I look up at the clock. 8:14. Six more minutes. I glide across the ice and snowplow stop in front of the score keeper’s box. I lean on the glass and put my ear up to the hockey puck sized hole in the wall.
“The usual?”
I nod. Of course, the usual. What else would I want?
“Totopos?”
I smile. Sometimes mom splurges and lets us get totopos and salsa with dinner. Either she wanted to treat the two of us tonight, or she just felt bad for me. She knows how frustrated I’ve been getting with skating recently, between the meniscus surgery and spraining my ankle in the fall, which will likely result in another surgery. The sport I have always loved has become a burden – a nuisance. I don’t get any enjoyment out of the activity; I’m too busy focused on the skills I have lost due to physical inability. I don’t even remember my program anymore – there’s no use in having one when I can’t even jump or spin.
I wouldn’t say eating is a good coping mechanism for anyone, but it definitely helped me get through the fall of my relationship with figure skating. On the nights where I would come off the ice early in tears of frustration, I would look forward to picking up take-out of my favorite meal and bringing it home to share with my best friend: my mom. Once we broke into the brown paper bag, I forgot all about how upset I was just a few hours earlier… and that’s just the start.
Well, I guess the real start was before I was born. I can only speak so much on what life was like when I was in utero, but according to my mom, my addiction to enchiladas suizas con arroz y frijoles began when I was just a fetus. When my mom was working as a goldsmith, she would go on lunch break with her coworker, Ellen, who is a close family friend to this day. On Wednesdays, they’d go to what now is my favorite restaurant in the world and eat what is now my favorite food in the world. My mom would “eat them every week when [she] was pregnant with [me]. And as soon as [I] [was] born, [I] started coming to the restaurant… before [I] could even eat! And it was one of the first foods [I] ate, mostly because [I] stole it off [her] plate.” Since they were in my system before I actually had a developed system of my own, cheese enchiladas suizas have become, and will probably always be, my favorite dish.
Since I owe my love of enchiladas to my mother, I talked to her about Mexican food, which we do quite a bit anyways. Whenever we hear of a new place in the area, we want to try it. We’re even willing to travel if the food and experience are good enough…one of our favorite places is two and a half hours away. It’s like a game to us: the search for the best Mexican food, or as I like to call it “will we ever find Mexican food that beats La Veracruzana’s enchiladas?” My theory is “no.” I wasn’t surprised to hear that my mom liked enchiladas for the same reason that I did: “They are a comfort food. They make [her]happy. When [she] eat[s] enchiladas, especially with [me], [she] feel[s] fulfilled.” They really are the perfect comfort food. They’re warm, cheesy, not too spicy or overwhelming in flavor… they’re just perfect. They feel like home.
Although enchiladas are a comforting idea to me, they are foreign in a sense. I don’t know the recipe; I can’t just make them when I’m sad to help cheer me up. I’m not familiar with the process that goes into making them, which in a way distances me from them. How can I not know the recipe to my favorite dish in the world? Well, I obviously know what’s in them, but only on the surface level. I know that the enchiladas are corn tortilla based, filled with cheese and smothered in a cream-based sauce. They’re always served with a side of rice and refried beans. There’s so much more to it, though. It’s not just the ingredients (which I don’t know precisely anyways) but how the ingredients are put together. The owner of La Ver creates the dish with such ease; it’s second nature to him. I envy how he can whip up the delicious meal in ten minutes, yet I’ve been trying to replicate the dish for years. They tasted like enchiladas usually do – I mean they were OK. They would’ve passed for a kid making a home-cooked meal, but they didn’t even come close to the incredible suiza sauce. Not only have I tried to make the dish, but my mom has too, on a few occasions; she described all the experiences as “Unsuccessful.” She seems to be hopeful, though, about possibly replicating the dinner. She thinks “it may be possible to replicate it if we get authentic seasonings, sour cream, cheese blend, and the recipe.” I really want to reach out to the owner and ask about the recipe. I don’t think that usually goes over well, especially with a family-run establishment. To me, it seems like the dishes they offer are too personal and special to them to just give them out like an equation to a math problem. Maybe if I sit down and talk to the owner about how much the dish means to me and how long it’s been a part of mine and my family’s lives, he would point me in the right direction to be able to make the dish at home. Certainly making this meal at home wouldn’t replace going to the restaurant – that’s an experience that is irreplaceable for me. Rather, it’s a way for me to access my favorite comfort food if I end up moving away from the area, or, God forbid, the restaurant closes.
At the end of the day, I know I’m never going to get sick of enchiladas suizas. They have a paradoxical place in my heart, being so familiar with them yet knowing so little about them and what it takes to create them the way I love so much. Perhaps knowing the good, bad, and ugly about the meal will take the magic away from it for me. Maybe there needs to be an unknown element to keep me coming back to the restaurant. Even for the meals we think we know, have been making for generations, have the recipe by heart, etc., we never know as much as we think we do. There are always new ways of combining flavors and preparing food to update it and make it different, and this is what makes food such an interesting part of American culture.
