Frito Pie: Es la comida de mi gente

I've been wanting to do a Come and Eat post, and finally got off my ass.

I'm extremely white, but was born and raised in New Mexico. One of the foods of my homeland is the noble frito pie. In its canonical form, frito pie involves opening one of those mini bags of fritos, pouring in some chile, and topping with cheese and chopped iceberg lettuce. In its canonical form, it's utterly disgusting. The chile is of the lowest possible quality, with lumps of gristly ground beef. The meal is 95% salt. But...the soul of frito pie is a beautiful, glorious thing. A thing that takes very little time to make, is fairly nutritious, and...fucking rocks. This weekend we did the monthly top-to-bottom housecleaning and therefore earned the right to eat frito pie.

So here's how it works. Step 1: Make chile. You know, however you like it. Here's what goes into mine (it's vegetarian). In that little round jar is my special supply of New Mexican red chile powder. Your frito pie will never be as good as my frito pie because you don't have this special supply of red chile powder, but that's okay. Just limp sadly along with your inferior chile.

Step 2: Assemble. Fritos on the bottom, chile on top, cheese, sour cream, taco sauce, whatever. To make it extra hippytastic, I topped it with some tiny greens from the garden. Frito Pie with Micro Arugula...I can just see it on some fancy-ass menu...In my house we also like to honor the frito pie by selecting the most amusingly shaped frito we can find and using it as garnish. Nom.