Guest blog: Captain Shalini reviews Tortilla's Cocina Mexicana, Port Douglas, North Queensland, Australia, 01/29/08

It was so funny. While we were sitting there and eating out on the patio, there were three women who came speaking Spanish (the Texan in me recognized it) and the owner of the restaurant was intrigued. He asked them where they were from and they said Argentina, and they kept giggling looking at some of the ingredients in the menu. I looked at their vegetarian enchilada before settling on the shredded beef enchilada plate and saw that it included pumpkin, and potato and other things that don't make any sense in an enchilada, but then again it might have been good.

And the sign says it all. It's not all spicy. It really isn't. That was the drawback, and YES I could have added whatever sauce I pleased after they served it to me, but I am lazy.

The plate came, and it was a great serving, but here in Tropical North Queensland (in Australia, folks) in Port Douglas this will cost you about 24 dollar (AUD) about 22 bucks (USD); a little pricey in my humble opinion. The 2 enchiladas had generous amounts of cheese and onion which you could taste in every serving and the shredded beef was cooked til it melted in your mouth, but I like a little bit of spice in my food, and this was on the boring side. The beans and rice, for me, are usually the mark of a good meal. The refried beans were excellent and just the right amount of cheese and tomato graced it. The rice was a little bit undercooked, but it was a good flavor.



The BEST part of the whole meal were the "dessert nachos" as they called it (it was churros with cinnamon and mango puree dribbled over it) - think "crunchy sopapilla". This dessert was excellent.

Would I go here again if I lived closer by? YES. I have to say, for Australia, this was a good first enchilada for me.

~Captain Shalini



Rating: 3/5



Tortilla's Cocina Mexicana
43 Macrossan St.
Port Douglas
Queensland 4877
Australia

Taquería Arandas #3, 01/13/08

After a Sunday afternoon drive back from Houston, followed by a devastating loss by the Dallas Cowboys in the playoffs, it was time for some cheese enchiladas. Guaranteed to make it all right again.

After considering several spots along the Burnet/Allandale corridor, some of which were closed by 8:00pm on a Sunday night, we settled on the #3 Taquería Arandas. It's one of those brightly-lit, brightly-tiled places with lots of posters with advertisements for American beers featuring Mexican pop stars. The menu was pretty standard for its genre, and included all the usual tacos, tortas, enchiladas, lengua, and imported Mexican Coca-Cola. It was conveniently printed in both Spanish and English - a great Spanish lesson while your mouth waters.

I ordered my 2005/06 standby, enchiladas verdes, and I was not disappointed.

These enchiladas were great - not excellent, but solidly, predictably great. The sauce/cheese ratio was just about right. As you can see, they were very cheesy, but the sauce swam around the rolls, and the cheese was the white Mexican variety, rather than the Tex-Mex processed-American-cheese-product variety. The cheese inside was a little chewy, but this was more than made up for by the fact that the cheese in question was so good. The salsa verde was excellent - not the flavor-masking, overly hot type that you often run into when eating breakfast tacos on the street. It was warm, not hot, but still had a typical verde flavor to it - and it was pleasantly tangy, as well. Great texture, great color, great taste. So even though these were straight-up cheese enchiladas, without even the crunch of onions, they didn't bore the Field Marshal. She ate all three of them, save one bite.

The sides were, as usual, not really anything special. Although I think the Arandas beans have the edge over most other run-of-the-mill restaurants. They had a little more flavor than the bare minimum, and complemented the rest of the plate nicely. The rice was just right, as well - typical Spanish rice, with added vegetables (corn, the odd pea, etc.).

Despite suffering the substandard tortilla chip affliction, Arandas' chips and salsa were excellent. The salsa was hot, chunky-yet-liquid, and had visible cilantro sprinkled throughout each bite. This is the type of place that pours salsa out of plastic gallons, and probably the type of place that sells the stuff by the gallon. And it would be worth buying.

They also serve gigantic glasses of Dr Pepper - probably 50+ ounces. And the service was good without being intrusive.


Rating: 4/5



Taquería Arandas #3

6534 Burnet Rd
Austin, TX 78757
(512) 452-9886

Kerbey Lane, 01/11/08

I have had Dave's Enchiladas at Kerbey Lane before. I can say they were definitely better at two o'clock in the morning.

This was the first time I had ordered enchiladas at the campus location. We started out with an order of Cowboy Queso - queso, black beans, guacamole, and pico de gallo. It was as good as its reputation, although Kerbey suffers from the crappy, thick tortilla chip scourge.

