By Juan C. Ayllon I was maybe three years living with my family in La Paz, Bolivia when I discovered this savory sensation: the Salteña! I can’t remember if my parents purchased it from a street vendor or a tiny, family owned restaurant with rough hewn tables and crumbling plaster walls, but for me, it was love at first bite. Now for the uninitiated, salteñas are baked empanadas indigenous to Bolivia, that are filled with beef, chicken or pork in a tangy, slightly sweet and spicy sauce with olives, raisins, boiled egg and potato. For years, the beef salteña remained unchallenged in my hierarchy of favorite foods and was a recurring request for birthday treats. However, we moved to the United States when I was four and a half years old. They were too time consuming for Mom to make and unavailable for purchase, so they fell by the wayside, to be replaced by the more accessible McDonalds, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken offerings in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. However, salteñas were never forgotten, and were the frequent subject of my lobbying efforts as my birthdays drew near. Then, during my gradeshool years, sometimes my father treated us to dinner at a family owned Mexican restaurant in the outskirts of town. These trips often occurred after he took the family – Mom, younger brother Luis, our youngest, Pablo, and me – fishing (technically, he did most of the fishing, whereas Mom read a book or laid out, while my brothers and I preferred climbing trees, playing army, swimming, or floating a toy boat in the lake). At first, Luis, Pablo and I topped our tacos with ketchup, but our dad’s indignance and cajoling eventually shamed us into switching to hot sauce which, we discovered, wasn’t half bad. In fact, it was very good! And in the absence of my beloved salteñas, Mexican food became an object of culinary desire – a go-to when we had a choice of where to dine. Ironically, I did not experience the burrito – steak, beef, or chicken, served with rice, beans, tomatoes, and lettuce wrapped in a large toasted flour tortilla – during those formative years, but later in my 20s. Serve’s up with So Cal Burritos I had a few meaningless college flings with the local Taco Bell circa 1983 in Azusa, California (their beef and bean burritos were soft and reasonably filling, but sordid affairs with their weak Americanized hot sauce packets, but in all fairness, that’s where I first discovered the egg burrito, which I’ve made hundreds of times since at home). However, my first recollection of a serious burrito occurred while I was a business major at Cal Poly Pomona in 1984 renting a townhouse with two Azusa Pacific University students in Baldwin Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. I was working the 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM shift unloading semi trailers at the UPS Cerritos Hub and needed some energy, so I grabbed one with a Coca Cola from a small Mexican takeout restaurant down the block. Seven inches long and three inches thick, it was loaded with savory spiced beef, tomatoes, rice, refried beans, cilantro, and cheese. It was there that I first squirted both green mild and red hot chili sauces from condiment squeeze bottles into the bitten off end of my burrito, tamping and stirring the slurry with a plastic fork several inches into the burrito. I repeated the process several more times as I consumed this chewy, delectable delight before driving off to work. A year later, I made a midnight with my zany and fearless friend, Sam from First Baptist Church in Pomona, to an authentic Mexican restaurant in sketchy East Los Angeles near where boxing legend Oscar De La Hoya grew up and the serial killer, Richard “the Night Stalker” Ramirez, was beaten and apprehended by some neighbors when he tried to nab a girl the year before. Sam had raved about their food, and despite my apprehension of traveling there at night, the trip was well worth it, as my carne asada (steak) burrito was incredibly tasty, authentic, and packed a kick with their chili sauces! Another time, I met up with my former roommate, Mohan, for burritos that he bragged were as large as footballs near the foothills of San Bernardino. Dubbed the “Garbage Burrito”, they really were huge, and what they lacked in quality was more than made up for with their enormous size! My Elgin Connections Circa 1992, I had moved to my parent’s home in Chicago’s northwest suburbs for a couple years while substitute teaching and taking night classes for teacher certification, and during lunch break one day, I discovered a bonafide Mexican restaurant just off Rte. 20 in the outskirts of Elgin, Illinois. Good Lord! Their carne asada burrito was to die for! I quickly became a regular there, and began making late night runs there with my friend, Scott, a cop who’d tuck his Bareta in the back of his pants and sit facing the door just in case (Elgin, like East L.A., had its share of sketchy neighborhoods). This establishment became one of three Mexican diners in a circuit that we’d frequent several times a month. Now, they made their own chili sauces at these restaurants and, sometimes – especially late at night, when they often boiled a huge steel pot of chilis to make it – they could be wickedly hot, creating a love/hate dynamic for me with their tasty, but potent burrito dressing that I couldn’t get enough. One semester while taking Saturday morning classes at the downtown National Louis University campus in ‘93, after