Flashback Friday - Tequila Mockingbird

This post originally appeared on Minxeats.com on October 26, 2011.

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Ocean City, Maryland, is hardly a foodie destination, and we're ok with that. Most trips, we end up eating pretty decent pizza at Lombardi's, tender ribs from J.R.'s, and terrific sushi at Yokozuna. If we're there more than three nights, another restaurant has to enter the rotation, and occasionally it's Tequila Mockingbird. Every time we go there, I think it's a terrific idea, and every time we leave I think, "why did I eat that?"

Not that the food is bad. It's not bad. It's just...bland. But that doesn't seem to keep anyone away. Seems like every time we've eaten there, there's been a small hoard of people at the front of the restaurant, waiting for a table. I don't really get it.

Ok, maybe I get going there for a margarita and some chips and salsa, which always seem freshly made. The chips were warm and un-greasy, and completely unsalted on our most recent visit. (That's fine - I prefer my tortilla chips unsalted.) The salsa also seemed underseasoned, but otherwise had the standard mix of tomatoes, onions, and cilantro.

After perusing the pun-heavy menu, which is divided into sections like "Chimi Chimi Bang Bang," "Gone with the Taco," and "Love American Style," you know, the usual suspects (see what I did there?), I ordered the "Tijuana Triple," a typical Tex-Mex platter of excess including a mini shrimp quesadilla, a chicken hard taco, and a cheese enchilada, plus arroz verde and refried beans. Pretty standard fare that can be made at home quite easily, with or without the help of Old El Paso. How could it go wrong? Well, not wrong, per se. Just horribly...uninteresting. The chunks of chicken breast in the taco were not only boneless and skinless but also completely devoid of seasoning and flavor. They were also slightly tough, but that was expected. Topping the meat were some unseasoned bits of tomato and onion and shredded lettuce. More of this bland vegetation topped the cheese enchilada, which was orange goo wrapped in a corn tortilla. The enchilada sauce had slopped off to the side and was killing the crispness of the quesadilla, which was filled with - you guessed it - more of the tomato/onion blandness. The small shrimps hiding in the cheese were pretty tasty though, adding a modicum of flavor to an otherwise snooze-worthy plate that also included underseasoned arroz verde and gummy refried beans.

After eating as much as I could stomach, I went back to the chips and salsa. After the blandness of my dinner, I could detect that the salsa *did* have seasoning - maybe a bit of vinegar. Perhaps even salt.

Mr Minx fared much better. He wisely ordered beef as the filling for his chimichanga, and found it to be nicely seasoned with a bit of cumin and other spices. It was actually flavorful. Unfortunately, it came with the same boring beans and rice, and more completely unnecessary tomato/onion/shredded iceberg.

My camera phone sadly doesn't have a flash. My dish came out blurry,
but that's fine - it looked like a mess anyway.

We washed down our food with glasses of sangria, which tasted heavily of cinnamon. It reminded me of the Korean persimmon- and cinnamon-flavored dessert beverage, sujung gwa. I probably should have ordered a margarita.

So...it was edible. Everything seemed fresh, and it was fine for folks who don't like spicy or flavorful food, I suppose. Really quite a let-down after eating some really good Mexican chow at Miguel's recently. I did notice that we were possibly the youngest customers in the dining room, and that might have been the reason for the "taco night at the nursing home" quality of the meal. But then the place has a captive audience, as do the rest of OC's restaurants that don't seem to try very hard.

Sadly, eating at Tequila Mockingbird gave me this thought: Ocean City could use a Chili's.

Tequila Mockingbird
12919 Coastal Hwy
Ocean City, MD 21842
www.octequila.com
(410) 250-4424

Posted on Minxeats.com.

"Healthy" Nachos

For our Super Bowl nosh this year, I made nachos - "healthy" nachos. I put the word in quotes because you and I may well have completely different ideas of what constitutes "healthy." Basically, I added lots of veggies and swapped out meat for beans; additionally, I tried to use as little oil as possible when cooking the veg and beans. The result was delicious and filling.

