First Post! I win cooking!

We are just home from Europe after a long and interesting yet totally exhausting honeymoon. You would think this was a lead-in to comment on oh the this that great little place by the Pantheon! Well, there was a great little place by the Pantheon, but that's not my main topic. My main topic: we came home. We were, as mentioned, totally exhausted, and also, not as mentioned, STARVELING HELP HELP. Airplane food, while actually existing on transcontinental flights, is not enough to actually sustain you in any sort of way once you are off the plane through customs on the train on the SECOND train and walking the mile or so home.

We were starving for our own food that we cooked at our house in our kitchen with our knives and our stove and our own refrigerator. Of course, when we first got home there was no food. So instead we walked exhaustedly up the block to our near and dear and fortunately excellent taqueria, Burrito Real.

Burrito Real and its sister store La Costeña get all kinds of crazy "best burrito in the Bay area OMG I MUST HAVE ONE NOW!" awards, and for good reason. Their burritos are gigantic, fully customizable, and excellent. You get to go along the counter and add whatever strikes your fancy, which, in our case, is refrieds and spanish rice, monterey jack cheese, fresh jalapeño, green onion (they have no idea what you mean if you say "scallion"), guacamole, lettuce, and salsa asada, which is the hottest salsa still mild enough to actually maintain a vegetable savor in with the peppers. The finished burrito must weigh a good pound, and costs something like six dollars, depending on your additions. It is perhaps the most worth it six dollar lunch ever. For instance, I can barely ever finish a full one, and then have to keep the remaining third in the refrigerator until two in the morning, at which point I am noodling around in the refrigerator all "snack snack snack--hey!" and contentedly eat the remaining bits all cozy on the couch watching, say, the last season of Deep Space Nine. It was particularly appropriate after the, er, "burritos" that we had in Helsinki a couple weeks earlier--they were pretty good, considering, and even included a pile of chopped hot red pepper, but were not what anyone from anywhere near the American southwest would ever call "burritos". On the other hand, it was Helsinki! They are excused.

Burrito Real, 580 N. Rengstorff, Mountain View, CA