breakfast tacos!!!
I truly believe few things are universally unifying: breakfast tacos are one of them.
One thing about Texans (especially South Texans) is that we all have an order.
You can name hundreds of combinations with the same 3-4 ingredients, and they’re probably all delicious!
In case you were wondering, mine is a bean, cheese, potato, bacon.
While these humble offerings aren’t seasonal, they always remind me of summer (or just hot days, which can include 70% of the year in Texas).
But I got stories about these guys, here are a few:
The Good—The Austin Trip with Chaney and Mal
Okay, I know (I KNOW) that Austin is known for having killer breakfast tacos.
And I believe them! But ironically, these are about homemade breakfast tacos.
We were three girls balling on tight budgets, sue us!
The three of us reunited for a mini road trip to see Sammy Rae and The Friends. I have yet to have that much fun at a concert! I think about it on a bi-weekly basis, MINIMUM.
Plus, it felt like one of my first real “adult” girls’ trips? Not in an explicit way, more in a hyper-independent way! As the kids say, “the plans made it out of the groupchat!”
*go to 3:41 on this video and see the three of us having a PARTY!
The morning after the concert, I made the three of us breakfast in our little Airbnb before heading to a trendy coffee shop.
They were simple: eggs, tomato, avocado, and cilantro, with sweet potato hash.
Were they incredible, absolutely amazing? No, but I love this memory!
The Bad—The Driver’s School Taco Stop
Picture it: August 2015.
I’m a scrawny teenager eager to get my driver’s permit immediately after turning 15, not wanting to feel “behind”, so I spend the last two weeks of my summer vacation in driver’s ed.
It’s a Saturday morning, and as a fun, communal bond (I guess?), the whole class walks together to get tacos from the local joint around the corner.
I can’t remember exactly what I got, but I remember how it made me feel.
I don’t think I had food poisoning, but man, was it close!
For your sake, I’ll spare the details.
The Ugly—“Salsa Vurday”
Fast forward three more summers!
I’m working at an incredibly niche uniform clothing store for the summer. The owners were kind people who, now and then, would treat us to the occasional pizza or breakfast taco.
I give my boss my go-to order at the time.
“Can I get a potato and egg taco with salsa verde?”
My kind, yet very caucasian, boss repeats the order into his phone, but completely butchers “verde” as “vur-day”.
As a result, I get a taco filled with some mystery meat. It was like a spicy breakfast sausage (not chorizo, I know the difference), and it was DELICIOUS!
The ugly part about this story is I was never able to order it correctly to get that same taco, even when I pronounced verde as “vurday”….
The One That Got Away: The Breakfast Taco Video
It would come as no surprise to anyone reading that I was an AV (audio/visual) kid in high school.
The video department at my high school was well-funded and an incredible outlet for creative expression and exploring silly ideas—Shout-out to David Rains, my AV teacher and long-time family friend. This man babysat me when I was six and taught me 90% of what I know about videography and creating captivating visual art.
All that to say, if I had a silly food idea, he’d approve!
One of which being a video ranking all the breakfast tacos within a 5-mile radius of our high school. It was amazing.
My film partner and friend, Anabella, and I woke up extra early to zoom around Portland for the best breakfast tacos.
Our two constants were a bean and cheese, and a potato and egg taco at every spot, ranked by taste, filling proportions, greasiness, and price.
For me, it was a fun (and a very literal) taste of working in food content media, for Anabella, it was an excuse to eat a BUNCH of breakfast tacos.
The winner was from a little shack off the highway outside of an even smaller town than Portland. I kid you not, they were perfect. Unfortunately, I don’t know the name, nor does the shack exist anymore.
What makes it worse is that this video was wiped from our school’s external drive and (as far as I know) was never posted online.
To wrap up, I love breakfast tacos and their humble memories. In all transparency, I don’t order or eat them often anymore.
My pride gets in the way, because I know Houston has some killer taco spots.
But when I eat a bean, cheese, potato, bacon here, despite how delicious or fresh it is, I sigh and think, “It’s not as good as the ones in Corpus.”
Whether that is true or not, nostalgia wins every time!
With Love,
Cara
