since Aurora mentioned it, I've been meaning to try Los Jalisciences #2. I have no idea where Los Jalisciences #1 is, but #2 sits right off of 290 East at the I-35/290 split between the Cameron and Berkman exits. Sits, did I say? Perches? Roosts? Squats like a strange, alien vessel? It's quite the architectural anomaly, as you can see from Robby Virus' excellent photograph, borrowed from his flickr account, below:



Yes, Los Jalisciences #2 is connected to an Econolodge, and while I wouldn't call my breakfast either free or high speed, it was pretty cheap and relatively quick. I only paid $2.63 for my tacos and they were ready in a white paper bag within five minutes. Big kudos for having 99-cent tacos in the mornings, though I believe I saw a sign stating that deal only lasts until noon. They also had a killer looking jukebox.

I should've taken my own pictures in and around the building, but as I was the only person there at that hour of the morning, I would've felt like a big weirdo. So, instead I quickly ordered two huevos a la mexicana tacos (a quick litmus test for breakfast taco authenticity, which Jali passed) with queso (my preference) and took them back to my office.

I remembered that Aurora had suggested Los Jalisciences, but what I should've remembered was the way she then clicked her tongue and shook her head and announced that their tacos were too soggy and that she doesn't like soggy tacos. Who does? This taco/economic-lodging fusion is less than a mile from my place of work, but by the time I got my freshly made tacos to go and took them up to my office (a full five-minutes at most), they looked like this when I opened them up:



Now, I know that food taken to-go is not necessarily supposed to look like food presented to you for eating at a restaurant, and I know that tacos are especially hard to make pretty to-go, but this was a soggy, soggy, greasy, soggy mess. I'd like to draw your attention to the shininess of the soggy paper and the discoloration of the tortilla (a side-effect of the aforementioned sogginess). Of course I still ate them and they tasted good even though they required about twice the usual number of napkins. The included to-go salsa selection was above and beyond, but I still can't get over what a mess these tacos were.

Final analysis: cool building, weird Econo-lodge connection, good prices, bad restrictions on breakfast, nice jukebox, tasty salsa, waterlogged tacos that should come with taco bib. Overall an odd experience and not a great taco.

Tacos Are for Sharing and Dia de Los Muertos

When I started work at my current job about two months ago, I made friends quickly with the remarkable Aurora, custodian, grandmother, and Spanish-tutor. She pleasantly tolerates my imperfect usage of her language, jokes that she will bring me a pillow and blanket so that I can camp out under my desk at night, and one time even stopped into the office to give me a shoulder massage while I sat doing mind-numbing data entry for grant compliance.

Our friendship hit a rocky patch over a linguistic misunderstanding in which she, reading a religious tract, joked that I was Satan's friend (I still can't really figure out where that one came from). In a amiable tone, I called her what my Spanish-English dictionary had clearly taught me was the word for rude: maleducada. Aurora immediately looked sad and offended and I felt like a jerk. I feel like both of our jokes landed a little harder than intended out of cultural context, but we got past it somehow and on Thursday, she brought me tacos!

I'd asked Aurora a few weeks back where the best places to get breakfast tacos was and she suggested Los Jaliscienses which I will still have to try, but said there was a place she liked even better. She claimed she couldn't remember the name, but the bag she brought me was from La Michocana. La Michocana actually has six locations around Austin, but as they advertise themselves primarily as a meat market, I've never bothered to go in. Yes, I'm a vegetarian, and Aurora brought me three kinds of veggie tacos: papas a la mexicana, huevos a la mexicana, and huevos con papa.

I'm not going to rate La Michocana at this time because I didn't get an ideal taco eating experience. Aurora brought them into work and I then waited for my co-worker Amanda because half of the tacos were for her as well. That day we had a evening event at work that quickly ate up our day, so much so that Amanda ended up not even eating her tacos (I've never been that distracted.) I reheated mine and ate them while Amanda was running errands... then I reheated Amanda's and ate them the next day while speculating on whether the unrefrigerated eggs would make me sick or not (they didn't). The papas a la mexicana were really tasty, surprising me since I would probably die without my egg intake. A business trip to La Michocana is pending.

Yesterday was the Viva La Vida Festival put on by the Mexi-Arte Museum here in Austin. My girlfriend and I decided that this was a nice moment to celebrate my moving to Austin and hosted an apartment warming to coincide with the Day of the Dead/Dia de Los Muertos festivities.

Perhaps the victim of too few breakfast tacos?

Dia de Los Muertos themed cupcakes.

That Austin throws such a passionate Dia de Los Muertos celebration warms my heart. This is the kind of fusion I came to love in my time of living on the border and what I am grateful for being able to learn from every day.

