Esperanza's Kitchen

Tinged with yellow. Basement stairs. Orange-ish. One window. I am too short to see the beige counter above me, but I can see and feel the pale-grey tiles beneath me which always glean a cool, refreshing aura against my skin whenever I press my face against them. Tia would always wash them with a grey rag, rubbing into the dark grout in the between.  Junior is in the basement playing SNES and Tia is wearing a sky-blue dress with white flowers. She is cooking up pale red noodles that are slippery wet and wormy but when she finally serves them up in a bowl, I feel like slurping them down with the little flecks of chili peppers and tomatoes that are flecked in the orange sauce served with the dish. The cabinet is next to the counter top on the left side and is easily 4 to 5 times my size at the age of five. Then there is this gargantuan cast iron stove—black as the grill marks charred on the tortillas she flops right down on the burners. She pulls them out of a plastic baggie littered with bits of Spanish.

Tio was always at the grill in the square green back lawn back in Cicero, grilling to the backdrop of the zooming cars at the racetrack and mariachi bands over the radio. Screaming tires moving at 200 miles-per-hour partnered with rich horns and, at the time indecipherable, Spanish in hearty tones.

I know the beef is outside. Tio lets the meat age in raw mounds of salt—sealed away in clear Tupperware containers with oak green and mauve tops. He does the same with hot dogs, except he prepares them differently before placing them on his propane grill. He slits the hot dogs down the sides—not vertically as if you were about to stuff them with cheese or other such Northern nonsense such as that—but three times on one side, and three times on the other. This way, they sear and pucker on the outside, becoming nice and crispy without the meat bursting and losing the crunchy flavor and consistency of the skin. I don’t remember needing a bun, or any sauces.

White smoke billows out of the grill spilling through and over the grey chain-link fence to the neighbor’s yard. I walk through it on my way to Tia. I ask for a sip from her teal colored water bottle with a little nozzle and – with a smile—she hands it over to me. It is always Diet Coke, but so infused with ice that there is a watery, slick after taste that keeps the bubbly carbonation from building up in my mouth or stomach.

Sometimes yellow-jackets try to climb down the nozzle and their little black and yellow butts stick out the top. While Tia would shoo them away, and like many kids I was naturally afraid of the stingy buggers, I was always curious to see what would happen if I sipped them up too—maybe it would leave a buzz in my stomach in its attempts to fly out.

Whenever my mom would drop me off, I would wait inside next to the brown red recliner waiting in the living room in front of  Cops, the television show. “Bad boys bad boys,” I remember, “whatcha gonna do when they come for you?” This is how my mom usually left me before she went off to work—to the back drop of some shitty, reality-television-spawning show.  I remember once my mom had me stay over on a Saturday night because she had to work late, so I woke up the next morning to catholic mass on the television with Pope John Paul II being dubbed over in Spanish. It was my first experience with Catholicism, and it all happened before breakfast. Deep for a 5-year old.

Early morning meals were different than the back yard grill-fest with its dazzling array of salted hot dogs, bistec, and beef tongue as, usually Tia would cook up some eggs for the whole family—that family being Junior, Julie, Tio— and to a certain extent me. Junior and Julie were brother and sisters from the same father that Esperanza was fostering (she would eventually end up fostering three more children), and she had been babysitting me so long that my mom called her my Godmother. But Esperanza preferred Tia.

Anywho, the eggs would be cooked to a slimy consistency similar to…well..snot. Not saying it sounded delicious, and for sure I had my own apprehensions at the time, but the only other eggs I could remember eating when I was that young were my Aunt’s rubberized scrambled eggs that were paired with eradiated bacon, both bombarded in enough salt to give my cousin enough cholesterol and sodium problems until he was 24. So we will just say that I was open-minded.

So when appropriately goopified, Tia would pour (although dribble may be more appropriate here) the bright yellow eggs onto several corn tortillas, occasionally chopping up some green peppers and frying up some chorizo sausage to be mixed into the concoction. Once the cooking was done, Tio would sit me up on his lap—as there was usually only three chairs at the small, yellow, semi-circle table that occupied the kitchen—and illustrated to me how to wrap the little breakfast burrito before us. What ensued was a simple--yet perplexing--maneuver of folds that elude me to this very day, leading to a perfectly wrapped meal; egg goop securely trapped within for maximum gooey deliciousness. Did I mention there was cheese in these too? Well, there was cheese, and it only added to the warm brew of goo waiting to be devoured.

So this was all quite a lot to take in for this gringito to take, and my poor little pallet hadn’t even tasted the thing yet. Tio would usually take the first bite, somehow managing not to spill any of it on the plate or himself, and then hand it to me. Oh boy, here it goes, I would think. Handle properly, one hand on each side—wait what? Interruption! What is that green sauce you are squirting on to the burrito? Something about jalapenos? What is that? Don’t worry, you say? Well…okay…

My taste buds were never the same. A spicy, sour, and earthy bombastic combination of flavors carpet bombed my tongue in an assertive militaristic conquest of my future desires in food. And while, at the time, I was terrified over the feeling of the Scoville’s and their scorched earth-policy of my mouth, I have had an obsession with hot sauces ever since. Damn you Mexican cuisine, damn you and the wonderful families you produce. Damn you Mexican cuisine and the stove away from home that you are cooked within.