Fantastic Tex-Mex Food

The great thing about Texas being so close to Mexico, is the FANTASTIC Tex-Mex food we had. Everything was unbelieveably delicious compared to what we call "Mexican" food here. Mexican Food in Australia tastes like it came out of a jar/can/packet compared to what we had in Texas. Let me start off with Breakfast.

I'm not a cereal and toast person for breakfast. So the fact there are breakfast tacos everywhere was fantastic news to me!!! We were lucky enough to be staying and working right ontop of a fantastic Mexican restaurant AND food court. This meant we had plenty of time to try out every variety of breakfast taco they had!

Sausage, egg and cheese

Chorizo, egg and cheese

Potato, bacon, egg and cheese

Huevos ranchero wraps

Sausage, egg and cheese sandwich

All breakfast tacos, wraps and sandwiches is served with a little tub of fresh spicy salsa. The best thing to kick start your morning!

The Mexican restaurant directly below our office was Don Patron. We loved their breakfast, so we decided to try their lunch as well.

Complimentary Tortilla chips, salsa and tomatillo salsa

I love how every Mexican place you go into, the minute you sit down, they plonk a huge basket of tortilla chips infront of you. Don Patron provides 2 types of salsa. Your standard red tomato pico de gallo salsa and a green Tomatillo version. Both extremely good! I would've been happy just eating this for lunch! Actually.....there was a day where all I ate was this for lunch and dinner. (Long story)

Tortilla Soup

This bowl was massive. You can easily fit a head into the bowl. By the time my friend was full, the soup level had dropped by 2cms....

I ordered the special of the day. 1/2 pound sizzling fajita platter with charbroiled shrimp.and tortillas. What I didn't realise was that 1/2 pound was JUST THE MEAT. Not the whole dish in total! This thing was hugeeeeee! How huge? Here's a size comparison!

Red Glass is about the size of a Large Maccas coke. The plate to the left is a FULL MAIN MEAL. Compare that to my plate! Luckily I managed to palm most of this off to my friends. And even then, we only got through half of it!

Here's what my friend ordered.

Veggie Chilli Con Queso

HAHAHA Man I want to laugh just thinking about it! My friend assumed that a veggie chilli con queso was veggies, cheese in a tortilla wrap. Not a bowl of pure melted cheese lightly sprinkled with something that looked like vegetables...

Soooooo cheesey!!

Also very......oily......

I think this took my friend a week to digest.....

Despite the huge portions of food, we went back to Don Patron shortly after that. But this time we were prepared!

Another 1/2 pound sizzling fajita mixed platter

We ordered this to share amongst the 3 of us. They looked at us like we were aliens when we only ordered this one dish. But yet, the 3 of us was stuffed to the brim by the time we finished this!!! Anyway, we weren't here for the food.....

Margarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrita!!!

Chips to go with our JUG of margarita

Don Patron Shot

Yes.....that is a shot. And yes.....it is in a tumbler. Texas size remember?

Speaking of Texas size......how about a Texas size margarita??

Size comparison

Weeeeee! Mini fishbowl size margaritas! This was at Cyclone Anaya's Kitchen. We deliberately went there for their fishbowl margaritas!

More tortilla chips!

Botanas Mixtas

Grilled shrimp sautéed in a lemon garlic sauce, beef quesadillas served with guacamole, sour cream and pico de gallo and chicken breast strips with spicy barbeque dipping sauce.

Crispy beef taco, homemade tamale, beef enchilada,guacamole, Mexican rice and beans

Lobster Enchiladas

Two lobster filled enchiladas with white Mexican cheese topped with special chardonnay cream sauce and roasted pine nuts. Served with Mexican rice and beans.

Carolina's mixed grill

Beef fajitas, baby back ribs and three camarones a la parrilla served with shredded cheese, guacamole, pico de gallo, sour cream, Mexican rice, beans and tortillas. When this was put infront of me, my jaw dropped. And that was before I realised an entire STEAK under my rack of ribs! Luckily, 2 of my friends decided to share the Lobster Enchiladas, so I was able to palm of heaps of food to them.

The meal came with either refried beans or charred beans. I opted to try the charred beans.


This was really nice. Almost like a light baked bean soup with extra herbs in it. This beats refried beans any day!

Despite finishing an entire fishbowl margarita, our local friend insisted on making us try some high end liquor. He just couldn't live with watching us drink cheap liquor!