Midnight at Magnolia Café

I swear, it wasn't the plan to dive so quickly into evaluating the breakfast tacos of beloved Austin icons like Magnolia Café. I'd meant to spend a while thinking and writing about tacos, coming up with detailed criteria and developing a complex rating system... and maybe starting my evaluations with a few taco trucks or less known taquerias before diving right in... but I went to dinner last night with three friends who know I've started this blog and know that I plan to start evaluating breakfast tacos around Austin and the breakfast tacos on the menu just looked so damn good.

After work last night, my colleague Amanda invited me to The Independent for their weekly poetry slam. Amanda and I work at a non-profit that runs after-school programming, so our busiest hours are between 3:00 and 8:00PM. The show started at about 8:30 and by the time we got out at 10:30 eating was long overdue. Amanda suggested Magnolia for their outrageously tasty Mag Queso. Magnolia's Mag Queso costs $6.95 and is black beans, queso, avacado, and pico de gallo in a really healthy serving... or is that unhealthy?

I considered the array of food on a menu with lots of excellent looking options, but my friends suggested if I was serious about this breakfast taco thing, it was time to get started. There was some peer pressure involved, but it doesn't take much to push me in that direction. I ordered the Three Alarm Taco. Okay, I ordered two of them.


Two Three Alarm Tacos come on a plate at Magnolia for $6.25 and consist of scrambled eggs, potatoes, cheddar and jack cheeses, and jalapeños, with a slightly spicy chipotle sauce and flour tortillas. And there's clearly about a ton of all of it... I wondered if they didn't accidentally give me three tacos with only two tortillas.

The primary categories I've established for rating tacos consist of the three main parts: tortilla, contents, and salsa. I've also established three secondary categories for when I'm rating a restaurant or taqueria overall and not simply the taco. These are: ambiance, salsa bar and other condiments, and beverages. Magnolia was NA in two of these secondary categories as they don't have a salsa bar (salsa comes on the side) and I ordered water. In ambiance, I unhesitatingly gave them a 5 out of 5. This place has a smattering of folk-artsy cuteness like the painted wooden pterodactyls swinging from the ceiling, and all the charm of a down home picnic. I think my family actually had this tablecloth packed away for weenie roasts and backyard cookouts.

But down to the serious business of the Three Alarm Tacos. I hate to start with the lowest point, but the tortilla is at the top of my scorecard. I don't really have anything good to say about Magnolia's tortillas except that they carried the contents of the taco from my plate to my mouth and they didn't taste bad. Out of 5, I gave them 2. The contents of the taco were really tasty. The eggs and potatoes were covered in a spicy chipotle sauce and there were giant, in fact somewhat intimidating, chunks of jalapeño. Oddly the cheese was all melted in the crease of the tortilla and not spread throughout or sprinkled on top... for contents, I gave them 4. Finally, the salsa was fine... just, fine. Between the chipotle sauce and the salsa, there was a nice kick to the meal, but the salsa itself was mostly generic.

Plus, I factored in an additional five as a bonus for having a rocking 'round the clock breakfast menu. 24-hours of breakfast = awesome. All told, Magnolia Cafe added up and averaged out earned a 3.8 out of 5 for their Three Alarm Tacos. Solid.

Toast Your Own Tortilla

Anytime I start discussing what the criteria should be for an excellent breakfast taco experience, one thing always comes up first: tortilla quality. Some people feel passionately about corn tortillas, the original Mexican tortillas, but they've never really done it for me. Corn tortillas tear and break, they have a sort of rubbery texture, and they just don't taste as good as flour tortillas. Now, I know fresh corn tortillas right off your abuelita's stove with a nice patty of butter on them are hard to beat, but most of us don't often get a corn tortilla like that.

The history of the flour tortilla is pretty simple. So, the indigenous people of what is today Mexico and the southwest United States were once upon a time making these toasted circles of flattened cornmeal when the Spaniards showed up and turned them onto wheat. The Spaniards also, unknowingly, turned them onto smallpox and the rest is western civilization history... but I actually think the flour tortilla was a pretty good idea. A great idea, really, and when done right, they're also the perfect vehicle for delivering the contents of your breakfast taco to your satisfied stomach via a pleasant scenic route across your tastebuds.

The taquerias I visit will definitely be evaluated on the quality of their tortillas. They should be light, not chewy, not soggy, and not burnt. They should be fluffy, almost flaky. They should have a pleasant flavor, maybe a slight taste of butter, but no taste of lard at all. I realize this is a lot to ask... especially if you're making your tacos at home, but it is possible to get a great tasting tortilla at home with minimal effort.

At most grocery stores, at least in Texas, you can find Guerrero's Tortillas de Harina - Fresqui-Ricas (which is an awesome made-up word, and trademarked). They're fresh, uncooked flour tortillas that you toast on the stove yourself.


It is a tiny bit more work than just tossing pre-cooked tortillas in the microwave, but the difference in taste and texture is truly worth the extra effort. On a medium heat skillet or griddle at about a minute on each side, your tortilla should start puffing up and turning a tasty golden brown (teapot not required for successful toasting).