Since they're vegetarian, they're completely appropriate to have for Ash Wednesday supper. :)

Veggie Nachos

tortilla chips or tostadas
refried black beans
sautéed or roasted vegetables (I used mushrooms, okra, and onion, but feel free to use whatever you have on hand - bell pepper, corn, fresh chiles, spinach, squash, etc.)
low-fat shredded cheese
chopped green onion
salsa, low-fat sour cream, guacamole

Preheat oven to 400F.

Spread black beans on individual tortilla chips or tostadas and arrange on a foil-lined baking sheet. Top each with a spoonful of vegetables and top with cheese and chopped green onion.

Bake until cheese is melted. Serve with salsa, sour cream, guacamole, whatever toppings float your boat.

Refried Black Beans

1/4 cup chopped onion
1 teaspoon olive oil
salt
1 15oz can black beans, drained
1 4oz can chopped green chiles
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander seed
pinch cayenne
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice

In a medium saucepan over medium heat, cook onion in olive oil with a pinch of salt until softened. Add black beans and cook for 10 minutes, stirring frequently, so beans break up and become pasty. Stir in green chiles, paprika, cumin, coriander seed, and cayenne. Cook an additional 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until most of the beans have broken down. Remove from heat and stir in lime juice.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Tequila Mockingbird

Ocean City, Maryland, is hardly a foodie destination, and we're ok with that. Most trips, we end up eating pretty decent pizza at Lombardi's, tender ribs from J.R.'s, and terrific sushi at Yokozuna. If we're there more than three nights, another restaurant has to enter the rotation, and occasionally it's Tequila Mockingbird. Every time we go there, I think it's a terrific idea, and every time we leave I think, "why did I eat that?"

Not that the food is bad. It's not bad. It's just...bland. But that doesn't seem to keep anyone away. Seems like every time we've eaten there, there's been a small hoard of people at the front of the restaurant, waiting for a table. I don't really get it.

Ok, maybe I get going there for a margarita and some chips and salsa, which always seem freshly made. The chips were warm and un-greasy, and completely unsalted on our most recent visit. (That's fine - I prefer my tortilla chips unsalted.) The salsa also seemed underseasoned, but otherwise had the standard mix of tomatoes, onions, and cilantro.

After perusing the pun-heavy menu, which is divided into sections like "Chimi Chimi Bang Bang," "Gone with the Taco," and "Love American Style," you know, the usual suspects (see what I did there?), I ordered the "Tijuana Triple," a typical Tex-Mex platter of excess including a mini shrimp quesadilla, a chicken hard taco, and a cheese enchilada, plus arroz verde and refried beans. Pretty standard fare that can be made at home quite easily, with or without the help of Old El Paso. How could it go wrong? Well, not wrong, per se. Just horribly...uninteresting. The chunks of chicken breast in the taco were not only boneless and skinless but also completely devoid of seasoning and flavor. They were also slightly tough, but that was expected. Topping the meat were some unseasoned bits of tomato and onion and shredded lettuce. More of this bland vegetation topped the cheese enchilada, which was orange goo wrapped in a corn tortilla. The enchilada sauce had slopped off to the side and was killing the crispness of the quesadilla, which was filled with - you guessed it - more of the tomato/onion blandness. The small shrimps hiding in the cheese were pretty tasty though, adding a modicum of flavor to an otherwise snooze-worthy plate that also included underseasoned arroz verde and gummy refried beans.

After eating as much as I could stomach, I went back to the chips and salsa. After the blandness of my dinner, I could detect that the salsa *did* have seasoning - maybe a bit of vinegar. Perhaps even salt.

Mr Minx fared much better. He wisely ordered beef as the filling for his chimichanga, and found it to be nicely seasoned with a bit of cumin and other spices. It was actually flavorful. Unfortunately, it came with the same boring beans and rice, and more completely unnecessary tomato/onion/shredded iceberg.

