I’d been hearing about this mexican place on buttonwood for awhile now. Let’s go to buttonwood, let’s go to buttonwood! What the hell is buttonwood? Buttonwood is a street off of 10th street, just south of spring garden. There, you will find this little hidden gem – Jose’s. The sign says Jose’s Groceries, Spanish & American Food. That’s very weird because when you go inside, there’s no groceries, and they serve Mexican food. And f’ing good mexican food to boot!

We started off with chips and salsa. The chips were super crunchy and not greasy at all. The pico was fresh. We also had some genuine mexican soda. Z had coke and I had a sidral mundet. Ah, how I love apple soda! It’s one of my favorite things about mexico. I wish the american soda conglomerates would wake up and start marketing apple soda in the US. They have no idea how well it would do. Seriously, it would go gangbusters!

Z got the steak tostadas. They were supposed to come with some refried beans on it, but I guess they forgot. So he asked for a dish of beans and they happily obliged. My word, these beans were so good. Some of the best beans I’ve had in any mexican place in Philly. Yum. He also asked for some green salsa and they gave us some excellent and spicy salsa verde.

I went with a spicy chicken torta. A torta, for those of you not familiar, is a mexican sandwich. It can come with whatever filling, but comes in a rather large and flatter roll. There’s also beans, veggies, cheese, and some sauce. I love these things. I was first introduced to tortas on my last trip to Mexico. I was in Mexico City for work, visiting Coca-Cola of all places, and on one of the days we went to have tortas for lunch. I remember this clearly as when we were walking to the torta place, from literally across the street, I got super tired. Whew! This was when the whole altitude thing hit me. I would walk for 10 yards and be winded. It was crazy. In any case, they love them some tortas over ther. My tortas in mexico were much more plain, with just meat and a sauce. They were also dirt cheap. I can certainly see why they love em over there. I’ll take a torta over a hamburger or turkey sandwich any day!

Jose’s

469 North 10th St

215-765-2369

This past weekend was beautiful, and perfect for a bbq. A fajita fest was had in Fairmount park on Saturday. Hosted by a native Texan, W was super serious about it. You should have seen all the meat, chicken, shrimp, and veggies that he spent hours marinading. It was quite impressive. You should have seen E’s grill too. It was a professional grill with 3 sets of burners, perfect for fajita meat cooking. We were all in awe of it. It’s portable, to boot, and can be put together in 3 minutes.

I myself had to bring some vittles, so I brought some skirt steak. Skirt steak is really the cut of meat you want to use when making fajitas. It’s a cheap cut of meat, or at least it’s supposed to be. If you’re in texas it’s cheap, if you’re in Pennsylvania, it’s not. Pish. It took me many trips to random grocery stores to find it. It’s like hunting for treasure! And when I did, I found it at my nearest crappy Super Fresh, and I snagged the last one. Because it’s tough, it has to be marinaded. So here’s a pseudo-recipe that I got from the Big T, another Texan.

Skirt steak fajitas:

Skirt steak (good luck finding this)
A beer (ideally Shiner Bock, but Yuengling Lager works too)
Lime juice (a good amount of it)
Chopped garlic (I used a lot)
Sliced onions (again, a lot)
Hot sauce – vinegar based (I used crystal’s and threw in a bunch of swigs)

Really, I don’t know exact amounts so just make it up as you go, that’s what I did and it worked out just fine. Let this marinade for at least 12 hours, making sure all of the meat is covered. Rotate it a bit as it’s marinading in your fridge. Then grill it up, to maybe medium, or however y’all like it. For the fixins we had guacamole, W’s homemade salsa, cilantro, sour cream, cheeses, and such. Really, put whatever you want on it. It’s all good. It was a good first bbq of the season, I’m hoping for a lot more. I’m also hoping I find some better places to find reasonably price skirt steak. Let me know if you know of any!

Instead of pizza friday, which was rescheduled to pizza wednesday, we had a pre-cinco de mayo celebration at work with some mexican-style food. I say mexican-style as it came from another random non-mexican catering company. It was a burrito and taco bar, also some flan and cookies, and some virgin drinks.

I went with a burrito. They had ground meat and grilled chicken and the expected fixins. They also had vegetarian filling option, of some random veggies in what seemed to be an indian-based type of flavor. There was definitely some curry or cumin in there. It wasn’t mexican whatsoever, but I liked it alot. I basically used it as a salsa for my chips.

I loaded my plate up with tri-colored chips, filled my flour tortilla with some ground meat, spanish rice, some black beans, and random fixins. It wasn’t anything special and not anywhere near authentic. But when you’re hungry, it does the job. I also had a pina colada, and somehow rum found its way into it. Oh, it was delish. And I felt it right away. Seriously. It was a nice buzz. I had some of the flan, and it looks like a big old mess in the container, but it was quite delicious. I could have eaten many pieces of this. And I should have, as I needed more food in my belly to soak up all that rum…