Hay Comida en la Casa: A Breakfast Ritual in My Blood

On a good morning, my routine looks like this. I rise at about 6 a.m. to feed Ramona and Chiquis, my beagle mix and trash kitty. Once my kitchen is clean, I pull out my electric kettle, grind a scoopful of single-source, locally roasted coffee beans, and then grab the carton of free-range eggs from the refrigerator. I crack one into a bowl, add a little milk, and mix the ingredients together before tossing it on a frying pan. This is my daily ritual: attempting to make the perfect breakfast egg. Sometimes, it’s an omelet with a splash of Tapatío or Valentina, or some crumbles of queso fresco or leftover chorizo. Sometimes it’s scrambled in a breakfast burrito consisting of just a warmed flour tortilla and a strip of thick-cut bacon.

How I prepare my breakfast is very much influenced by my bicultural upbringing in the 1980s and ’90s in the Pacific Northwest and Southern California. My mom was born in 1956 to a Mexican American household and came up in the San Fernando Valley. By all accounts, her parents were very much concerned with fitting in with the Joneses, pressured to raise the all-American family and downplay their Mexican roots. From what I understand, my dad had a somewhat rural upbringing in western Washington and Hood River, Oregon, by way of Oakdale, California — about a 30-minute drive northeast of Modesto and deep in the heart of the state’s San Joaquin Valley. Just recently, as I’ve begun to unpack my family history, I learned that his birthplace goes by the moniker “Cowboy Capital of the World.” When I was little, dad told me that his family was a part of the massive wave of poverty-stricken Southwest Americans known as Okies who traversed to California for a better life.

My parents split up when I was four years old, and my dad remained in our lives off and on; his side of the family helped to raise my sister and me over the next 10 years. Shortly after my mom, sister, and I relocated to the San Fernando Valley, we got word that he died from a drug overdose. Now in majority-Latino Southern California, with what felt like severed ties from my paternal family and the typical teen pressures associated with the desire to fit in, much of my young adulthood was spent largely ignoring my white side and looking to my Chicana half to inform how I would move about in the world.

The thing is, there’s no escaping those data points that both of my parents passed along to me and my sister. Regardless of how I arrived at my tendency to “pick a side,” I am the sum of them both. In my house, although we primarily spoke English, hay comida en la casa was a familiar refrain, one that was thrown about in response to our cries for Happy Meals, or that signaled that payday was a long ways away and that we would have to make due with what was already in our cupboards. What’s in my house and pantry now, as an adult? It’s those collective memories that signaled to me what food I should eat and why.

Sometimes, I’ll give my egg a nice fluffy scramble that I can use to fill a warm tortilla for breakfast tacos or burritos. I love the complexity of homemade tortillas de nixtamal — nutty and formidable, flexible yet sturdy with an intoxicatingly sweet aroma — and recently started making them myself at home. Otherwise, I’ll pick up a package of freshly made flour tortillas from La Gloria Bakery in Detroit’s Mexicantown district, which are bubbly and covered in toasty little brown spots and pack a punch of flavor.

I haven’t always paid such close attention to the quality of a tortilla: Only recently did I begin to appreciate the ancestral wisdom that is passed down when we take the time that our abuelas (and their abuelas before them) did to preserve culture, one masa ball at a time.

We grew up with Mission or Guerrero packaged tortillas, only occasionally treated to the pillowy flour tortillas my mom would pick up from Carrillo’s Tortilleria in San Fernando. My mom went from daughter to teen wife to young single mom all before the age of 30 — a trajectory that I think about often as I’ve reached milestones in my own life that would have never been possible with two kids. A few weeks before my sister was born, my mom’s mother, my Granny Mary, died at 59 from a stroke. My grandmother wasn’t the type to invite others into her kitchen to cook, but my mom did observe. Even though my sister and I never had a chance to enjoy our grandmother’s cooking, we recognized our mom’s approach as nothing other than authentically Mexican.

My mom held all household roles: breadwinner, caretaker, mother, and father, all on top of completing undergraduate and graduate school. As such, Mom’s Mexican and Tex-Mex cooking was made with convenience in mind. My mom was an expert at producing an assembly line of ingredients, easy enough for two small girls to hop on by themselves to build our own meals. Tostadas were a constant, just a corn tortilla fried up until it’s stiff, that we’d slather with refried beans, a scoop of pico or diced tomatoes, shredded cheddar, maybe a little lettuce or olives. A dollop of Daisy? Sure, why not. For a sweet snack, we could similarly crisp up a flour tortilla and spread melted butter across it before dusting it with a sparkly finish of cinnamon and sugar. She also filled our cupboards with the organic ingredients she’d pick up at the local food co-op. Chocolate treats made with carob beans, flavored honey sticks, fruit leather. Never grapes (she tells me that while an undergrad at Evergreen State College, when I was in preschool and kindergarten, she tabled for the United Farm Workers to raise awareness about the working conditions of farmworkers.) Subtle, unspoken ways to model healthful, socially conscious eating choices.

Mom’s store-bought tortillas illustrated to me the power of resourcefulness and resilience, and that you don’t need a great deal of money or a shoe box filled with recipe cards passed down through the generations to whip up something that’s nourishing and comforting. I’m reminded of this every time I’m throwing down in the kitchen, exhausted from a long day of deadlines.

Sometimes it’s a single-egg omelet sprinkled with mozzarella and some chile crunch. This omelet is paired with a perfectly seared fatty ribeye, cooked on a hot, seasoned skillet, brushed with melted butter and rosemary and fish sauce to achieve a charred outer crust, locking in a pink juicy interior. It’s the perfect cowgirl meal for one, and I definitely picked up on this from my dad.

