Carnitas at Home

For dinner, I had beans, rice, and carnitas. With another bad beer.



This was a lazy meal- the only thing I had to cook was rice. And I have a rice cooker, so that doesn't really even count. Don't worry, to make up for this laziness, I made cookies after dinner.

The black beans came from my freezer- I pre-cooked a ton last month to facilitate packing lunches. I hate boring sandwiches, but also hate salty/pricey/weirdly gelatinous canned beans.

I heated the beans, added some rice, a little salt, butter, and Marie Sharp's, and topped the whole thing with some carnitas from TJ's. TJ's seems to have discontinued their delicious garlicky carnitas. These came packed differently and were less tasty- really dry, not as flavorful. Why does TJ's have to discontinue everything tasty?

In other news, I discovered these today at TJ's.



Dried hibiscus flowers. I bought them to eat, but, upon further examination, discovered their true use- art!

They're not very tasty. Too dry. Kind of like a dry cranberry. BUT- they're gorgeous. Translucent, in really nice deep red shades. Some are very structured, like this one, while others resemble little octopi or grassy fronds. They brought back memories of my panicked freshman-year art class final, in which I had to come up with a still life and draw it. Being an inveterate procrastinator, I waited until the night before it was due, only to discover the only thing still-life-ey I had around were some extremely grim and dessicated calmyrna figs. Needless to say, I didn't do very well. But maybe if I'd had some of these, I would have.

It's not normal, indeed.

Tonight, I had a taco plate from Freebirds Burrito, with chips, salsa, and a diet Dr. Pepper.

Freebirds (it's driving me crazy not to put an apostrophe in there somewhere)is a small chain of burrito joints that I always thought was from Texas, but was apparently started in California. They're very popular in Texas, particularly with the college student market. I'm picky about burritos, and mostly ambivalent about Freebirds, which to me tastes identical to Chipotle (ie, badly seasoned, salty beans and textureless meat). My favorite burritos in the world come from Big City Burrito in Colorado, also a small burrito chain that also is popular with college students. They have a much cooler logo:



But I digress. I wasn't in the mood for a mediocre burrito, so I decided to try the items on their menu that differentiate them a bit from Chipotle- in this case, tacos. The burrito girl flirted with me shamelessly while making my burrito, which caused her to repeatedly screw it up. Nice compliment, I guess. I'd love to know why it's always girls in the food service industry who think I'm a lesbian. Anyway, I ended up with carnitas, pico de gallo, onion, cilantro, and cheese in corn tortillas. One also contained iceberg lettuce, because I didn't catch burrito girl's last mistake in time.

I'm still unimpressed with Freebirds. I'd forgotten how much I dislike their beans, so their presence sort of ruined the whole taco. I couldn't taste the carnitas at all through the beans' salty, smoky haze. Their chips were decent, and the accompanying salsa was actually very good, if acidic. The salsa's tomatoes had a pureed but still chunky consistency, with onion and lime flavor and some heat.