She Who Must Be Obeyed and I served our ‘I’d tell you but then I’d have to kill you’ super-secret fajita recipe at a little soiree last night. It was mouth-wateringly delicious as always, demanding a Thanksgiving-level overeat, though for the first time in quite a while my fajitas weren’t the most amazing thing on the table.
The best thing on the table wasn’t even the fresh, hand-squeezed lime juice in the margaritas or the hand-cranked, vanilla bean homemade ice cream topped with raspberries that were still in the field as the sun rose yesterday morning.
Nope, it was the humble Pico de Gallo.
And not just the run of the mill Pico de Gallo (translated as rooster’s beak from Spanish), but Pico de Gallo made from the first genuine, vine-ripened roma tomatoes that are rolling into the markets in our neck of the woods.
These days you can get spanish onions any time of year, as well as decent jalapenos, limes and cilantro.
But the tomatoes of summer are unbeatable.
The Pico last night reminded me of the first time that we tasted real, by god Pico de Gallo. It was in 1982 down in San Antonio as I ground through four years of grad school with She Who Must Be Obeyed making below poverty level wages teaching in a private girls school. We were simply too naive to know how poor we were.
Friends had showed us the humble, probably 250 sq. ft. original outpost of a now famous (some might even argue infamous) taqueria chain which started on the corner of Hildebrand and San Pedro in almost downtown San Antonio.
The story goes that after having their patio furniture stolen (everything) their first night in operation, the fledgling team decided to remain open all night thereafter. Our friends discovered that they started making their fresh Pico de Gallo and other salsa around midnight for the next day, so we began to pull change out of our car seats and couch every few weeks and head down for four tacos al carbon ($0.79 each) and a load of the ultra fresh pico after midnight. A trip down would simply begin with a phone call consisting only of the word ‘taco’; there’d be no discussion – we’d just go.
That first taste of ultra fresh Pico de Gallo was as if we’d never tasted salsa before.
Hunt around today and you’ll see that there are around seven or eight billion recipes for pico and fresh salsa out there. Most are probably edible, an incredibly small percentage genuinely good and just the barest handful great.
Summer Fresh Pico de Gallo in it’s simplistic glory is one of those great ones.
Find those freshest of fresh tomatoes this weekend and go to it. Purists never reach for the garlic or the olive oil here. Try it without…
2 cups roma tomatoes (see above), seeded and chopped
1 medium red onion, chopped
1-2 jalapeno chiles, seeded, chopped
2 tbsp. fresh cilantro, finely chopped
1 lime, squeezed with pulp chopped finely
Kosher salt
Pepper to taste
Prep and mix. Was and prep the vegetables, chop to the desired size and mix well. It will need salt, taste as you go.
Grab the chips or tacos or whatever and go it.
Enjoy.
