First, some history (ok, a lot of history).
Growing up in New England, tacos were exotic, a luxury. When my mom started dating a Texan, my eventual stepfather, they became a little more commonplace. Tacos had spices and flavors I wasn't familiar with and therefore I turned my 9-year-old nose up at them. To be fair, I turned my nose up at almost ALL spices until I was well into my teens. I started using black pepper only a few years ago!
Once I moved to Texas in the early 90s, tacos became a weekly staple in our house. There were now three+ kids at any given time in the house and two overworked, underpaid parents. I was ok with tacos. They were covered in shredded mild cheddar and sour cream and I could build my own with however less meat I wanted.
Given that we were a household that was barely making it financially, we almost never ate out, save special trips to my beloved Red Lobster for birthdays. We never went to taquerias or cantinas, as they were certainly too focused to appease the gaggle of picky eaters. I was a tween who had never had Taco Bell, so when my best friend Christina would suggest it for dinner I told her it was likely I didn't like Taco Bell. Tacos made by someone else? Probably with heavily-seasoned beef, salsa, onions and who knows what else Mexican stuff I knew I didn't like already? No thanks.
Then she got me to try the basic crunchy Taco Bell taco. Yum. I didn't want to look inside the shell because who knows what types of spices I'd find. I just ate them. Her father, a single dad, would buy boxes of them and we'd all snack on them whenever we were hungry. I found that I could eat a lot of them, embarrassingly so, in a sitting. I remember once we all counted how many we were hungry for, and between the three of us we ordered exactly nineteen tacos at the drive thru. I estimated I could eat about 9 or 10, which we all found hilarious. I took down a dozen donuts or a whole pizza easily, so it wasn't all too surprising. I chose to have my fifteenth birthday dinner at Taco Bell, much to the delight of my parents' wallets.
Fast forward to 2010. I'm living in a new place, Corpus Christi, which is the World Capital of Breakfast Tacos. Breakfast tacos are eggy and cheesy and I get them for breakfast most mornings. It should also be said at this juncture, I am somewhat obsessed with Epic Meal Time, a group of guys from Montreal making absurd meals and making me laugh.
So I decide to make an Epic Meal of my own, saluting Corpus Christi obesity by using our staple ingredients in a creative fashion: by making a giant taco a la Taco Town. I had seen that SNL skit, but it actually didn't occur to me when I designed the taco.
Here is my final product, language not safe for work:
To answer some frequently asked questions:
Ew, did that even taste good?
Yes, it was honestly very, very good.
Did you eat the whole thing? How long did that take?
Yup. I ate the majority of it myself. My stepfather and brother (in the video) ate only a few bites, as they had been snacking all day and weren't very hungry when the taco was finally ready. It took me 4 days to finish. There were some outside crispy parts that ended up in the trash - I would peel some off the outside to actually get bites that weren't 100% fried tortilla. That didn't taste so good after the first day.
Could you taste all the ingredients? It looks like mush.
Yes, you could taste all the ingredients individually. The cheese (made with the generic mexican blend cheeses, Hooks 15 year old cheddar, milk, Worcestershire sauce, nutmeg) was so amazing and I was so glad it was throughout the taco.
Why didn't you use more of x?
I used a lot of ingredients. It doesn't look like a lot of bacon - but it was 5 lbs. I used a lot of beer. I didn't "run" out of cheese sauce - I used an entire crock pot worth. And really, I couldn't afford any more food. This was expensive for me!
How many calories was the taco?
Dude, I'm not a nutritionist, I don't know.
Why are there so many haters?
People didn't "get" it. I was doing an homage; I was not trying to benefit off of EMT's success. I'm not a comedian. Actually, I'm not very funny at all. I'm not a film editor either. It was a very low-rate production of me messing around. I wasn't trying to make a statement on behalf of Corpus Christi. I didn't think it would blow up like it did. Epic Meal Time's demographic is likely 23 year old guys who bow down to Tucker Max (as EMT is full of tongue-in-cheek misogyny). These viewers actually apply such values to their everyday lives. Sad, really.
