Albuquerque

These last three days, I've been in Albuquerque for a work trip. Alb (so I don't have to keep typing it all out) is pretty small by my reckoning, but I will admit that I didn't journey out too much.

Monday, the night I arrived in Alb (with my boss), we headed out to Old Town and found a local place called the High Noon Restaurant and Saloon. The building has been around since 1785, so it was cool to see some of the original architecture in the place. My boss was particularly excited that the vents were built into the stone rounded booths. Neither the hostess nor our waitress seemed to share his enthusiasm.

If you note on their menu, it says "To ensure exceptional flavor and consistency, all of High Noon’s Corn Fed mid-western beef is dry pack aged a minimum of 21 days." Now this confuses me. I've been reading in my organic books and whatnot that you actually want all grass-fed beef. In fact, you don't even want beef that are finished on corn because their little bovine tummies are made for grass and the corn feeding in the feed lots fatten them up at the end, but are ultimately bad for the meat. So you don't just want grass-fed beef, you want grass-finished beef. So anyway, this marked the first time that I ever skipped something on the menu based on a foodie whim. I had the lamb instead. And it wasn't bad. I have to admit that the lamb I had in St John could not stand up to mine. This wasn't as good as mine, but it wasn't bad.

Tuesday afternoon, our branch office took us out to lunch at Abuelita's (6083 Isleta Blvd SW, Albuquerque, NM 87105) which was pretty off the beaten path. I had their special, an Abuelita's tacopilla, which the waitress recommended for me, stating that it was their best seller. I've found recently that if I am not sure if something on the menu is actually good, I choose an alternate and ask my server to choose. Typically, I end up with better food this way. I used to ask "is the xxx" good?" but very rarely can you get the candid response you want.

A tacopilla is a 12 inch fluffy sopapilla and filled with (in my case) shredded beef, lettuce, tomatoes (I think), sour cream, and guacamole. Then it's folded over like a taco. This thing was huge. In fact, I ate just over 3/4 of it, and people were amazed. This food was so good. It came, like all New Mexican foods, with the choice of red and green chile sauce. Both were fiery hot but very tasty! I used small dabs of the green chile. The guy sitting next to me poured his green chile all over his tamales!

I also had the opportunity to try natillas as a dessert. It was described to me as something similar to flan, but it really reminds me more of a thinner rice pudding. It's served warm. Actually warm, not just room temperature, which was a bit of a shock. It's sweet and milky, with cinnamon on top. It was a nice ending to a spicy meal. I also tried a sopapillo with honey on top, a pretty standard dessert, or so I'm told. That was pretty good too, but the natillas was better.