Taco Tuesday

“Billie, are you seriously going to be able to eat thirty dollars’ worth of tacos?” Dana asked as she scooped a carrot through the tableside guacamole that had just been freshly made for us.

“Oh, girl. Prepare yourself for shock and awe.”

On this particular Tuesday, seated at a table in Rocco’s Tacos and Tequila Bar with my friend, I had just made up my mind to indulge my darkest, most gluttonous impulses with the “All You Can Eat Tacos” special, available at the super thrifty price of $27.99 plus tax. While I didn’t know just how many tacos I could actually eat, having never tested myself to find out, I was pretty confident that I could easily surpass that thirty dollar threshold for getting my money’s worth. And hey, who doesn’t love a bargain!

Now, let’s get real for a second here. I’m a big girl. One look at me and it’s obvious that I can fuckin’ eat. But what’s not quite so apparent is my ridiculous capacity for food in one sitting. I’m not a grazer, I don’t do much snacking. I often have a very light breakfast and lunch, if I don’t skip them completely. But dinner? Dinner is my jam, and where my bottomless pit of an appetite really shines in all of its Adephagian glory (supposing such a thing exists).

A thin and bubbly waitress explained to me how it all worked: I could order four tacos for my first round, with up to two different proteins; each round after that, I could order up to three of a single protein. “Great! Let’s do this shit! I’d like to start with the pork carnitas and the shrimp, please!” I also asked for the toppings on the side because I know I’m actually a pretty picky eater, so it was important for me to be in complete control of what and how much of those toppings ended up in my dinner. Fortuitously, this turned out to out to be a brilliant move on my part because one of the four garnish items brought to our table was fresh cilantro.

Listen. I know plenty of people who love cilantro, and it smells amazing. Unfortunately, however, I am one of those poor souls who is forever cursed with the dreaded Soap Gene. If you know, you know. And if you don’t know, you probably enjoy cilantro and eat it all the time without any problems, you absolute asshole. Meanwhile, for the rest of us who carry this horrific defect in our DNA, we are eternally afflicted with a most dreadful of conditions: The taste of cilantro is somewhat akin to guzzling down a pint of dirty dish water. The moment even a teeny tiny speck of finely diced cilantro hits my tongue, my mouth is flooded with the delightful flavors of liquid Dawn Ultra dish detergent and deep, deep regret.

As for the other toppings, I was almost equally unimpressed. Instead of regular diced tomatoes, it was pico de gallo, which I never touch because raw onions are super gross and only potential serial killers eat them, and yes I’m prepared to die on this hill. Then, I assume purely to add insult to injury, rather than lettuce or cabbage I was instead presented with pickled red onions. Seriously? I simply cannot fathom why on earth would anybody see a food that’s already as offensive as the onion, and say to themselves, “Bruh. I wonder how we can take this already miserably foul vegetable and make it even more revolting? Yo, I know! Let’s soak that motherfucker in vinegar! Yeah!” I mean, why aren’t there laws against this sort of thing?

The saving grace of the toppings plate was the teeny tiny portion of crumbled cotija cheese, which I can only assume was so skimpy because Rocco’s are a bunch of cheap bastards, I don’t know. It was enough to work with though, and few things make me happier than a good cheese, even ones like cotija which possess that vague aroma of a foot. I don’t care, I’ll eat that shit up. I will bathe in it. I will fling myself face-first into a swimming pool full of it, just like Scrooge McDuck swan-diving into his ginormous vault of money. I love it. The foot-ier, the better. Om nom nom.

So now that I’ve waxed poetic about taco toppings for two whole pages, I bet you’re ready for the main event, aren’t you? Because I know I sure was! And right on time, a long oval plate appeared before me, adorned with four flour soft taco shells: two filled with grilled shrimp and the other two with pork, as promised. Oh yeah, here we go. Time eat my feelings, and let me tell y’all, I got a lot of them.

Let’s get ready to rummmmmble! Round One! Ding Ding!

After carefully dividing my meager portion of crumbled cheese into four equal piles, I dug into the carnitas tacos first because I honestly love the hell out of me some braised pork. I sprinkled the meat with the cotija, then carefully folded over the soft flour shell. Raising the taco (is it still a taco if it’s just meat and cheese? Fuck it, I say yes) to my mouth, I leaned in for that first bite, all while practically vibrating in anticipation of the supreme deliciousness I was about to be blessed with. Sinking in my teeth and chewing slowly, one thought echoed through my brain.

Why the hell is this meat so dry?

Well-prepared carnitas are intended to be super tasty and juicy and delightful. They’re supposed to make your arteries scream in utter terror as the unsaturated fat slimes its way down your gullet. But these? It was like chewing on porkchop-flavored cotton balls.

