I love immigrants. I’m convinced that if anything is to save the U.S. from its tech-tweaked obliviousness and proudly-uninformed politics, it will be immigrants coming here to kick ass and remind the rest of us how it is done. There are two primary personal experiences that actualize this feeling of love. The first is the rare experience of taking a cab (always driven by an immigrant) and leaving soothed by the reminder that people all over the world still see this as the place to come and work your ass of in relative peace and safety. The second is the torta.
The torta is the ultimate combination of Mexican gastronomic glory and that ultimate form in American dining: the sandwich. Its bread is white-bread hero rolls, and I don’t even care. We eat beans a lot in our house because 1) they’re super tasty, 2) they’re super inexpensive, and 3) they’re super inexpensive, and after paging through cookbooks looking for something out of the ordinary to make for dinner and getting distracted by a recipe for marinating onions, I decided to riff on the torta motif with those onions as the primary ingredient. Continue reading