After four weeks of eating all my meals while driving I finally get a day off and decide to feed my friends. It all worked out marvelously thanks to Todd and his amazing PianoQ.

That’s right, PianoQ- not barbeque. Todd should be put in the bbq hall of fame for his awesome creation. He had an old broken piano and rather than dump it, he turned it into the most incredible grill ever made.

In order to honor the PianoQ I had took a trip to La Esperanza Market on Mission and Laurel in Santa Cruz. La Esperanza has some badass butchers working in the back there and if you can speak a little Spanish you can score some of the best legally attainable marinated meats around.

The bags of meat you see above contain chicken and beef marinated in adobo. Seriously tasty stuff. I’ve tried buying adobo from the store and making it myself, but I’ve never tasted anything better than the stuff from La Esperanza.

A note on marinades: lots of Mexican marinades were created to help preserve meat, so these bags o’ meat are perfect to take to the park or camping with you where you might not be able to keep your ingredients refrigerated all day until you cook.

I wish I could say I worked really hard toiling over mounds of ingredients to get this PianoQ together, but really all I did was buy some great fresh ingredients, chop ‘em up, and voila! The beauty of living in California is that you can get super fresh, ripe produce for cheap and the innate tastiness of the ingredients does all the work.

I bought a few bags of cilantro and chopped them up with some onions and sprinkled with lime juice, chopped some tomatoes, and served up some perfectly ripened avocados as condiments. Not only is this all you need for the perfect tasty taco, they also look great together. So good that people will hardly wait for you to take a picture before they attack.

Todd did a great job grilling and everyone else did a great job eating. With such a simple preparation and cooking, there was plenty of time left for drinking Coronas and Pacificos, playing ping pong, and enjoying my only day off in more than a month. It was all so easy, I feel bad blogging about it. But hey, it was damn tasty.

Another note about Todd, he’s a got quite a garden going in his back yard. The craziest part of which is an humungous zucchini that’s the size of a small child. It’s almost like a 1950’s horror movie, except you get to eat it, instead of it eating you.

I had to put the dollar bill on it for perspective, since I could barely get that giant squash to fit in one picture. I only wish I could be in town when he finally serves this baby up.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Chez Moi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.