America acts like its minorities have chingos of spare time to keep correcting the U.S. government, corporations and organizations. This week it's the corporate-officer dregs of Chipotle Restaurant who call their food "Mexican."
Ask A Mexican's Gustavo Arrellano has good updates on the Chipotle/Latino Author fiasco. Put simply, for a series of plastic cups, the list of American authors who contributed 250-word stories, qué chingaus, failed to include any Latino author. Like Gustavo says, a "Mexican" restaurant couldn't find one Mexican-American writer, though they claimed they tried.
I proposed a different strategy to put pressure on Chipotle and facebooked the following:
#LatinoStory4Chipotle
How to answer Chipotles' exclusion of latino writers--
1. Make up our own story (250 words, max)
2. Use your favorite LOCAL latino restaurant's logo or slogan
3. Identify your city, and share your piece across the country.
4. You can use the LatinoStory4Chipotle tag
I'm working on mine. Even if you're not, spread the word, por favor.
I'm still working on my story and cup that will highlight Mexican-owned Santiago's in Colorado, which is selling burritos and great Mexican food, like to upstage Chipotle. I can't say they treat their staff better than the Rice-Makes-A-Chingón-Burrito Chipotle place, but at least they're local and Mexican owned.
Somebody took me to Chipotle's right after they opened in Denver, and I hated the food, but kept the friend. A burrito with rice! I understood how trendy rice is and that the place was attempting to appeal to the gentry. But that didn't make the food genuine.
Other gente's experience may be different from mine, but the only time when I was growing up that my impoverished family ate rice was when there was nada else to fill it with. Refritos, mashed frijoles is the proper thing to put in a burrito, other than meat that didn't always appear on our table.
Chipotle expects me to celebrate my cultural heritage by eating a rice burrito. What will they think of next? Mashed lima beans or garbanzos instead of beans? (Those were always the last two cans in our cupboard, back then.)
I can't trash other food at Chipotle's because I don't care to taste anything more from the place. That's just me. Whatever you do, if you're thinking about stopping there, you might want to first read about how they treat their workers.
And if you want to REALLY let them know what you think about excluding Latino writers, Facebook or Tweet your own story and cup about your favorite local puertoriqueño, dominicano, mexicano, Tex-Mex or Chicano restaurant. Promoting Chipotle's competition might make them never again forget to put Mexicans (latinos, too) on their literary menu.
Es todo, hoy,
RudyG, ex-tejano connoisseur of la comida mexicana
I whipped these up the other night with a favorite basic bean filling recipe. It’s from Stephen Raichlen’s Healthy Latin Cooking. It’s a great book, but funny enough, as with many cookbooks, I gravitate toward one very simple recipe and just make it over and over. I really have to explore it more but for now, here’s the recipe. It actually is part of a dish called Bean Tortillas with Honduran “Butter,” but I’ve only ever made the bean part, though I’m sure the complete three-part recipe would be great.
Bean Topping:
adapted from Stephen Raichlen’s Healthy Latin Cooking
1 1/2 cups cooked or canned red kidney beans (available in Germany! as opposed to black beans, which I have yet to find)
3 TB minced onions (I use dried when I’m in a hurry)
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1 cup chicken stock
In a skillet or saucepan over high heat, combine the beans, onions, garlic, cumin, and stock. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to medium, and simmer for 5 minutes, or until all the stock has been absorbed. Remove from the heat and let cool for 2 to 3 minutes. Mash the beans with the back of a spoon.
I put the beans on top of a toasted corn tortilla, then added avocado and a homemade salsa made with tomatoes, onion, and a little of some kind of green chili that you find here. It’s not jalapeno but it’ll do.
If you know me well, you’ve surely heard me mourn the dearth of Mexican food in Germany. Thankfully a friend introduced me to www.mex-al.de, where you can order, among other delicacies, corn tortillas. You can get the flour kind in the grocery store, but to me, corn tortillas are the taste of Mexico.
For those of you who enjoyed the cauliflower recipe awhile back, I also tried a cauliflower curry with toasted cashews from the same blog recently, and it was delicious. Or as we say in German, lecker, lecker, lecker! True to form, I didn’t follow the recipe entirely. I’ve had so much success with the Thai Kitchen recipe on the back of the coconut milk can that I hated to veer from it and just don’t have time in my life right now to grind my own curry powder (though I do have a spice grinder and do believe in doing stuff like that). So, I used the 101 cookbooks recipe as an inspiration point, adding snow peas instead of green beans and oops, didn’t have red onion so I left that out, too. The toasted cashews really make it.
Nick Baumann is keeping us updated on what’s happening in Egypt [Mother Jones]
This Washington Post photo made me laugh [Buzzfeed]
It’s a dance dance revolution! [Jordan Matter]
A very interesting roundtable with Oscar-nominated actors [THR Network]
People + Words. What more could you want? [NPR]
It’s not like you ‘get’ most New Yorker cartoons anyway [The Monkeys you Ordered]
Some people are very serious about reading [Julian Smith]
I mean, I love messy, fake Mexican food, but… [Food Beast]
Philadelphia Man Shoots Friend for Eating His Cake [AOL News]
Things real people don’t say about advertising
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Life -
I just lit my toaster oven on fire. Apparently, leaving the foil you cooked some oiled up taters on the night before in the oven while pre-heating it is a poor idea. With an oily, stinky, foggy, nasty result. But I think my oven is still fine. Crappy cheap frozen taquitos from work for dinner, comin atcha! (
I, too, am mourning the lack of Mexican food in Hannover, but I just recently discovered canned black beans at this international grocery store (http://www.i-shop-now.de/cms/). Now if only Edeka would start carrying my favorite brand of chickpeas again…
Thanks for the link!
And- there is a little Spanish grocery store in Linden that is associated with the restaurants “Rias Baxas” and “Rias Baxas II” (which are excellent) that sells dried black beans. The store is on Allerweg right across from the Netto. Still can’t find them canned, but dried is better than nothing!
thanks for the tip! and oh we found some very good chinese food yesterday—Arc En Ciel on Koenigstrasse.
thanks for the tip, and thanks for stopping by!