Anger Burger

Pizza Party!  Spaghetti Dinner!  Taco Night!

You know what I’m talking about.  And even though we didn’t exactly have these at my house growing up¹ — we had Clam Dinner and Fish Fry and similar parties, but they don’t really capture the American dream like the non-native foods do — I had enough friends to know that Spaghetti Dinner meant cheese from a can, iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing and damp, greasy garlic bread.  Fantastic!

Mike’s mom told me a story about how when she was going to night classes at college, she asked her husband and two kids to each take a night of the week to be in charge of making dinner.  Predictably, each night that was Mike’s?  Tacos.  Of course, he has terrible memories of this period since his sister often chose split pea soup, but this is the drama of adolescence.

So anyway, Taco Night.  Despite my willingness to acquiesce to those foods most childish, I find that my ideal adult Taco Night taco is somewhere between a proper taco and an American taco: soft corn tortilla, oily orange ground beef, shredded cabbage, fresh salsa and sour cream.

First things first: salsa.  I hate store-bought salsa of most varieties.  I’ve been laughed at for this before, but I’m highly sensitive to the taste² of sodium benzoate — a preservative used in acidic foods — so much so that I can’t drink most commercial lemonades.  And salsas, as a matter of storytelling.  Luckily its a mere matter of chopping tomatoes, onion and cilantro and maybe halfheartedly squeezing a nearly-rotten lime into the whole thing and calling it a job well-done.

And then the meat!  Clearly a non-meat substitute would do just fine here, because most important is the packet of Lawry’s Taco Spices & Seasonings (the plurals really get me) – without this magical packet of orange powder, your filling just won’t have that orange oil that makes Taco Night tacos so special.  Be advised: most other brands have cornstarch as the first ingredient, but Lawry’s is actually spices.

So so far we have salsa fresca and orange meat, but perhaps even more importantly is a lack of crunchy taco shells.  I respect those that love the crunchy shell, but I just can’t abide by them.  Even as a child I hated the way they were always stale and then snapped perfectly down their length, rendering them useless within the first moment of biting them.

After that the cabbage is not terribly important (I like it because it is crunchy and I am more likely to use the rest of a head of cabbage than I am a head of lettuce) and cheese is a matter of preference.  Sour cream seems vital to me, though others might disagree and I wouldn’t kick them out of my house.

And perhaps most importantly of all, this genuine capture of the reason this website is named Anger Burger in the first place: my occasional expression of rage when eating something I find transcendently delicious.  Look at all the muscles around my eyes!  I’m like some kind of Star Trek alien.

¹Well, we totally had Pizza Party, back when Brewery City Pizza was the only pizza to be had in Olympia. Which is, upon my last tasting of several years ago, pretty dismal as far as pizza goes.  Though a few years back they did send out fliers advertising a “Moroccan” pizza that had two kinds of pork and came with a beer special.

²It also has been linked to hyperactivity in children and other nastiness, too, so avoiding it might behoove all of us.

**Also note: I am eating raw tomatoes despite knowing they aggrivate my Crohn’s — we’ll see what happens!