Big Little Restaurant: Taquito's Restaurant in Salinas (CA) Review by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Big Little Restaurant:  Taquito’s Restaurant in Salinas (CA) Review by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) editors gladly sent me off to review a big Mexican restaurant with lots of parking in an easy-to-find location in Salinas (California) across from the California Rodeo.

I liked the restaurant in 2004 and like it better even now in 2019; the restaurant is still there and getting better every year.  My reworked review follows:

Big Little Restaurant

Located in a strip mall across from Sherwood Hall (California Rodeo) in Salinas, Taquito’s reigns as my family’s “let’s eat one meal today” restaurant.  (The portions are rather large.)

Affixing “-ito” to the end of a Spanish word usually makes the word diminutive.  “Small” is not the case with Taquito’s portions, though.

However, I do think of something cute and spirited with the word “Taquitos,” and the restaurant certainly lives up to its name.

Ranchera music (Mexican country and western) greets visitors at the door, and salmon and green crêpe paper streamers stretch overhead between the booths with orange cylinder tile roofs.

Taquito’s has a seating capacity of 130 – perfect for birthday and office parties.

Little touches like heating the nacho chips makes eating at Taquito’s a gratifying experience.  The salsa that accompanies those chips has a definite kick to it, making the pungent cilantro seem even fresher.

I liked the variety of Mexican foods on the menu.  After eating at Taquito’s for the past two years, I have some favorite dishes.

The first is a simple taco salad filled with boiled tongue, lengua.  Tongue meat is tender and has a faint beef flavor.  At Taquito’s, minced, sweet onions come with this dish along with limes.  The combination of tongue, onion, and lime makes for an unusual treat on a soft, corn taco.

My other favorite is a specialty of Michoacan – pozole soup.  Pozole soup is made with lime – processed hominy, pork strips, chili peppers, garlic, and Mexican oregano.  I especially like the flavor that the condiment of shredded cabbage adds to this soup.

But last week, I branched out and ordered a Tostada de Ceviche as my starter, while my husband Laurent had a quesadilla.

Ceviche starts out as raw white fish pieces that are “cooked” by marinating the fish in lime juice for at least six hours.  You add chopped onion, tomato, and jalapeño peppers to the marinated dish along with a vinaigrette to make this a tangy appetizer.

Laurent’s quesadilla measured 7 inches across and was filled with melted cheddar cheese.  I would add some hot sauce to this quesadilla, but Laurent does not like it that way.

For my main dish, I ordered Camarones (shrimp) a la Veracruzana.  The shrimp came in a spicy, tomato-based sauce with jalapeños.  (You can order a milder version of this dish.)

Laurent ate a Sol y Luz platter made up of a charbroiled rib eye steak that came with four jumbo shrimp.

When our daughter Florence comes with us to dinner at Taquito’s, she orders carne asada, charbroiled steak, with flan as dessert.  Flan is made with eggs and milk, which I like.

Meals seem to taste even better on weekends, when the tables are filled with extended families, who meet here regularly for get-togethers.

Everyone seems to smile.

End of Article

Note:  I like mole poblano enchiladas made with Mexican cheese and spicy, chocolate-chili pepper sauce these days.

My favorite Mexican cookbooks are written by Rick Bayless and Diana Kennedy.  The books by Rick Bayless are on Kindle.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Thai-Style Feasting: My Thai Restaurant Review - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Thai-Style Feasting: My Thai Restaurant Review – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Galangal’s flavor makes me think of biting into perfume that lingers on the tongue.  The woody slices in the soup may not be to everyone’s liking, but I ate mine, because galangal is supposed to be good for the lungs and stomach.

I drank a Thai iced tea made with black tea, sugar, spices, and a healthy dose of cream.  This drink is a particularly good antidote for putting out chili pepper fires, if you order spicy food.  The default spiciness of food at My Thai is mild, so be sure to ask for spicy food if that is how you like it.

The food I ate for lunch was so good that I came back for a weekend lunch with my husband Laurent.  We started our meal with chicken satay – like chicken kebabs – and fried shrimp rolls.

The satay was made of flattened, marinated chicken breasts.  Their bright yellow color hinted at turmeric in the marinade and their sweet flavor signaled the use of coconut cream in the marinade as well.

The satay came with a peanut dipping sauce, cucumber relish, and strands of carrot and cabbage.  The peanut sauce was rich (high calorie).  I liked refreshing my palate with the sweet relish.  The tender chicken meat made me want to make a meal out of my appetizer.

Laurent’s fried shrimp rolls looked like skinny baseball bats filled with shrimp.  They came with a sweet sauce that accentuated the flavor of the shrimp.  We both liked this dish and felt we had made a gastronomic discovery for ourselves.

I drank a Thai Singha beer with my appetizers.  The crisp lager reminded me of Corona from Mexico.  Singha goes well with spicy Thai food.

Laurent ordered the most well-known Thai dish as his main course, Pad Thai, while I chose Dusit’s Delicious Duck.

