when you want, where you want.
Rachel Kushner Wants Her Tacos Hot Enough to Hurt
Illustration: Ryan Inzana
When novelist Rachel Kushner — her latest book, Creation Lake, is in paperback this week — cooks at home, her meals draw on whatever is fresh around her: sprigs of rosemary from the garden, ruby-red grapefruit from a tree in her backyard, an avocado from her neighbor. This week, though, Kushner hopped around her (many) favorite taco joints in Los Angeles while making sure to budget a night for her once-weekly pork chops at home, one of her favorite things to cook. Kushner was a vegetarian for 30 years, until the pandemic. Meat, she finds, suits her. “I immediately think of some primal scene when the first person put the first piece of meat over the first fire by some accident,” she says, “and then had just, like, a body orgasm.”
Sunday, June 22
Woke up in a secret location off the grid. I can only say it was east and north of Yucca Valley, California, and the weather was perfect, 70, sunny, with a supersoft breeze laving over the giant sandstone rocks in this higher-elevation stretch of the Mojave.
I was with two friends who were both still asleep, so I crept into the kitchen and made myself a moka pot of coffee with beans from Joshua Tree Coffee Company that we’d bought the day before at a café in Yucca Valley, a town that used to be just liquor stores and lotto and the Jelly Donut. Now, Yucca Valley is collectible vinyl and racks of incense-reeking vintagewear, plus the café where we got the coffee.
The aroma of a moka, which issues at the same time it starts to pleasantly rumble and hiss, is so specific, never to be mistaken for drip, which is what I prefer at home. We all had to get back to L.A. and didn’t have time to make a proper breakfast, so we shared one nectarine. Each cold, tart slice was a reminder of how much I love stone-fruit season. In the car headed back, we passed around various bags of nuts.
Back in L.A., I dashed into my house long enough to grab an actual breakfast of the kind I eat every day: plain “European-style” yogurt (which I think means it’s runny), the last of some rhubarb compote my mother made from her garden harvest, and macadamia nuts. Then I dashed off to a film screening, followed by the opening of a much-anticipated retrospective survey of the artist Nancy Buchanan. Food was offered, delicious kefta and falafel and shawarma from Mizlala, a Mediterranean restaurant in Culver City. I talked to Nancy about the rug that covered the floor in the gallery just off the patio where the food was served. She had made it in the early 1970s from the hair of U.S. Marines going off to fight in Vietnam. Apparently, she knew someone on the base who collected bags of hair as the men were processed and shorn.
Before dinner, I went for my evening run in my local park, Elysian, where I stopped for a moment to watch the fire department cut open a car to free a baby locked inside. People clapped and cheered when the firefighter handed the parents the baby. Later in my run, I saw a blue heron flying a mere ten feet off the ground and working extra-hard to stay airborne on account of a gopher in its beak.
For dinner, I foraged; my husband was planning to eat a burrito he’d picked up earlier, and our son was away at a music festival in Ventura County. I made a cucumber-and-tomato salad with olive oil, yogurt, lemon, pepper, and salt and fried myself two sausages whose expiration date I made my husband read and his reply was “July of next year.” They did the job and were perhaps even more delicious to me than that gopher was to the heron.
Monday, June 23
I got up at 6:30, and my husband was already awake, having just started our coffee. We have a Moccamaster coffee maker that I guess does something like pour-over but for an entire carafe. It’s a gizmo but whatever, I really like it. I added my half-and-half. Milk in the Swiss Alps, as I remember it from a mythic trip to Zermatt in my early 20s, is like American cream. Ever since, I’ve chased that cream. I did some work and then had breakfast, a variation on my usual: European yogurt, walnuts, sliced banana, and blueberries.
Midday, I walked down the little semi-secret municipal stairwell on our street, which leads to our local taco place, Guisados — still family run and still awesome. I’ve been going there since it opened 12 years ago. Before it was Guisados, it was La Esquinita. I will eat whatever tacos are being made at this address, but hopefully Guisados will be there a long time. My lunch selection was two camarones tacos and one chiles toreados, which is a very hot affair. So hot that the cashiers give you the side-eye when you order it and ask if you know what you’re getting into. I used to straight eat it like a regular taco, but I no longer really can. Instead, I take a few of the varieties of possibly not street-legal hot peppers and use them to garnish my other two tacos. I go into a sympathetic nervous system crisis but only for a moment, until the endorphins kick in.
In the afternoon, I had my annual checkup and the doctor asked me what was for dinner. I’m HMO and she’s got a million patients, I’m sure, but when I said, “Pork chops plus a salad,” she responded, “You were making the same exact dinner when you were here a year ago.” I make this dinner every week, so there’s a one in seven chance. I get the pork chops at Cookbook, a little grocery store in my neighborhood that is expensive, but its meat, from Cream Co. in Oakland, is hard to compete with. The chops are bone-in and feature a delicious border of thick fat. Two minutes on each side on full flame, which seems unwieldy ever since our son adjusted the burners on our ancient stove for “searing,” but there have been no grease fires so far. Then six or seven minutes in the oven at 450 degrees. The chops are delicious, perhaps more so to me because in 2021, after 30 years as a vegetarian, I flipped my script and started to eat meat. My salad was arugula with some romaine, a combo I got from my mom. After my initial skepticism, I’m now a believer in her leaf blend. I added sliced peaches, two avocados, goat cheese, squeezed lemons, Greek olive oil, black pepper, and that Camargue salt that’s trendy and feels like an accessory because it has a cork lid.
After dinner, I broke off a piece of dark chocolate as a treat for the movie we were planning to watch — Staying Vertical by Alain Guiraudie, a filmmaker we are really into right now who made the recent and masterful Misericordia. I was never into any kind of chocolate at all, but I have gotten into the habit of having a square or two of dark chocolate on occasion, having fallen for the idea that it’s good for us, and so I make myself eat it like it’s medicine, because if I began to enjoy it, who would I even be?
