The Crispy Taco Challenge: Second Breakfast, Second Edition
Hi! Welcome back to Second Breakfast, a monthly-ish newsletter written by me, Meghan McCarron. Two reminders: this newsletter is free, and you can unsubscribe anytime here.
A couple weeks ago, I left therapy with an assignment: go eat crispy tacos. I do exposure therapy for anxiety, so it’s not weird to end our weekly video call with a trivial-sounding assignment (go for a 15 minute walk daily; don’t rehearse what you’ll say on that phone call; tweet something and then don’t check your mentions, ahhh). But eating crispy tacos was never something I’d needed help with.
That was before I burned my esophagus, and spent months on a soft food diet to heal. My whole approach to food, and what I even considered a meal had to change. When normal, enjoyable foods turn painful and suspect, it messes with your head. Now, I'm trying to go back to normal.
My crisp taco assignment came from a piece of good news: my esophagus is totally healed. Last month, I got an endoscopy, which means I was knocked unconscious so my doctor could stick a camera down my throat. When I was wheeled into the procedure room, the techs and nurses asked why I was there, so wearing two masks, my palms sweaty with nerves, I told them about putting a morsel of béchamel in my mouth so hot my body swallowed it automatically, like a gasp of surprise. Like every other medical professional I've described this to, they found my injury darkly fascinating.
I feel sort of nostalgic for that day at the medical center; it was nice to make small talk to strangers, even if they encouraged me to recount my trauma before pumping me full of anesthesia. One of them patted me rather aggressively and said, “Go to sleep, go to sleep.”
I woke in another room to more patting; I said, “I thought you were my cats.” My doctor told me my esophagus looked completely healthy. No scarring, no ulcers, no nothing. She’d taken a photo ever centimeter to be sure. I got a printout of all the pictures, which were very pink. Soon after, my therapist asked if there were foods I was still avoiding, even though my doctor had pronounced me healthy, and I said yes duh of course, and so we came up with the taco assignment.
It took me a couple days to get over to my neighborhood taco truck on Venice Boulevard next to the Smart and Final, which previously advertised its specialty as Cemitas Poblanas and now due to Los Angeles’s birria-mania, is painted bright red with BIRRIA splashed across the side in bold white letters. The consommé container was so full it spilled onto my car’s feral and dirty hood, which was maybe not the best place to eat lunch to begin with. I picked a taco out of its styrofoam container, dipped it in the consommé, and took a bite. A crispy taco eaten on the street in Los Angeles, an essential pleasure of the city I had not partaken in for months, went down just fine.
Since then, I've completed the schnitzel assignment, the toast assignment, and have ongoing projects involving coffee and wine. Recently, my partner and I ordered from Qin West Noodle, one several great Chinese restaurants clustered around UCLA, and I made sure to get their liang pi, which is a dish of thick, fat noodles slicked with chili oil. I had desperately missed my mouth burning with earthy, fruity chili. I can’t wait for it to happen again.
For Eater, I wrote about how recovering from this burn forced me to learn how to eat to take care of myself, which largely involved consuming as much ice cream as I wanted without worrying if I would only eat ice cream forever. (I am… kind of sick of ice cream.) Now, I’m confronting the food fears the burn itself gave me. Next up: reviving my sourdough starter, and getting back to baking rustic, crunchy bread.
Some things I’ve enjoyed this past month(ish):
On Eater: I think a lot about Americans' emotional attachment to beef, and Nadra Nittle has a great breakdown of why our country won't quit it even as it's destroying literally everything
Elsewhere: Tejal Rao wrote really beautifully and complexly about her recovery from another injury: the loss of smell due to COVID-19
A newsletter to subscribe to: I started writing this newsletter because I love love reading other people’s newsletters, and there are so many, but I’ll keep myself to one per issue. I absolutely adore A Piece of Cake by Bill Clark, the former co-owner of Meme’s and one of the funnest and most creative bakers out there
A show to watch: I wrote about the optimistic maximalism of the Netflix show Nadiya Bakes. It truly is a delight.
A recipe to try: Nadiya Hussain’s chocolate cheesecake brownies are out of this world; I had one as a snack with some of Yes Plz’s new(ish) decaf coffee every day for a week, and it made my second breakfast extra-enjoyable.
A programming note: You might notice this email is now coming your way via Buttondown rather than Substack. The TL;DR is I really like Buttondown's ethos and functionality, and Substack's play to be both platform and publisher makes me increasingly leery. Since I started this newsletter recently, and it's not a source of income, for me switching was not that complicated. Ideally, little changes for you at all, because when it comes down to it, email is email.
A good video: I want to try every single one of these ways of eating bread!