Dana must have read my face, which frequently speaks for me even louder than my words do, because she offered to share her guacamole with me. I’m not one who typically reaches for the guac, mainly because the typical vehicle for it is chips, of which I’m not a fan. (Not big on snacking, remember?) But slathering that shit on a raggedy dry-ass taco? Don’t mind if I do! This one simple addition made all the difference, and I would have never thought of it if not for my MVP friend… So Dana, if you ever read this story, thanks girl. You chased away much of my taco troubles that night.

Once that problem was solved, the pork tacos went down nice and easy, so I quickly polished them off and moved on to the other pair of tortillas on my plate. Nestled within each were three large grilled meaty ocean nuggets. Ah, the noble shrimp! The cockroach of the sea floor! How yummy art thou? How succulent, how tasty? These bad boys received the same treatment as the carnitas, joined in their flour shell by a generous helping of creamy green goop and footy cheese.

Taking that initial bite, I was immediately struck by the imbalance of precious sea meat to tortilla. Maybe this is just fat girl talk, but I would have been happier with another two or three jumbo camarones to fill up that tortilla. As it was, it tasted more like a guacamole wrap garnished with a few shrimp instead of the other way around. Bummer. However, I am a card-carrying lifetime member of the Clean Your Plate Club, so down the hatch they went! Truthfully, I was tempted to ditch the tortilla and just munch on the shrimp themselves, but then I wouldn’t be able to count them towards my taco count. I’m nothing if not an honest little piggy. Oink oink.

Four tacos down, infinity to go.

When our server came around to ask about Round Two, I opted for boringness and just ordered two of the grilled chicken tacos. After a somewhat disappointing Round One, I thought I would play it safe. Aside from overcooking the ever-living shit out of it, even the worst cook in the world would have a hard time messing up grilled chicken. I mean, it’s the basic white girl of the protein world. Other meats, the ones who fancy themselves as being so much edgier and far more interesting, they like to talk mad shit about grilled chicken for wearing infinity scarves and drinking pumpkin spiced lattes and listening to Taylor Swift. Aggregate threat level: Zero.

Well… Winner winner chicken dinner! (Literally.) Tacos number five and six, stuffed with savory poultry and guac and feet-dairy, were by far superior to tacos one through four. As I had hoped, the chicken was moist and flavorful, and in just the right amount. Along with the avocado smash and cotija sprinkle across the top, it made for an absolutely perfect taco filling and most definitely hit the spot. Basic bitch meat for the win. If I was any good at making life choices, I would (a) have chosen to stick with the chicken for all of the following rounds, and (b) not even signed up to begin with for this insane self-indulgent taco challenge where no matter how many of them I manage to cram down my throat, I still lose. Alas.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also give mad props to our server because she just kept on slingin’ those tacos like it was her job. …Oh right, it was. Seriously though, she was very attentive and excellent at asking me for my next order before I’d even finished the one I was working on. She ensured that a continuous stream of taco excess flowed across the table and into my ravenous maw.

However. Upon placing my order for Round Three, when I asked her how spicy the “spicy ground beef” protein option really was, and she shrugged and told me, “Oh, it’s not, it’s just seasoned. It’s the same ground beef we put on tacos from the Kids Menu.”

Y’all, I think that bitch straight-up lied to my face.

Now, to be fair, along with all of my other strange gastronomical quirks, I also am a massive weenie when it comes to heat of any kind. If you take me to an Indian or Thai restaurant, I’m the lame-ass who will invariably order the Butter Chicken or the Pad Thai respectively. It’s all I can handle, and far I’m too much of fraidy cat to even try anything else. I avoid Cajun food completely. I don’t trust it at all because I know, as sure as I know my own name, I know… I cannot handle my spice. I’m absolutely a little bitch about it. Mexican cuisine, while it frequently can be rather spicy, it’s become quite Americanized and is familiar enough that I typically know what not to put in my mouth. Luckily for me, there are few things typically safer than taco meat, for fuck’s sake.

Or so I thought. Tacos number seven and eight turned out to effectively be a manifestation of the ninth circle of Hell. Every bite was pure relentless agony, each mastication unleashing a torrent of violently scorching magma to flood my mouth and scald my tongue, bringing tears to my eyes and contrition to my soul. If I were Catholic, instead of saying Hail Mary’s for penance, they would make me eat these tacos. I could wrap my quivering lips around the chapped teat of a cow’s udder and drink pure unpasteurized cream straight from the source, and it still wouldn’t have been enough to soothe the violent inferno that raged against my taste buds and slowly scorched them away to ash. And who exactly are these little tiny baby children who are supposedly eating tacos made with this meat which was clearly harvested directly from Satan’s crusty butthole? I need to know.