The stir-fried noodles and tofu in Pad Thai hearken back to Thai food’s Chinese heritage.  The sour flavor of the dish makes it uniquely Thai.

Laurent ordered the Pad Thai with beef.  A generous helping of crushed peanuts came on top of the Pad Thai as garnish.

Dusit is the Thai name of My Thai’s owner.  Dusit’s Delicious Duck lived up to its name.  Many slices of duck with skin intact flavored a medley of vegetables made up of baby bok choy, carrots, sweet red pepper, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, and onion in a chili-basil sauce.  The baby bok choy tasted especially good with the duck, offsetting the duck’s richness (fat).

The Bangkok-born owner told me that he serves food as it is prepared in Thailand.  In just a few months, he had developed a regular clientele, who love the real thing.

End of article

My Thai has a new name and owner now, but the Dusit family helped created the love of Thai food on the West Coast as a lasting memory in our community.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Thai-Style Feasting: My Thai Restaurant Review - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Thai-Style Feasting: My Thai Restaurant Review – Part 1 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I first ate Thai food in the mid-1980s at the Thai 55^th Restaurant in Hyde Park, Chicago when I was a student at the University of Chicago.  I always ate sweet-tasting Panang Curry with jasmine rice there.

When I saw the My Thai Restaurant in Marina (California), sweet memories prompted me to query the editors at The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) to do a review.  I described the food, especially an elusive ingredient called galangal and won the assignment.

Thai-Style Feasting is the official name of the article, but I liked the photo caption, too – Bite of Bangkok.  The article follows:

Thai-Style Feasting

“Thai food is totally individual, befitting a country which has never been conquered, yet it has similarities to both Indian and Chinese food,” notes Charmaine Solomon in The Thai Cookbook:  A Complete Guide to the World’s Most Exciting Cuisine.”

I decided to see how My Thai Restaurant fare in Marina held up to her standards after just a few months in existence.  On a recent visit for lunch, I ordered Panang Curry with shrimp over rice. 

There is a major difference between Indian and Thai curries.  Notably, the chile paste used to prepare Panang Curry is made with fresh ingredients like cilantro roots, lemon grass, galangal, and kaffir lime zest whereas Indian curries rely on dry spices for flavor.

I have perused many cookbooks at home to make Panang Curry, my favorite Thai dish.  I asked my waiter if My Thai uses peanuts as a thickener in its version.

“Absolutely not,” he responded.

“We thicken our curry by letting it simmer a long time.”

My Thai takes no shortcuts in the kitchen, but does not keep customers waiting long for their food.

My Panang Curry arrived piping hot within minutes, tickling my nose with a sweet aroma of shrimp paste and coconut cream.  The orange-pink color of the curry matched that of the plump shrimp and contrasted with the flavor of the green beans and peppers, sweet red peppers, and carrots.

The sweet and savory curry no doubt got its salty flavor from Thailand’s namm pla fish sauce.  I ate each curry-coated vegetable leaf of Asian basil and shrimp with bites of flavorful jasmine rice.

The carrots and green beans were crisper than what I expected, but that did not keep me from eating them; I did not want to waste any curry.

The Panang Curry came as part of a lunch with a cup of hot and sour soup, which had fried tofu, mushrooms, and slices of galangal in it.  The Thais use galangal like the Chinese use ginger, which galangal resembles in appearance.

End of Part 1.

To be continued…

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Making a Nature Walk Journal with Children by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Making a Nature Walk Journal with Children by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Many local parks have nature walks set up for families to do outings on a regular basis in all seasons.

Using a local resource like a nature trail allows parents to help young children keep observation journals and introduce them to the recordkeeping necessary for science fair projects.

The first project children could do with a journal concerns the walk itself.  Before going on a walk, parents and children could consult a Peterson’s Field Guide about wildflowers, animal life such as birds, and rock bed formations in an area for a walk.

Using my local community in Marina (California) as an example, we have two parks for doing nature walks that can provide lots of data for journals:

-Locke Paddon Wetlands Park by the library

-Marina Dunes State Park

In each of these parks, a parent could help a child note data in a spiral notebook to make each visit unique:

“Ecosystem Observations”

Where:

Date:

Day of the Week:

Time:

Temperature:

Latitude:

Longitude:

Tide Level:

Flora (Plant Life):

Fauna (Animal Life):

Rock Bed:

(Igneous, Metamorphic, or Sedimentary)

Cloud Types:

(Stratus, Cumulus, Thuderheads)

Water Cycle in evidence in area:

Food Webs in Area:

After making a good journal observation list, the reward could be going to Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Pacific Grove Natural History Museum.

Souvenir Ideas:

Compass

Books:

The Complete Book of Science Fair Projects:  The Classic Science Fair Resource by Julianne Blair Bochinski

Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling by John Muir Laws

(Books like those two above can be found in public libraries as well.)

Spiral Notebooks

Postcards of wildlife – Sets

Tracing Paper for postcard pictures

Colored pencils

Crayons

Books about how to make scavenger hunts for birthday parties and outings with tea parties afterwards

Happy Trails!!!!

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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