Follow Thru

My goal this weekend was to find a carniceria: A Mexican meat market. Not THAT kind of meat market, butcher shop. The carniceriasI have been using for the past couple of years have moved or gone out of business. The Mexicans have all kinds of what I call “flat meats”, different cuts of meat cut very thin for different kinds of Mexican dishes I suppose. I have found the flat meat very convenient for the Asian cooking I like to do. This time of year I like to marinate the pieces of meat and barbeque the meat and serve over rice and mixed vegetables. I don’t work off a recipe but hen I was in university we lived for a while in “married housing” and made some very good friends from Malaysia. The summer were in married housing a lot of us in the complex congregated nightly round the playground/sand box with little hibachi’s and grill dinner. All of the Asians would bring their rice cookers and grill their flat meat and vegetables and we all shared. It was fun.

Dianne helped in my flat meat quest and found a couple carnicerias in Salt Lake. In fact going into Salt Lake on Friday evening in search for one of the carnicerias that we ended up eating at Café Med. Café Med is just a couple of blocks from one of the markets. Café Med is a nice place, hidden treasure, and kinda of upscale but not bad—actually Dianne was much better dressed then I. I don’t even think I wore shoes and basically hid my feet with my back pack. I know that’s cheep but hey, that’s how I roll.

The Mexican meat market we found used to be a cigarette shop. I was surprised to see the smoke shop gone but intrigued to see it had morphed into a meat market. We pulled the van into the parking area a little after 8:00 p.m. and I was surprised to see there was limited parking available not that there was sufficient parking but that all the parking were taken. Dianne finally parked on the other side of the building and I powered into the market. The place was wall to wall stuffed with Hispanic people. I am always impressed at being in a place where no English is spoke at all. Kids screaming, old ladies picking and pointing at stuff and everyone staring at the gringo in the power wheelchair. I powered myself over to the meat section looked at all the different kinds of meat wandering what they all meant. After a minute or two I finally got the attention of the butcher and pointed to wanted holding up three fingers to signify the poundage I wanted. Soon, I was grinning and back to the van.

I made to different marinades and slipped locked half the beef in each.I was going to grill on Sunday but Sunday came and we were hot and busy. We shopped and wandered all over the valley I even got rained on at Wal-mart. But the truth is I was exhausted by the time we got home and nothing got grilled last night and I don’t know just when I will be able to get back to my flat meat.