Patron shot

This is actually tequila. After the last xmas, the smell of tequila actually makes me gag. This, however, was amazingly smooth. It doesn't taste anything like tequila!

Belvedere shot

I've never been able to drink Vodka straight. Even if I take it like a shot it makes me feel quesy. This shot however, was smooth and velvety. I could be drinking this all night! Except one Texas size shot is about 2.5 normal shots. Which means.....I effectively had 5 shots of spirits AND a fishbowl margarita....

Of course, I can be quite a slow learner. Which is why we went to El Patio when we found out about the BLUE margaritas!!!

Mahi Mahi fish tacos

I was so glad I got this. It was the smallest meal out of everything we ordered! hahaha AND it tasted great. I wish they had deep fried the fish for a bit of extra crunch though!

Mixed fajita/enchilada platter of some sort

Chicken fried chicken

Rack of baby back ribs

Flying Fajita Sisters

I was going through my photos and realised I never blogged about the Flying Fajita Sisters (FFS - in the nice way). I guess I forgot all about it as it was on the day that I found out my Granddad passed away. But I had already made a date with Moishii to have a catch up as I didn't see him for almost 2 months. I had a quick look on the net for something in Glebe and picked the FFS. We met up and decided it was time to get trashed. Its been awhile. We walk into Liquorland and pick up 2 bottles of wine. One each.

We get to the restaurant and we're seated upstairs. I loved the decor of the place. It was so cute and charming. My only complaint would be all the wooden floors and walls didn't help minimise the sound. We ended up screaming at each other half the night. Mind you, that could be because of the alcohol. Talking about the alcohol, they had the strangest wine glasses. They're curved at the very top in such a way, you can barely drink from the glass without having to pour it down your throat. Once we mastered the technique, we downed half a bottle each before the food came out:

Trio of dips with corn and purple corn tortillas

Chicken Burrito with corn salsa and guacamole

Pulled pork Tamale with mole sauce

The food was fantastic. So fresh and flavoursome. It was a real contrast to the Baja Cantina, where the food seems to be heavier. We spent a good part of the night sitting there, eating, drink, laughing and talking about going on holidays again. All I can say is, good thing flight centre was closed.

After about 3 hours, the noise started getting to us, so we paid our bill and went to San Churros. No photos here since my camera died. But we gorged on churros and coffee before heading home for the night. I think I might have been tipsy...

Welcome to 2007!

Happy New Year!! I can't believe how quickly 2006 has come and gone! It only seemed like yesterday that I was at Circular Quay with a bunch of Melbournians celebrating the coming of 2006! So much has happened in the past year and so quickly it all seems like a blur. I don't even know where to start. But here are a few highlights of 2006 for me:

• Having a nice TAME holiday at the Hunter Valley with a bunch of friends
• Figuring out that I don't like tame holidays so I went to the Blue Mountain with Moishii only
• Blue Mountains wasn't wild enough which led to our binge drinking holiday at the Gold Coast where I managed to get a guy to pull out his sack for me
• Getting my first bonus at work!!!!
• The birth of my new niece Ashley!
• Having the entire family home for Christmas - First time in over 10 years.
• The many weddings of my friends
• Finding out one of my really good high school friends is pregnant!!
• Taking up Volleyball - My new obsession
• Organising a successful surprise birthday party for Moishii
• Socceroos in the World Cup!!

So what are my New Years Resolution for 2007? Well, I usually don't do resolutions because I don't stick to them. But this time, I think theres a few resolutions I might be able to stick to...atleast until July 2007.

• Drink Less e.g. No more alcohol for breakfast! Its basically getting too expensive for me to drink. I practically need to drink a fish bowl of spirits to get SLIGHTLY TIPSY!
  
• Save more - Turkey, Greece (Mykonos) and Italy in July!!
• Exercise more - so I can run down the beach of Mykonos in a white bikini and blonde wig Baywatch style! MuahAUAh

I wasn't even going to celebrate New Years this year. With the weather forecast and all, I just wanted to curl up at home and watch the fireworks on TV. But then Cookies told me she's got her cousins apartment for the weekend in the city and to bring alcohol. Of course thats an offer I can't resist!

So I rock up bright and early in the morning so I could go to the fish markets with MnM for brunch before we head off to buy supplies for the night:

Fresh Oysters with Tetsuya's Vinaigrette

Seafood platter for 2

Jumbo prawns

Salmon Sashimi

Seaweed Salad

Flying fish roe

After the fish markets, we headed over to Broadway shopping centre to buy our supplies for the night. Since the alcohol was already taken care of the day before (Think trolley and Dan Murphy's) it was just food to soak up the alcohol. And boy am I glad that we bought some really carby stuff to help soak up the alcohol......