My camera phone sadly doesn't have a flash. My dish came out blurry,
but that's fine - it looked like a mess anyway.

We washed down our food with glasses of sangria, which tasted heavily of cinnamon. It reminded me of the Korean persimmon- and cinnamon-flavored dessert beverage, sujung gwa. I probably should have ordered a margarita.

So...it was edible. Everything seemed fresh, and it was fine for folks who don't like spicy or flavorful food, I suppose. Really quite a let-down after eating some really good Mexican chow at Miguel's recently. I did notice that we were possibly the youngest customers in the dining room, and that might have been the reason for the "taco night at the nursing home" quality of the meal. But then the place has a captive audience, as do the rest of OC's restaurants that don't seem to try very hard.

Sadly, eating at Tequila Mockingbird gave me this thought: Ocean City could use a Chili's.

Tequila Mockingbird
12919 Coastal Hwy
Ocean City, MD 21842
www.octequila.com
(410) 250-4424



Posted by theminx on Minxeats.com.

Leftover Tacos

We had tacos for dinner the other night, using up bits and pieces of leftovers: pork tenderloin from the weekend, and both black beans and reduced-fat sour cream from that brownie fiasco. I mixed the beans with the dregs of a bag of frozen corn and concocted a kind of warm salsa, seasoning it with cumin and both jalapeno and ancho chile powders. Three wilting scallions were also called into action that evening, as was a fresh avocado, TJ's Chipotle salsa, and some whole wheat tortillas.

As we were eating, Mr Minx remarked that he would have liked to know about doing something like this in his bachelor days, but back then, a "taco" to him involved one of those nasty u-shaped hard-shell things that come in a yellow box, filled with ground beef mixed with ultra-salty packaged seasoning. He knew of flour tortillas, of course, but never thought to use them at home for anything. They seemed to be the jurisdiction of restaurants specializing in fajitas and burritos. Now we eat flour tortillas all the time - usually filled with whatever might be hanging around in the fridge.

Long have I toyed with the idea of writing a cookbook on using leftovers creatively. There's no need to eat three-day-old pork tenderloin with the same sauce and sides it was served with originally! Use it in pasta sauce, or on pizza, or...in tacos.

Would anyone be interested in my book, should I ever write it?

Product of the Week - Charras Tostadas

I love to tinker with the flavors of Mexican and Tex-Mex foods, but like most average American home cooks, I don't want to fuss with making my own tortilla chips at home. Yeah, I know there are a zillion commercial brands available, but just about every one of them is too salty for my tastes - and I like salt - so I avoid them like the plague.

So what do I do when I want to make nachos? I grab a bag of Charras tostadas. The subtly spicy chipotle flavor is my favorite. When I make nachos, I break them up into wedges, but sometimes I leave them whole. I also like to use them as the basis for their namesake tostadas, eating them unbaked and covering them with a pile of shredded and sauced meats, salsas, guacamole, etc. Kinda like a flat taco, and marginally easier to eat than the American-style hard taco - a tostada doesn't automatically fall apart at the first bite.

They're pretty tasty on their own, too, especially with a nice margarita on the side. Mmm. :)

A Taste of the Southwest

My handsome hubby and I plan to eventually move to New Mexico. Six years ago, we spent our honeymoon in Santa Fe, and fell in love with the scenery and the spirit of the land. While there, we ate a good deal of tasty local cuisine at places like Maria's, Tortilla Flats, the Corn Dance Cafe at the Hotel Santa Fe, La Cantina at Coyote Cafe, and The Anasazi Restaurant.

Every once in a while, I get a hankering for green or red chile (or both - Christmas style!) with pork, and I have to make it myself. There doesn't seem to be anything like Southwest food in my area, although I think when Taste first opened, there was mention of Southwest cuisine in their PR info. And Blue Agave has authentic Mexican cuisine, which may come slightly close. There are green chiles (albeit not Hatch) on the menu, at the very least.

