It's Road Trip Week at Bon Appétit! Which means every day, we'll be sharing stories about food on the long and lonely highway. Or not so lonely if you grew up traveling across the country in a minivan packed with six of your closest brothers, sisters, friends, and Poochie the carsick beagle. So buckle up, and don't make us turn this car around.
You know that smell: You're laying in bed and it's that combination of brewing coffee and bacon, or chorizo. My dad’s breakfast tacos were an incentive to get up. It didn't matter if you were hungover, or if you'd been up all night—you have to get up. Also, in my room growing up, I could hear my mom's rolling pin, it had a very distinctive sound, a wooden rolling pin on marble. It was only ever used for two things, a pie crust, which was an afternoon thing, but in the morning it was homemade flour tortillas. It was like: I'm getting the hell up.
We didn't fly anywhere when I was a kid. We drove. My dad, also named Richard, has always been into cars. He bought a '59 Chevy after he got out of the Navy and drove it from San Francisco to Texas. We'd drive from our home in San Leanna, Texas, to go see family in LA, or Georgia. When we were really little, my dad would pick me up out of bed, put me in my car seat, and get on the road at 5 a.m. There was a thermos full of coffee and a foil package wrapped full of tacos. Road trips, camping, hunting—there were always breakfast tacos. Even now, he sends my brother home from holidays with a stash of tacos to-go.
The fillings varied. The classic was fried potatoes and scrambled egg, and my mom's homemade salsa. We never had jarred condiments or vinegar based hot sauce. It was always hers. It was really simple, and changed with the season. Chiles, garlic, tomatoes. The potatoes were like a slightly thicker potato chip: Take a russet, peel them, cut them in half, and very thinly slice them. Then fry them. Crispy on the outside but tender on the inside. You can never have enough.
Another taco filling was smoked sausage, from Elgin or Lockhart, chopped up and sautéed with onions and a little bit of garlic and then the scrambled eggs were poured in and mixed up together. My favorite tacos in the world are chorizo and refried beans. Then bacon and refried beans. But most of our road trip tacos were egg-based.
My mom made the chorizo and my dad made the beans. The basic chorizo recipe was: Ground pork, flavored with dried chiles, cumin, garlic, and vinegar. Then you let that sit for 4 days to marinade and get funky. Then you cook it down until the water releases and it fries in its fat. She would take that and put egg in it, so chorizo and scrambled egg. It was heaven.
About 6 or 7 years ago, we went to the Texas State Fair. I was old, my parents are old, and it was the same thing: Get up early and drive to Dallas. And my dad made breakfast tacos again. We parked at a road stop and had breakfast tacos and coffee watching the sun come up in Waco. It was one of those amazing moments with your parents, that you don’t realize in your groggy morning state is amazing until you remember it months later when you wake up back in your bed in New York, suddenly craving breakfast tacos.