How long did this whole thing take?
Hours, hours, hours. I started about 1:30PM and ate about 7PM. I finished cleaning the kitchen around 9:30PM. Long day.
Why do you call that a taco? Isn't it a burrito?
It's a Corpus thing. Plus, no beans or rice, so I'm calling it a taco.
Maybe not frequently asked, but asked by my mom: Why the foul language?
I had a bird sound effect a la Epic Meal Time to block out my bad words. I just couldn't figure out how to put it over both the music and my voiceover. So I gave up and uploaded the video without the bird sounds.
Did you see a few weeks later EMT did a taco episode? Do you think they ripped you off/are mocking you?
They were bound to do Mexican food. They had congratulated me on my taco and definitely took it beyond what I was capable of. I don't think they were specifically talking to me when they asked during their video "Don't you wish you thought of this?" I mean, come on.
Recently, after my newfound local taco semi-celebrity status, I was invited to tag along on a Tacotopia review. That Friday, Mr. and Mrs. Tacotopia and I ate breakfast at San Luis, a taqueria near my work with an authentic ambiance of blue collar workers, Univision and an incessantly ringing telephone. Working at call centers for 7 years of my life, this drove me completely batty.
I ordered a bacon egg cheese taco and a carne guisada with cheese. After a considerable wait, my tacos arrived in their glorious flour tortillas. My egg taco was salty but good.
My carne guisada arrived with no cheese. Super sad face. After informing her, the waitress brought me a ramekin of waxy, American shredded cheese. Oh, joy.
On that note, I'm generally against having traditional American cheese on anything, but there are times where you just can't avoid it, like on a Whatachicken or a breakfast taco. Remember back in the day when Subway only had American cheese? or Chick-fil-a? I didn't complain then, I shouldn't now. You know who doesn't use American cheese? Taco Bell. And my ramble has come full circle, which is a sign that this is the end of the post.
Growing up in New England, tacos were exotic, a luxury. When my mom started dating a Texan, my eventual stepfather, they became a little more commonplace. Tacos had spices and flavors I wasn't familiar with and therefore I turned my 9-year-old nose up at them. To be fair, I turned my nose up at almost ALL spices until I was well into my teens. I started using black pepper only a few years ago!
Once I moved to Texas in the early 90s, tacos became a weekly staple in our house. There were now three+ kids at any given time in the house and two overworked, underpaid parents. I was ok with tacos. They were covered in shredded mild cheddar and sour cream and I could build my own with however less meat I wanted.
Given that we were a household that was barely making it financially, we almost never ate out, save special trips to my beloved Red Lobster for birthdays. We never went to taquerias or cantinas, as they were certainly too focused to appease the gaggle of picky eaters. I was a tween who had never had Taco Bell, so when my best friend Christina would suggest it for dinner I told her it was likely I didn't like Taco Bell. Tacos made by someone else? Probably with heavily-seasoned beef, salsa, onions and who knows what else Mexican stuff I knew I didn't like already? No thanks.
Then she got me to try the basic crunchy Taco Bell taco. Yum. I didn't want to look inside the shell because who knows what types of spices I'd find. I just ate them. Her father, a single dad, would buy boxes of them and we'd all snack on them whenever we were hungry. I found that I could eat a lot of them, embarrassingly so, in a sitting. I remember once we all counted how many we were hungry for, and between the three of us we ordered exactly nineteen tacos at the drive thru. I estimated I could eat about 9 or 10, which we all found hilarious. I took down a dozen donuts or a whole pizza easily, so it wasn't all too surprising. I chose to have my fifteenth birthday dinner at Taco Bell, much to the delight of my parents' wallets.
Fast forward to 2010. I'm living in a new place, Corpus Christi, which is the World Capital of Breakfast Tacos. Breakfast tacos are eggy and cheesy and I get them for breakfast most mornings. It should also be said at this juncture, I am somewhat obsessed with Epic Meal Time, a group of guys from Montreal making absurd meals and making me laugh.