SOME of the alcohol.....

Vodka Jelly shots and Cowboys

Oh, did I mention that we only had 3 people drinking??? hehehe its alright, we didn't waste the shots. Although mind you, it might not be a good idea to drink and make jelly shots.....Since we didn't have a measuring jug to make the jelly, I decided to just wing it. I boiled some water, mixed just enough water with my aeroplane jelly until it dissolves, the poured in the vodka. How much? I'm not too sure. But after 2 packs of jelly mix, we had less than 1/4 of a vodka bottle left.

A few things to note, NEVER put your vodka in the freezer before making the vodka jelly shots. The minute I poured the vodka in, the jelly started to solidify! So instead of pouring the jelly mixture in, I was spooning GLOBS of them into the shot glasses. And always try to measure your vodka! My jelly shots were soooooooo potent, it was impossible to eat without gagging on the excess vodka! We decided to mix the jelly shots into our punch to help dilute the alcohol content.

So our lovely punch, mixed in a rice cooker because we didn't have a punch bowl, went from this:

Batch #1 without the Vodka Jelly Shots

To this:

Batch #2 - With the Blueberry Jelly Vodka Shots

Batch #3 - punch with Lemon and Lime Vodka Jelly Shots

The blue one has got to look the nastiest.....whilst the yellow one.......well......we squeezed a whole bunch of lemon into it so it had a sour acidic smell, but god it tasted good!!

Inbeteen us drinking punch and taking shots, we decided to head around to corner to Baja Cantina on Glebe Point Rd for dinner:

Vegetarian Tacos with black beans and rice

The black beans were way to salty. We basically all left our beans untouched since I could feel my arteries hardening with every bite. The vegetarian tacos were a real disappointment since the fillings in the taco was black beans, rice, lettuce and cheese with sour cream. You've already got a plate full of beans and rice, but to get tacos also filled with beans and rice was way too much. The least they could've done was to put some fresh salsa or something in the tacos. Stick to the meat ones next time.....

Chicken Suiza

The chicken was shredded and cooked in a creamy sauce, wrapped in a tortilla, covered in more cheese and sauce and baked. This was really nice and I might actually order it next time!

Baja Fish Tacos

I got my usual Baja Fish Tacos. The fish was fresh and the batter was light and crispy. It was served with coleslaw wrapped in tortilla. Next time I'm going to order some extra salsa to go with it. But this dish does not disappoint!

So after dinner, it was back to the apartment for more drinks and some UNO attack. We were going to watch the fireworks on TV, when at the last moment we remembered that theres a roof on the apartment! In our rush to get up there for the 9pm fireworks, I left my camera behind. No problems though, because I remembered it for the midnight fireworks!

The view wasn't as good as the one we had at Circular Quay last year, but we didn't have to deal with the crowds or the waiting and pushing and shoving. And the plus? We could rock up in our PJs and slippers and be back home within 2mins of the show from finishing to have more drinks!

We ended up crashing into bed around 4 am. It wasn't until about midday when we woke up desperately needing some sort of liquid, preferrably non-alcohol based. I think after 3 buckets of alcohol, we've had more than enough (See my NY Resolution up above!!)

We headed around the corner to Wok Master on Parramatta Rd (Between Broadway shopping centre and UTS) for some hangover cure:

House soup

I would've been happy if they served me a massive bowl of this for lunch. The soup was light and refreshing. The pork ribs and carrots served in the bowl was nourishing and perfect for a hangover cure (Not that I had a hangover). Its like the antidote for alcohol!

Combination Won Ton Noodle Soup

Ahhhhhh Vegetables. Sweet refreshing crunchy vegetables. And the soup.....I needed something hot to settle my stomach after a night of drinking. Won Ton Noodle Soup is such a big comfort food for me. I don't know why, but ever since a kid, this has been one of my favourite dishes. In year 9, after Chinese school on Saturdays, I will always go to Chinatown with my friend for a bowl of Won Ton Noodle soup and she will have her Beef Brisket Noodle soup. Good memories!

Roast Duck Rice Noodle Soup

Cookies seemed very happy with her bowl of noodles, commenting on how meaty and juicy the duck was. And guess what? Each bowl was only $7.80 and they were massive! We will definately be back!

So eat lots, drink moderately and have a great 2007! *Cheers*

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!