So when I'm in another city, and I see a restaurant that bills itself as serving cuisine from the Southwest, I'm all over it. In New York, there's Agave, on 7th Avenue in the West Village. Alas, the menu has what seems an awful lot like Tex-Mex food to me: tacos, quesadillas, but they also have Hatch green chiles in a chowder with corn and chicken. And squash blossoms are featured in one of the tacos. I figure I should take what I can get and allow myself to believe that I will find a taste of my future homeland somewhere beyond those front doors.

That said, I've been to Agave twice. The food is actually quite good, and even better, it's cheap. By NY standards. On my first trip, expecting miniscule portions for the reasonable prices, I ordered both the Hatch Green Chile, Corn & Chicken Chowder and the Autumn Leaves salad (caramelized apples, cabrales blue cheese, and spiced Texas pecans, with cider vinaigrette over baby greens) as appetizers. I was also naive enough to request that both the soup and salad arrive at the same time. Well, both plates barely fit on the table, especially with my DH's appetizer (that I've since forgotten) taking up a fair portion of real estate on the opposite side of the table. The soup was thick and rich and served in a large wide bowl. The salad was practically of Cheesecake Factory-proportions, with a huge mound of greens, slices of apple, and a good handful of nuts. At least they didn't go completely over the top with the application of cheese.

I couldn't tell you what I had for my entree; I was already in a food coma by the time it arrived. Neal had the "Santa Fe Shepard's Pie." (Why is it that people can't seem to spell shepherd correctly? It's just like "sheep herd" but with one less "e.") It was a rich and tasty mixture of chile and macaroni and shredded Jack cheese. I'm not sure it got finished. We were, after all, saving some room for dessert - gelato from a shop across the street.

I was in NY with my Dad recently and we stopped into Agave for an early dinner. Having recently had a slice of pizza from Pizza Box and some miscellaneous cream-filled things from Rocco's Bakery, we weren't exactly starving, but part of this trip to NY was a birthday dinner for me. We planned to hit the Turnpike soon, so this was to be the last chance for that celebratory meal.

At least I knew not to order both a soup and salad, so just had the Autumn Leaves salad. It was again enormous, and I made Dad eat some of it to help me out. I opted for what seemed like a lighter entree, the Skirt Steak Carne Asada Tacos. Dad, after inquiring if I liked chorizo, opted for Pan Roast Pork Tenderloin filled with a chorizo & caramelized apple stuffing lacquered with a maple cider treacle.

Again, we were not disappointed by the portion size. I had three tacos, each filled with a tangle of strips of skirt steak, cooked medium, with blobs of salsa, sour cream, and guacamole to one side, and the standard "Mexican" rice on the other. The meat had a satisfying chew and a pleasant piquant flavor. Dad got the equivalent of half a tenderloin, sliced and slightly fanned out next to a large assortment of roasted vegetables including butternut squash, summer squash, and what may have been parsnips. All seemed to be glazed with the maple cider "treacle." It was all very flavorful, and the pork was tender and juicy.

The best part of the meal, however, was the number of times my water glass was refilled - 10. Two cups of coffee and no other liquid consumed over the course of the day had left me dehydrated, so I appreciated the attention to my need.

So...Agave is pretty darn good, regardless of what it calls the cuisine it serves. Does anyone else out there have recommendations for restaurants serving good Southwestern food outside of the actual Southwest part of this country?

An aside: Because it sounds so horribly fusion, I was drawn to the "Tesque Seared Ahi Tuna Tataki Tostaditas" A Google search for the word "tesque" brought up a recipe for that exact menu item, as featured on Rachael Ray's Tasty Travels. Ack! Anyway, I think that "tesque" is just an innocent misspelling of Tesuque, a pueblo just north of Santa Fe. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Ahi tuna is indiginous to New Mexico. But if Rachael pronounced it "yum-o!" then it has to be good, right?