Oh, and if you’re currently sitting there reading this and thinking, “But Billie, if you were so miserable, why did you keep eating them?” Because fuck you, that’s why. Quitters never win and winners never quit.

Eight tacos deep into this personal challenge. My lips were singed and smoke wafted from my flared nostrils. I could have happily stopped here and been satisfied, if not full. But the shitty little gluttonous goblin that insists on squatting in the back of my fucked-up brain, he would have none of my logic or reasonable decisions. “Food crimes! Commit them!” he ruthlessly shrieked in my inner ear, demanding that I keep going, to soldier on eating as many tacos as it took for me completely fucking hate myself. So, like the champion that I am, I rallied and pressed forth.

Despite my enjoyment of the grilled chicken tacos and my profound remorse for their infernal ground beef cousins, I again decided against returning to the safety zone, forging ahead to another of the protein options. For tacos number nine and ten, I selected the carne asada, or grilled steak.

Now, once more, if you haven’t picked up on it yet, I do dumb shit. What kind of dumb shit, you ask? Well, dumb shit like ordering steak tacos when I know perfectly well that I am incredibly picky about steak, and do not enjoy anything warmer than medium at the very worst. And yet, there I was, ordering steak in a restaurant that had already somehow managed to fuck up braised fatty hunks of meat like carnitas, instead serving me something which resembled the dried-out demon lovechild of a Yorkshire swine and a box of chalk. After that, why the hell did I have any faith that they could get steak right?

So, as you’ve probably already gathered, the carne asada tacos were ridiculously underwhelming. I wagered a guess that the marinade was the only thing giving any sort of enjoyable flavor to the well-done strips of sad, grey beef. As I consumed them, I questioned why I was even bothering. After the first one, I was definitely feeling the pressure in my abdomen, my stomach pleading with me to stop before it was too late. However, my abusive little brain goblin stepped in and berated my physical form, “Hey, Body! It’s just a taco, not a dick, so don’t take it so hard!” Then he cackled, farted, and ran away.

Have I mentioned that goblin is a real asshole?

So without further debate, into my big fat slavering mouth went the other steak taco, exerting great effort to chew down and swallow each overcooked bite.

When the server approached and asked if I’d like to put in another order of tacos, I was already hurting. Heartburn was looming large. I was so full that my back ached. I wasn’t even enjoying myself anymore.

So, naturally, I said, “Yes, of course I would. Let’s do chicken again!” I mean, give me some credit here. When I commit to something, I do it all the way.

In retrospect, I am convinced that at this point in the evening I had honestly lost all control of the situation. I was nothing more than a marionette puppet for the food goblin inside of me, my own personal god of terrible decisions, who was pulling my strings and guiding me into a state of utter ruin. Again.

When tacos number eleven and twelve arrived, I could only glare hatefully at them. After a long moment, I took a deep, steadying breath. My hand twitched over the plate. The gunfight theme from High Noon played somewhere in the distance.

I took my sweet time preparing each of my stuffed-tortilla opponents, lazily adding in the requisite guacamole and cotija cheese. Finally, I lifted number eleven to my mouth, imagining cartoon-ish sweat beads forming on my forehead. And then, because I’m no quitter, I took a bite. And then another. And another.

While slowly forcing Eleven down my throat, I began envisioning horrible scenarios of post-dinner humiliation. Dana and I had tickets to go see the touring company of Hamilton… really great seats that I paid top dollar for. The very last thing that I wanted was to be halfway through the show and need to excuse myself. I imagined myself sitting there in the dark theater, center house seats, when right in the middle of “Guns and Ships” my world suddenly devolves into Buns and Shits, and I have to somehow clench my butt-cheeks together, shimmy my massive ass down the row, and scurry to the lobby to find a bathroom. To be sitting on the toilet, contending with Taco Tuesday’s revenge, missing half of the show, the ladies restroom now becoming “The Room Where it Happens.” Or worse yet, feeling the urge in the theater but having no time or opportunity to do anything about it, completely “Helpless” to my intestinal distress and stealing the show from Thomas Jefferson when I inadvertently “Blow Us All Away.”

I bet when you started reading this ridiculous essay, you never imagined that it would ultimately culminate in Hamilton puns, did you? Surprise, motherfuckers!

And then the goblin purred contentedly in my head, “Okay. You can stop now.”

Looking down at the remaining taco, lying so still and forlorn on my plate, I just shook my head. I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to know how many of the tasty tortilla treats I could put away in one sitting when given an opportunity to do so, and I found out: That number is eleven. Eleven fucking tacos. And it was neither the first nor would it be the last time I would subject myself to such unmitigated foolishness where food is concerned.

Next time I see that goddamn goblin, I’m going to punch him in the dick.