Salsa

I love salsa. Yeah, as George Castanza says, it's partly because it's fun to say.

Especially specific different salsas and hot sauces. I don't mean the trendy boutique salsas like "Jump Up And Kiss Me Hot Sauce," I mean the simple things, like habanero.

For a semi-Spanish-speaking Caucasian, this word gives you the delightful challenge of making it clear that you understand how much different the word sounds in Spanish without sounding like a TV anchor saying "Channel 4 reporter <brief pause to switch language modules> Rrrrrramon Marrrtinez <pause> is on the scene with more."

But my favorite is Pico de Gallo. Because it means, of course, a trillionth of a rooster. Sort of like homeopathic salsa, in case you need to be cured of roosterosis or something.

Plus, there's the fact that people from all Spanish-speaking countries, even the ones where "ll" isn't normally pronounced like a hard "y," have to say "Pico de Guy-yo," because it just sounds wrong any other way. Even the dumb gringos get this one pretty close.

Anyway, any tacqueria without a decent salsa bar is not worth eating at. They don't have to have 20 flavors of salsa--in fact, if you find southwestern mango chutney paste, leave before someone tries to charge you $10 for a "wrap"--but they should have at least two, one of which should be very hot and one of which should be an odd shade of green.

But the real key to the salsa bar is the pickled spicy carrots. There is no proper English term for these things, because it's really not proper to speak English in their presence. Many people cannot handle them, and Taco Bell exists for those people, but that just means more for me.

Speaking of Taco Bell, when I was young, they had two salsas: Mild and Hot. At some point they added Fire. Fire is not really much hotter than Hot, it's just redder. Both have no flavor whatsoever, but can be used to give spice to Mild, which actually has an interesting taste once you get over the fact that it tastes like nothing else in the world that has ever been called "salsa." Somehow, it makes Taco Bell chicken almost edible. But for the boil-in-the-bag beef, you really need Hot. Or maybe Fire, whose thicker color hides the meat from view. Maybe that's what it's for.

Anyway, carrots.