his workday ended, Scott and I would make regular late night burrito runs on Fridays and, inevitably, during mid morning class break the next day, I’d rush to the men’s room to expel the white hot chain coursing through my colon. It was a crazy, sleep deprived semester! During one such night, they were brewing a large pot of chiles around midnight when Scott and I saw a pair of headlights pull up to the storefront window by our table, my surname AYLLON emblazoned on the license plate. I never ran into other Ayllons, so this was surreal. I believe it was a powder blue VW Super Beetle, but either way when its owner stepped inside, I told him that Ayllon was my last name and he didn’t believe it – until I showed him my driver’s license. It was as if God, Himself, placed His thumbprint on our burrito ritual, reminding us that – if not outright amused – He was there watching over us. Looking back at those times, I think I may have been trying to exorcize some inner demons with this aberrant behavior. As I’ve aged, I’ve certainly done away with the crazy late night feasts and dialed way back on the amount of fire I infused into my burritos, which I insist on consuming at least monthly nowadays. Sometimes, like today, after church Belle and I will grab lunch at a nearby Tacos El Norte restaurant (she prefers their spicy shrimp soup, while I nosh on a carne asada burrito or, mixing things up, tacos, instead with chips and guacamole that we split). Or maybe we’ll go to a more upscale Mexican restaurant that we like, La Hacienda, in Deer Park, Illinois. This past Thursday night, I ate a reasonably good carne asada burrito prior to parent-teacher conferences. I sampled the mild, medium and hot chili sauces at this modest Mexican diner near work and, wisely, avoided their really potent hot sauce. Moderation is key. An Evolutionary and Transformative Experience Regardless, the groundwork for what would become a lifelong passion of burrito consumption began with my seminal experiences with the salteña – which, when you think about it, is a smaller pastry version of the burrito. Picture the human evolutionary charts that we studied in middle school tracing the ape to the homo sapiens and you get the idea. Now, I don’t know which is more evolved – the easily constructed burrito or the more work intensive salteña; frankly, I sense that the former is more Cro-Magnon to the latter’s Homo Sapiens, but regardless, there appears to be more than a casual relationship between these two New World Latin entrees that warrants further scientific studies, yet, sadly remains outside the scope of this paper. The real meat of the burrito experience lay not so much in the savory sensation – as important as it was – but the meaningful relationships nourished by investing time together during those meals. The simple act of “breaking bread” – or burritos – together, slowing down and connecting (or if dining solo, connecting deeper with myself and processing what’s going on my life at the moment) gives substance and meaning to life’s journey. Whether it’s just hanging out, talking through a crisis, or seeking advice, there’s nothing quite like noshing on a burrito with a companion. Back on July 4, 1997, Scott and I met up at his home for the evening. Our spouses were supposed to join us, but my wife at the time encouraged me to go ahead alone, and Scott's told him that she was taking their kids to meet up with her sister. "What's wrong with this picture?" he said. "We're both married, but where's our wives?" We commiserated about our relationship woes over beers and burritos (the beers for sure, anyways – the memory is somehow hazy), fireworks exploding in the distance, as our soon-to-be exes celebrated Independence Day elsewhere. Within days, we both knew our marriages were over. Fast forward to 2010: it was our third date when I took Belle out to a trendy Mexican restaurant at the Glen (where I splurged for a thick carne asada steak, medium rare) and, afterwards, held her hand for the first time while watching George Clooney’s Up in the Air at a theater across the street. We have since enjoyed numerous outdoor dates, family outings, and gatherings at El Puerto, a popular lakeside Mexican eatery on Nippersink Lake in Fox Lake, Illinois (sadly, circa 2007, I watched a speed boat sink parked at one of their docks, nose high in the air). Now happily married to Belle since 2011, I have enjoyed occasional breakfast tacos at Deacon's (a countryside restaurant and bar with a driving range that doesn't serve breakfast burritos) with a wise mentor and several friends I meet for Saturday morning Bible study. Their input in my life is invaluable, uplifting, and transformative. They help keep me on track, grounded, and I need that!
Either way, I am reminded of something Arnold Schwarzeneger said years ago when someone asked him if he drank lots of milk to build his huge muscles. He quipped, “Milk is for babies! Beer is for men.” For me, salteñas were a pleasant childhood treat, but like beer, the cruder, beefier burritos were an integral part of my rites of passage to the complicated world of adulthood.
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Juan C. AyllonA writer, artist, educator and owner of Prairie Audio Man Cave, he lives with his wife, Isabel (AKA Belle), and their Goldendoodle, Liam, enjoys listening to high fidelity music and all things hi-fi at their home in the greater Chicagoland area.. Archives
May 2024
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