The enchiladas, however, were not so great. They were dry, first of all. This is not acceptable (compare to previous photograph, of Angie's enchiladas). And absolutely smothered in shredded romaine - which looked pretty, but provided a rather paper-like sensation on the tongue while adding no flavor whatsoever. The stingy portion of ranchera sauce that was provided was also dry, more like a powder than the viscous orange sludge one expects, and became more and more spicy as the meal went on, almost obscuring any other flavors. For this reason, whatever cheese that was hiding in there wasn't really at the forefront (which is, of course, exactly where it should be).The comparatively generous dollops of sour cream were its only saving grace.

The side of black beans were quite tasty, and the guacamole was also more than passable. But I couldn't really get over my disappointment at the dry, hot, blandness of the enchiladas long enough to appreciate the sides. It was like a culinary trip to the Panhandle in August.

To cap off this lovely lunchtime experience, at the end of the meal our waitress (who, otherwise, was perfectly pleasant and competent) dropped the entire plate of enchiladas (half of which were still untouched) behind my chair, getting pasty sauce on the back of my pants and shoes, while all the patrons looked on in horror, having heard a eardrum-shattering CLANG! as the plate cracked into several pieces around my feet. A fitting end.

Undaunted, and lover of enchiladas that I am, I'm sure I'll give Kerbey's one more try - probably with a different sauce next time - but that's it. I give them two stars (instead of one) because the sides were good, and the plate was beautifully presented, and looked delicious - until I started eating it.

Rating: 2/5

Kerbey Lane Cafe - Campus

2060 Guadalupe

Austin, Texas 78705

(512)477-5717

http://www.kerbeylanecafe.com

"A Celebration of Tex-Mex, Without Apology" - from the New York Times.

(New York City?!)

By Joe Drape
October 24, 2007

WHEN I arrived in Texas as a college freshman in 1980, there were a great many things I knew nothing about. Among them were Tony Lama boots, espadrilles and Tex-Mex food. I remain clueless about the Lone Star State’s indigenous footwear, but I continue to search for the perfect enchilada.

More here.

A word about cheese.

Speaking of enchilada cheese -

When I was living in the UK, I learned to make a lot of Tex-Mex myself. While most of the large chain groceries like Tesco and Sainsbury's carry the full line of Old El Paso products, somehow that just didn't quite cut it. Hence the sauce recipe below. I was able to pretty well replicate most of my favorites from home: salsas, refried beans, beef tacos, even my Stella's Famous Guacamole (thanks to those famous Israeli avocados).

But one thing was always missing, and from my favorite dish: cheese.

You can't make cheese enchiladas with cheddar. Well, you can make a heavily cheesy pile of carbohydrates that the English might be fooled by, but you cannot replicate real cheese enchiladas. So I expanded my repertoire of fillings. I tried Cheddar, Cheshire, Gloucester, , Leicester, Five Counties - even Stilton. I realized it wasn't so much the flavor that was off as it was the texture, and, more specifically, the meltability. So I searched even further afield. Mozzarella was obvious, but the result was decidedly un-Mexican in flavor. Gruyère - shockingly - was the best. It was melty to begin with! So I then tried mixing gruyère with cheddar. The result was a tasty mountain of cheese - but in no way resembled cheese enchiladas.

Finally, in desperation, I clandestinely smuggled a Kennedy-family-sized log of Velveeta into the country. At least the stuff melts, right? It looked great. I even took a photograph of my first Velveeta-based attempt at a plate of cheese enchiladas, intending to email it to my parents as proof that, despite the tiny refrigerators and lack of religion, England wasn't such a dismal place, after all. I pulled the plate toward me and hungrily attacked the first of four rolls of the delicacy. It looked right, it smelled right... but it was so, so wrong.

Velveeta isn't cheese.

Later, I found out that a lot of old school Tex-Mex places use another processed cheese - apparently it's some sort of food industry secret, but I hear it's made by Land O Lakes and is only available to wholesale restaurant buyers. I guess it's like the Lexus of processed American cheese product. It's like upper class Velveeta.

Anyway, I never mastered the cheese enchilada the whole time I was in the UK, much to my shame and disappointment.

There's a great related article by my favorite Texpert, Robb Walsh, a food writer for the Houston Chronicle, here.

