There were taco stands everywhere! My favorite is pictured to the right. They took a chef's
decision approach and served one type: tacos de res, beef tacos. Unlike the US, beef tacos aren't ground beef, it's small, thin cut pieces cooked and served outside out of a cart on the street. Here they gave us one option: cilantro and caramelized onions on the side? They were delicious, particularly with the salsa verde. (Us Americans learned quickly that the green sauce was almost always less spicy than the salsa that looks like what we're used to.) Another major difference is that everything is served with corn tortillas, not flour. They're smaller (so yes, order 5 tacos a person!) and have a different flavor. Enchiladas and gorditas, it made a difference, but honestly, tacos tended to be delicious either way.Other taco stands offered more variety in terms of taco fillings. Chorizo and choriqueso, bisteck (steak cut beef), barbacoa (another favorite of mine), pollo, refried beans, and gringo (we wondered forever and found out that it has yummy avocado in it!) A couple places even offered flour tortillas, although this wasn't common. To eat, you go up to the cart and order, then sit down at a plastic table under a tent. You watch them cook your meal, then they bring you your stack of tacos at the table. The main accessories are cilantro and onion, although some places offered tomatoes. The best part, however, was that these delicious tacos cost 5-7 pesos apiece. This means that for a meal of 5 tacos and a drink, you can get a full lunch for less than $3.00!
The other main type of street food was gorditas, but I never actually ate them. Why eat gorditas when I could eat tacos! Mmm.... But anyway, so about restaurant foods. The standard offerings were a selection of meats and seafood, a selection of "mexican foods" and a selection of american or italian foods. One interesting, unique dish was cecina de res. "Cecina" technically means jerkey, but it's actually a flank steak marinated in deliciousness (some sort of soy based thing?) and yeah. Yummers. I also had a delicious chicken dish with a cheese sauce. Not something you
would expect to taste good, very rich, quite amazing. As far as Mexican foods in restaurants went, everything was served with enchiladas. I made enchiladas a while ago, and they were nothing like what I had made. Small corn tortillas folded over manchego cheese! I also ate Fajitas at some point, and while they were delicious, they were so spicy I couldn't finish them. Pretty much, everything was served with tortillas, so. Everything was Mexican?Okay. So here is the thing about American food in Mexico: everything is gigantic. Of course, every time we ate American food, we were so hungry that we reinforced the stereotype. After a day full of driving we stopped at a hamburger joint. The "chica" burger was the size of a whopper. The middle size was the size of a personal pizza. The "grande" was the size of a basketball! Me and my boyfriend split a grande with double meat, cheese and bacon. But some of the people I was traveling with got a grande on their own. Now that restaurant believes it is right about Americans eating gigantic amounts of food. Another place, we got gargantuan slices of pizza!
While we were there we mostly just ate at restaurants because we stayed in a lot of hotels. We camped on several occasions, but we still only did a limited amount of cooking. We did do a lot of eggs and pancakes and french toast on camp stoves. I was thwarted so many times by tryin
g to make over easy eggs; either I'd break the yolk when I cracked the egg, or I'd nick it when I tried to flip it and it'd run all over the pan. One morning, we did add hash browns to the cooking experience. My favorite instance of cooking was when we camped at a place called The Phantasms. We had bought hotdogs and spent an hour tracking down a bakery for buns. We ended up making fries from the left over potatoes from hash browns, and actually ended up shoe stringing them, which means that they turned out great. The meal was ended with roasting giant marshmellows over the fire! The hotdogs could have been better, but they were turkey dogs since one of our travel companions didn't eat beef. Overall, however, the experience was excellent.In any case, food in Mexico was pretty good! American food was so much more greasy/filling after all that good, relatively healthy(er) food.