My dad was involved in our lives as much as he could be, but he struggled with alcohol and drug addiction; sometimes months would go by without knowing where he was or if he was okay. He had long, wavy hair, a bushy strawberry blond Yosemite Sam-looking mustache, smoked Camel straights and had crooked teeth, and wore collared shirts with the sleeves rolled up; had he lived past his 40s, I imagine he’d be rocking a bushy white Sam Elliot ’stache by now. When I was in fifth or sixth grade, he lived in a school bus on a sprawling organic farm in Clackamas County owned by an old friend of his from the Vietnam War, where my sister once chopped off a chicken’s head, leaving it to flap about wildly until it eventually fell to the ground. The household’s matriarch cooked it for dinner.

My dad’s cooking reminds me of something a cowboy might make on the open trail. My dad was a meat-and-potatoes guy, but his defined palate understood how to put together a chophouse-worthy meal, even on a church food pantry budget. Bacon fat-cooked green beans were a regular side dish. He loved experimenting with fresh ingredients. One time, he got his hands on some rhubarb and made it into syrup. I’m not sure I fully appreciated it at the time, but as an adult, I know what to do with raspberries if they’re on the verge of going bad: Make a compote topping, a sweet variation of my dad’s syrup.

Coffee was non-negotiable. He worked the second or third shift off and on for years and as a result, he trained me to make a fresh pot of coffee for him just before he woke up in the afternoon. He had a particular process, using a plastic pour-over maker placed on top of a mug. Too many grounds and it came out bitter, too little and it may as well be water. Always whole beans that you grind at home. Never instant. Always black, unless we had an espresso machine; then steamed milk for a latte, which he taught me how to make. He made sure I understood the assignment; it became a skill that would reap rewards into adulthood.

I’m pretty sure that he picked up a taste for Vietnamese food from his Air Force days during the war, and it showed up every now and then when we ate: When my sister and I wanted McDonald’s or some other fast food, he’d try to persuade us to try Vietnamese instead. He usually had a bottle or two of some fiery hot sauce in the refrigerator door, the rarer or harder to procure, the better. Often, a meal with my dad wasn’t really about the food at all, but rather a chance for him to share war stories: At times they came off as a retelling of an adventure, afforded to him because he raised his hand and volunteered to serve. Other times, they’d be horrific, violent scenes that could have come out of Apocalypse Now. He loved cuisines of the world and technique and transforming the mundane into complex dishes that I still think about. I just wished he’d come up with some better dinner table conversation.

Sometimes my breakfast ritual might involve picking up fresh produce from Detroit’s Eastern Market, bright and early on Saturday morning. I load my granny cart with bags of locally grown salad mix, or this time of year, a bunch of asparagus and whatever fruit is in season (hello peaches, hi blueberries). I reach for a carton of colorful eggs, a container of microgreens, along with a crusty loaf of sourdough from a booth set up by a farm from Ann Arbor. Afterward, I may stop by my favorite bougie neighborhood shoppy shop for a jar of chile crisp; a bag of ethically sourced, locally roasted whole coffee beans; and an oat milk latte; followed by one last stop at the Mexican grocery store for queso, cactus water, epazote, cilantro, limes, and dried hibiscus flowers. If I’m in Dearborn or Hamtramck, two predominantly Arab communities in metro Detroit, I might grab a bag of pita bread instead of tortillas and maybe some olives and hummus from the olive bar.

My shopping routine reflects my own personal patchwork of Oregon and LA, Mexican and hippie granola, childhoods out west and adulthood in the Midwest. It’s summers picking blackberries while building forts in the woods with my sister and the neighbor kids. The hum of ThunderCats dubbed in Spanish on the television at my grandparents’ house in Mission Hills with the subtle scent of citrus wafting through the back patio. Camping on the Oregon Coast in my dad’s old-school Volkswagen bus. The paletero’s cart parked outside of my high school on a hot September afternoon. Shopping at Saturday Market in Portland. Ending a night of clubbing with bacon-wrapped hot dogs. Skipping middle school while sipping short mochas at the oldest Starbucks in Oregon.

When I get home, I heat up a kettle, pull out my Chemex glass pour-over coffee maker, and brew myself a pot as I unpack my bounty. While the coffee’s brewing, I fill a mason jar with some hibiscus flowers and water to steep on my porch in the Detroit sun for a few hours for a batch of agua fresca. I crack open the light brown shell of an egg on a small ceramic bowl. I allow the butter to sizzle on the warm frying pan, but try not to let it brown. My nostrils flare open from the scent of the chile oil as I sprinkle it across my eggy canvas, which sizzles alongside a market discovery of bright green breakfast sausage flavored with chile verde. I open up my cupboard and scoop some nixtamalized masa harina into a mixing bowl, a splash of warm water, and begin kneading the mixture until it forms into a ball. I return to the stovetop and add some grated sharp cheddar to my omelet and a handful of microgreens, along with some crumbles of that sausage. I turn on another burner to warm the comal that I’ll use to make a quick dozen tortillas. I ladle the glistening, perfectly folded omelet into a warm blue corn tortilla, take a sip of coffee.

My pantry is informed by my Pacific Northwest and Southern California upbringing, seasoned with the knowledge imparted by my Chicana mom and white daddy. And now with a full belly and a little kick of caffeine, I’m ready to tackle the day.

Victor Bizar Gómez is Mexican-American illustrator currently vibing in Portland, Oregon.