Desert Dawgs
Posted By bbinns on February 13, 2009

Supplies for the traveling foodie. Just add butter.
Butter doesn’t do well as a road snack. So when I am lucky enough to hunker down at (high-school roomie) Mary’s empty vacation home east of Scottsdale for six whole nights, I immediately get me a block of the Irish stuff. (Full disclosure: I developed a recipe for Kerrygold once. One recipe. It’s not like they’re my sponsor.) It isn’t clear if one person can go through 8 ounces of butter in six days, but I’m eating in on this stay and willing to give it a try. So I eat butter-sizzled kale, wild salmon baked in foil with butter (and wine, something the car is exceedingly well stocked with), fingerling potatoes five different ways—all involving at least a little bit of butter, and baby zucchini with mint and, duh, butter. But when I set out for Las Cruces this morning, there’s still about two ounces left. Guess I just wasn’t man enough. I contemplate several possible breakfasts that would use 2 ounces of butter, but in the end I eat an apple, wash the sheets, and pack up the car. Mary and Bill will use the butter when they come down from snowy Idaho in ten days. I’ll leave a post-it on the fridge helpfully directing them to its excellence. (Mary is not a passionate cook; the kitchen equipment in the house is testament to this fact, but I already knew. Raising three sons will do that to a person. Luckily, I travel with my own knives, salt and peppermills, good olive oil, smoked paprika, and cocktail shaker.) The peaceful, pretty house has become too heavy a burden, and three of Mary and Bill’s friends are coming in later today to see about buying shares. So, I’m hoofing it down to Las Cruces to wait out the last three days before the start of my month’s rental in Marfa.

Some dogs know how to find their light.

I have found the light, with this desert dog.
Stella is sanguine about getting back on the road; she knows there will always be food, toys, and episodes of wild dancing on hotel beds at the end of each boring day. She’s proved an intrepid hiker (the black-and-white theme looks quite fetching against the subdued shades of the high desert, don’t you think?), and we had only one mild cactus-spine incident on this visit. Two hours south of Phoenix, another kind of desert dog awaits me, in south Tucson: The Sonoran Hot Dog at El Guero Canelo. A local legend, scented on some episode of late-night trip-plan googling, this amalgamation of vehicles, metal structures, and plastic sheeting occupies an unprepossessing corner in a depressed, dusty neighborhood of shuttered hair salons and auto body shops. Clearly, the Sonoran Hot Dog is the thing to have, and I feel an uncharacteristic pang of hunger as I order from one of the four windows and scope the indoor-outdoor dining arrangements.

So many choices, only one dog.
“What’s everything?”
“Beans, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, cheese, mayonnaise, jalapeños…”
Yepper.

When will I learn to READ the menu? And, what's a winie?
Seen along the Road: Pinal Air Park (a vast parking lot for planes); the Continental Divide; the Rio Grande river. And, most thought-provoking: two small trucks traveling in tandem, both piled perilously high with worldly goods (folding chairs are bound to the outside of the scrupulously-strapped edifices; under madly flapping tarps I can glimpse a refrigerator, crib, and dog kennel). The Joad family of today is on the move, to a better place.
Reading the menu is overrated — compared to writing it . . . 🙂