So I decide to make an Epic Meal of my own, saluting Corpus Christi obesity by using our staple ingredients in a creative fashion: by making a giant taco a la Taco Town. I had seen that SNL skit, but it actually didn't occur to me when I designed the taco.
Here is my final product, language not safe for work:
To answer some frequently asked questions:
Ew, did that even taste good?
Yes, it was honestly very, very good.
Did you eat the whole thing? How long did that take?
Yup. I ate the majority of it myself. My stepfather and brother (in the video) ate only a few bites, as they had been snacking all day and weren't very hungry when the taco was finally ready. It took me 4 days to finish. There were some outside crispy parts that ended up in the trash - I would peel some off the outside to actually get bites that weren't 100% fried tortilla. That didn't taste so good after the first day.
Could you taste all the ingredients? It looks like mush.
Yes, you could taste all the ingredients individually. The cheese (made with the generic mexican blend cheeses, Hooks 15 year old cheddar, milk, Worcestershire sauce, nutmeg) was so amazing and I was so glad it was throughout the taco.
Why didn't you use more of x?
I used a lot of ingredients. It doesn't look like a lot of bacon - but it was 5 lbs. I used a lot of beer. I didn't "run" out of cheese sauce - I used an entire crock pot worth. And really, I couldn't afford any more food. This was expensive for me!
How many calories was the taco?
Dude, I'm not a nutritionist, I don't know.
Why are there so many haters?
People didn't "get" it. I was doing an homage; I was not trying to benefit off of EMT's success. I'm not a comedian. Actually, I'm not very funny at all. I'm not a film editor either. It was a very low-rate production of me messing around. I wasn't trying to make a statement on behalf of Corpus Christi. I didn't think it would blow up like it did. Epic Meal Time's demographic is likely 23 year old guys who bow down to Tucker Max (as EMT is full of tongue-in-cheek misogyny). These viewers actually apply such values to their everyday lives. Sad, really.
How long did this whole thing take?
Hours, hours, hours. I started about 1:30PM and ate about 7PM. I finished cleaning the kitchen around 9:30PM. Long day.
Why do you call that a taco? Isn't it a burrito?
It's a Corpus thing. Plus, no beans or rice, so I'm calling it a taco.
Maybe not frequently asked, but asked by my mom: Why the foul language?
I had a bird sound effect a la Epic Meal Time to block out my bad words. I just couldn't figure out how to put it over both the music and my voiceover. So I gave up and uploaded the video without the bird sounds.
Did you see a few weeks later EMT did a taco episode? Do you think they ripped you off/are mocking you?
They were bound to do Mexican food. They had congratulated me on my taco and definitely took it beyond what I was capable of. I don't think they were specifically talking to me when they asked during their video "Don't you wish you thought of this?" I mean, come on.
Recently, after my newfound local taco semi-celebrity status, I was invited to tag along on a Tacotopia review. That Friday, Mr. and Mrs. Tacotopia and I ate breakfast at San Luis, a taqueria near my work with an authentic ambiance of blue collar workers, Univision and an incessantly ringing telephone. Working at call centers for 7 years of my life, this drove me completely batty.
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| Taco Inspectors |
I ordered a bacon egg cheese taco and a carne guisada with cheese. After a considerable wait, my tacos arrived in their glorious flour tortillas. My egg taco was salty but good.
My carne guisada arrived with no cheese. Super sad face. After informing her, the waitress brought me a ramekin of waxy, American shredded cheese. Oh, joy.
On that note, I'm generally against having traditional American cheese on anything, but there are times where you just can't avoid it, like on a Whatachicken or a breakfast taco. Remember back in the day when Subway only had American cheese? or Chick-fil-a? I didn't complain then, I shouldn't now. You know who doesn't use American cheese? Taco Bell. And my ramble has come full circle, which is a sign that this is the end of the post.
