Food, Glorious Food

It is not often an e-mail nearly makes me weep with joy, but it happened today. First a little backstory...

A couple of decades ago I moved from the Western New York area to here. Over the years, I have discovered that most of the local food is absolutely bland-tastic. I would say it's almost like eating cleverly sculpted servings of Gerber's Baby Food, but that doesn't adequately describe the abject disappointment I feel as I dig into a typical meal. Maybe Southern-fied MREs would be a better taste analogy... I don't know. What I do know, though, is the attempts at Buffalo Wings here are just plain insulting and might even be cause for The City of Light to file a libel suit if the city fathers were feeling particularly litigious.

About five years ago my brother got tired of me comparing myself to Ray Liotta's character at the end of Goodfellas where he is living the rest of his life in the Witness Protection Program, or, to a lesser extent, Steve Martin's character in My Blue Heaven living out the rest of his life in the Witness Protection Program. So we decided to brainstorm solutions to getting me some decent grub and possibly shutting me up about it.

Sure, everyone knows about Buffalo wings. Maybe you even know about Beef on Weck and are still digging phantom caraway seeds out of your gumline years after your last exposure. But the prime standard for Western New York fast food is Mighty Taco. That was our clear objective.

Although my brother has one just down the street, the closest one to me is a little over 500 miles away. Here are a few of the schemes we came up with to deliver psuedo-Mexican awesomeness to my belly:

• Cannonball Run – He hops in his car, me in mine. We drive as fast as possible and meet in the middle, probably in Maryland. Problem: Mighty Taco take-out barely survives a five-minute car ride without getting all mungy – I would hate to see what it would look like after 5 hours sitting on the passenger's seat of a vehicle. No, those electrified thermal bags wouldn't do it, I'm afraid – you would just end up with a partially desiccated nightmare.
• Fraud, Waste, Abuse – We get a friend that is stationed at the Air Force base in Niagara Falls to fly some MT down in a C-130, possibly air-dropping the food as it flew over my house. Problem: aside from the obvious string of federal crimes this solution implies, it would still take several hours to get here and the hard-shell tacos would end up more like floppy-translucent-shell tacos.
• Science! - Order tacos, wrap in Mylar, plunge into liquid nitrogen, and drive down here. Thaw, re-heat, and eat. Problem: The issues involving the cost and logistics of transporting a dewar of LN2 500 miles in a car are dwarfed by the fact that uncontrolled rapid freezing would cause the cell walls of the lettuce and meat to rupture into a greenish brown goo. I am pretty sure the cheese and the shell would survive the process, but at what cost?
• Be an Owner – This is where I buy a Mighty Taco franchise and have all the greasy goodness I want. Problem: There are no franchises available at this time. Oh, yeah, sure. .. “Lack of availability” is the only thing holding me back, here.
• Parts is Parts – My brother or a friend of his gets a job at a local franchise. Instead of filling the taco order (placed when the store first opens) as normal they take each of the parts (meat, cheese, shell, lettuce, etc.) - place them in vacuum sealed bags and then into an awaiting coolder of ice. My brother drives like hell here and we re-heat the meat and assemble the tacos and enjoy. Problem: Actually, this is the best solution we had come up with. Maybe a small bribe could replace the need to actually get a job there...

Believe it or not, we had a few more rough sketches of ideas. Those others, though, were shouted down by the committee of Reason and Common Sense. You heard me. I said we had even worse ideas than the unworkable ones above. Sadness reigned and I resigned myself to a life of (shudder) Taco Bell.

But today I got the heart-stoppingly beautiful news that Mighty Taco now delivers to the lower 48 states! Sure, the menu is limited to only beef and cheese burritos right now, but it is a start! They claim that the taste of home is only a microwave away, which is pretty cool. Even cooler is their claim that it is “perfect for carpetbaggers and snowbirds”. Priceless.

For only $40 (plus $22.70 for shipping and handling – yikes), starting November 9th, one dozen flash-frozen burritos can be delivered to your door in a dry-ice container shipped via 2-day air. I placed my order and the only downer is that their online store is a little clumsy to navigate. Oh, don't get me wrong, it gets the job done. I just couldn't figure out how to buy the burritos AND a t-shirt at the same time without having to fill out the form twice, so I didn't bother to get the shirt. Hmph...I think I read somewhere “Always make it easy for people to give you their money”...

Meh, no biggie – I told my brother the problem and he said he would pick one up for me next time he goes there.

So, yes, I am paying about $5.25 per burrito for the honor of capturing the taste of home once again. I am aware that they may not be all that I remember them being. Heck, my Armistice Day snack might even be downright vile, but this is not the point. Frankly, I am impressed that this possibility even exists. Everything else is just gravy.

If nothing else I will have a story to tell. Maybe I will be telling you, maybe I will be telling the paramedic with the stomach pump, who knows? But, for the price of an Xbox game, I get to recapture a lost childhood comfort if just for a little while.

Totally worth it.