The Field Marshal's Basic Tex-Mex Enchilada Sauce

Ingredients

1/4 cup lard or vegetable oil
1 cup water
1/2 cup chicken or vegetable broth
2 tablespoons white flour
1/4 cup chili powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
salt to taste


Directions

1. Heat oil in a skilet over medium-high heat. Stir in the flour and chili powder, reduce heat to medium, and cook until the mixture acheives a light brown roux-like consistency. Be careful not to burn the flour.

2. Gradually stir in the rest of the ingredients and continue cooking and stirring until smooth, with no freckles. Cook over medium heat until slightly thickened.


Use this sauce to soften your tortillas when rolling enchiladas, and as a topping before cooking.

Recommendations

Please post any recommendations for places that serve good cheese enchiladas in the comments to this post.

Thanks!

Angie's, 01/04/08

Friday night, I was sipping whiskey sours with two friends at Long Branch, when we were suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to eat some cheese enchiladas. If you know me, you realize this is not at all unusual.

After a short deliberation, we headed over to Angie's, on East 7th Street. Angie's used to be at 900 E. 7th, and they're now a couple of blocks east of there, and across the street. The new building is a lovely, muted yellow fortress of food in the most attractive style of imposing Mexican colonial, complete with a colonnade, cupola, heavy wooden doors, and warm tile throughout. It's nice, but it rather reminded me of Las Vegas in that its scale and location, set well off the street so as to be almost hidden to passing traffic, didn't quite jive with the surroundings - mostly typical early 1900s Texas farmhouse style structures, and eclectic law firms and other businesses. I suspect many regulars from the old location, which was one of those very same old, vernacular, East Austin houses, will not be impressed with the Dallas-suburb-style building (which reminds me of Abuelo's, a chain restaurant I first encountered in the cookie cutter hell that is Plano).

Nevertheless, the place is clearly firmly within the Tex-Mex tradition, and the cheese enchiladas were pretty much just what you'd expect. They were gooey, greasy, and cheesy. Oftentimes such establishments overdo the pepper or onions, but Angie's got it just about right.

The cheese was especially on-the-mark. It wasn't too glue-like - sometimes they just put industrial enchilada cheese sticks in the middle of tortillas and throw them in an oven (and you can tell, because the result will taste like a piece of string cheese wrapped in a tortilla) - not the case here. This was proper orange, melty, warm, comfort cheese.

Made with Angie's rightfully famous homemade corn tortillas, it was almost a shame to have their flavor largely masked by the ranchera sauce. Since I'm a vegetarian, I have trouble with sauces. Very often in real Mexican restaurants, where the staff are not as used to customers whose palates have been dulled by thirty years of El Chico, the waitress simply cannot understand what I mean by "no carne" or, even, "vegetariano". It's difficult in these otherwise delicious establishments to get something other than cheese enchiladas with cheese sauce, which may be fine as far as colon cancer goes, but are nevertheless a bit bland day after day, week after week. The waitress here, who was in fact Angie's niece, and covering as a favor, immediately suggested the vegetarian ranchera sauce, which was pretty much what I would make at home for an authentic Tex-Mex enchilada sans the ubiquitous chili con carne sauce. Usually made from chicken broth, but possibly from vegetable broth (if being touted as "vegeterian" here in hippy-dippy Austin), it is whipped up in a skillet with some flour, and usually has some pepper, cumin, and a dash of chili powder or paprika, as well. I think this sauce probably also had a little of the typical tomato paste, but just enough. I don't personally like tomato-heavy sauces, and certainly not in Mexican food. More melty, melty cheese was smothered over the top of the three (count 'em, three for $7!) enchiladas.

The rice and beans were 100% standard Tex-Mex. In that they complimented each bite of enchilada, and provided a satisfying sauce to mop with the last of the tortilla chips (also very good here - thin but not undercooked), and were otherwise totally unremarkable. I love some good beans, but the standard Tex-Mex cheese enchilada plate does not, as a rule, have "good" beans. Just beans. I also suspect that there's a factory out there somewhere churning out big vats of perfectly uniform, suspiciously yellow, somewhat sticky "Spanish" rice to every Mexican restaurant in Texas.

Angie's also has sopapillas, which I would like to have sampled, but after three whiskey sours, two Dr Peppers, and three cheese enchiladas, I was finished.


Rating: 4/5

Angie's Mexican Restaurant
900 E. 7th St
Austin, TX 78702-3217
Phone: (512) 476-5413