Tuesday, June 24
Woke up at 6, which was lucky because I had things to do. Had my coffee and completed an edit, and then it was 8:30 — time to meet my son at a classical-music festival 50 miles away, in Thousand Oaks. Since we had no time for breakfast, I’ll include high- and lowlights from the menu of performances: A boy who beautifully performed the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite no. 2. A young woman who mangled Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet while peering strangely into the open piano “as if gazing at the face of Stalin,” as my husband later put it. Our son and two friends playing a six-handed Rachmaninoff (excellent, by my bias). On the way home, starving, I suggested that we stop for some Moons Over My Hammy, but my husband was not seduced by my Denny’s plea. I ate leftover salad for breakfast; it was delicious and technically lunch.
That evening, we got tacos at Angel’s Tijuana Tacos, which is two blocks away, down Sunset. Angel’s is on a sidewalk on Sunset; they come in, set up, pack up, leave. We were happy they were out there, because there have been days recently when they did not set up, presumably because of L.A.’s recent ICE invasion. They blacken chickens on a giant makeshift grill. Their al pastor is the size of a beer keg and spinning against its flame. The guy who mans the al pastor hacks off slices and then uses his machete to wick at the pineapple on top, flinging juicy shards of grilled fruit up in the air, which land perfectly on the tacos on a plate in his other hand. I got two tacos, one with chicken and the other al pastor, and my husband got an al pastor burrito.
We took our food to a little park we like that’s kind of hidden and secret except to a very loud flock of rogue peacocks that roost on the utility pools on its upper borders. In the park were two people with ditty bags scanning metal detectors over the grass and pausing to slash at the soil with their full weight on shovels. I tried to ignore that they were tearing up the park and gazed at the skyline, which is amazing from that vantage. As we were leaving, I asked them what they were digging for. “Bottle caps,” one of them answered, while the other threw dirt in the air.
Wednesday, June 25
Coffee with half-and-half. Used pre-ground Illy Intenso, which is solid and always good and the can makes that satisfying gasp as you open it. After coffee, I decided on a morning run. On a hillside, amid dry eucalyptus, I encountered a young coyote. I see them almost daily and know to say, Get along, Scooter, and they do.
After I cooled down, I ate a bowl of plain yogurt and cottage cheese — together they make something more than the sum of their parts — with raspberries from Cookbook that cost mucho but taste like the real berries you can pick on a farm, plus sliced fresh purple figs. I added pecans and cashews.
In the midafternoon, I walked down to Tacos Arizas, a truck that has been parked in the same spot on Logan near Sunset in Echo Park since I’ve lived in this neighborhood, which is 22 years. Its generator these days is loud as a Harley with open pipes. I used to eat my order on the milk crates they have along the sidewalk, which are shaded by a huge Indian laurel, but lately I take my single carne asada taco home and eat it sitting on a milk crate in my backyard.
Dinner was takeout from the restaurant Dune, because our son loves it and he was just back from the music festival. Dune is Middle Eastern; it’s an order window and has a few locations. This one is on the main strip in Atwater, which features gift shops and other sorts of useless little boutiques. Atwater is grating and saccharine, but it’s also pleasant. I always get the same thing: the hummus-and-lamb plate, which comes with black olives, pickled turnips and radishes, marinated cabbage and onions, seasonal greens and herbs (I am transcribing from the online menu right now), lemon turmeric yogurt, and s’rug. My husband had the chicken souvlaki plate, and our son the souvlaki sandwich with fries. We chowed down while having a spirited conversation about the collapse of America. After dinner, I took a bath while eating dark chocolate and some blueberries and reading The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson.
Thursday, June 26
I woke up at 5:30 for some reason, but I had so much to do that I just got up and fired up the coffee. Added my half-and-half. Ate yogurt with macadamia nuts, kiwi, and passion fruit. Had a French lesson at 9 on Zoom and then went to the local shampoo place, Mezkla, for a wash by my favorite stylist, Sindy. My grandmother used to go to the beauty parlor every week to have her hair “set.” Getting your hair done is a luxury, but in my grandmother’s defense, she contracted polio rescuing people in a flood and had a partially paralyzed leg and arm and a difficult time washing her own hair. I merely don’t like to do it.
At noon, I recorded an episode of the podcast How Long Gone, whose hosts, Jason and Chris, were cracking me up, and then I dashed down the municipal stairwell to Teddy’s Red Tacos, a truck on Sunset whose specialty is the wet burrito. I got birria, brought it home, and squeezed in limes and added radishes and cilantro. I had forgotten that Teddy’s birria is rather oversalted for my taste, so I didn’t eat that much of it. Not a tragedy, as I’d be having a good dinner because I was going to Taix, our neighborhood establishment, and boy is it ever one, complete with oil paintings of its brother founders and more banquet rooms than most people know about.
My friend Karyn was already there when I arrived, waiting for me at the bar. I ordered a club soda with lime, which is something I’ve gotten into because it’s simple and old school and more festive than just plain water. For dinner, Karyn had the special (the grand-mère,) which on Thursdays is Tourte de Volaille — a chicken potpie with onions, leeks, and crème fraîche. As the waitress said, “It’s really good if you like tarragon. If you don’t, it’s not.” I got the New York steak with Bordelaise, which came with broccoli, cauliflower, and frites. I ordered a glass of Bordeaux and a second club soda. I walked home feeling good, full, happy, heard a great horned owl on a telephone pole, and then sat on the couch listening as my husband and son had an involved conversation about Schoenberg and music that was way over my head.
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