Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-01-27 - 8:02 p.m.

Secrets and Fries

I told my best friend something that seemed to shock her today. I told her I was hungry for 1970s tacos.

I'm not saying I'll make them. I'm not even saying I could really eat them. But I THINK I want them. Remember seventies tacos? Before we went all ground-turkey and stuff? We fried up hamburger and dumped Lawry's packaged seasoning into it. Then we FRIED the corn tortillas, made a token pass over a paper towel, and stuffed them full of ground beef, cheddar cheese, sour cream and avocado, and threw some onions and tomatoes and lettuce into whatever space was left so they'd be "healthy", and ate them over the plate because they dripped grease. I think we might have used La Victoria bottled salsa on them, too.

Of course, we served them with a salad - with bottled Kraft French Dressing.

My mouth is watering. I also want the salad with canned kidney beans and Kraft Dressing. The tacos wouldn't be the same without that.

Oh, come off it. Like you don't eat anything weird. Everybody has something in their secret pantry, whether you're snitching those dehydrated marshmallow thingies out of the kid's cereal box or harboring a hidden passion for Funyums. I used to work with a woman who admitted (under the influence of a few Long Island Iced Teas) that she fried Spam and wrapped it in a tortilla. Spamurritos. And she was a perfectly nice woman in all other respects.

I'm not even sure I could eat one of those tacos now. Or maybe I only want to think I couldn't eat one, when I really could eat about six if no one was watching me, and I'd feel sick and sorry I had done it, but I'd still do it. I know I'd have to make them when the girls weren't around, because the girls don't know about fried corn tortillas. They don't know that if you fry them just so they're almost translucent with grease, they get so crispy, instead of the hard crunchy things that are baked or the raw ones that just break when you bend them. I have kept the fried-item secrets, the Southern Legacy my mother (who would have fried the shells in bacon grease and made taco gravy to go with 'em) passed on to me.

1970's tacos. We used to eat a lot of things like that. I should have reminded my best friend exactly WHO it was that taught me back then to wrap hot dogs and cheddar cheese in Pillsbury crescent rolls and bake them. I know she hasn't eaten them in decades; I know she's so much more health-oriented than I am that she COULDN'T eat one of those, she'd puke first, while I...I...well, I wouldn't eat them in front of anybody, but...

Okay, now I want greasy homemade tacos and salad with bottled Kraft French Dressing AND Hebrew National franks in Pillsbury Crescent Rolls, WITH cheese. But I think I want to eat them back in the seventies, when they were still perfectly good food, beans and rice were still side dishes, and turkey meant Thanksgiving.

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