Hickory Smoked Pulled Pork, Beer BBQ Sauce, Monterey Jack Cheese, Chopped Bacon, Diced Tomatoes, and Chopped Scallions.
The Husk Cherry. The Jamberry. The Mexican Tomato. Jitomate. All aliases for the black, or should I say green, sheep of the Tomato family, the Tomatillo.
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Nachos Time: Nachos in the News - A convenient mouthful of short form nacho news, topped with the cheese of truth, jalapeno slices of journalism, beans of education, and other toppings of various questionable informative analogies. We bring you nacho news one chip at a time.
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When I woke up the morning of the last day of the conference I had to conclude that the weird puppet group of cultists did not in fact summon Cthulhu and that the stars must no longer be right for the calling of the Great Old Ones from out of space and time. This came as quite a relief. Three days of Lovecraftiness however had taken a toll on me and managed to just drag myself out to the last few panels, they being the customary “WHY CTHULHU?”—IS HPL TOO MAINSTREAM?” hipster bait and the patting ourselves on the back “LOOKING FORWARD – AND FAREWELL!” panel. We had survived, but only just.
Sadly what had not however was my desire to eat more nachos. You’d be hard pressed to find someone more into nachos than myself, but apparently even I have a limit, and that seems to be four dishes in three days. I figured walking all over this eldritch city would arouse strange and terrible hungers in my belly, but the nachos themselves being strange and terrible seemed to cancel that out. I’d seen many an otherworldly thing on my days there, but perhaps the most otherworldly thing to find would be nachos that taste good. With one day to go, I had to throw in the towel. I was done with nachos. At least the ones in Providence.
Seriously, this is Providence, not Bavaria. How can a building this strange be in this city but good nachos not?
So what did I learn about Lovecraft and Providence and Nachos and Conferences and NecronomiCon and NachoProviCon and Myself?
LOVECRAFT may or may not have been a racist, or he might have just been a little more racist than other people of his day. I don’t think we’ll ever know.
PROVIDENCE may be known as “The #1 Food City in the U.S.” by a Travel + Leisure poll in 2012, but if that’s the case the raters must not have had any nachos, or the places they went were secret ones I had not located.
NACHOS are as always delicious, however eating them every day for days in a row, probably not the best idea.
CONFERENCES will have uncomfortable chairs. There will be a lot of panels you want to go to, but going to them all instead of resting is a bad idea. You may feel like you need to get the most bang for your buck by doing and seeing as much as possible, but a good night’s sleep is worth much more.
NECRONOMICON was a great time, especially for a first time conference. However don’t have panels run right up to the time of the next panel, especially when the next panel you want to go to is a ten minute walk away and up to the 18th floor of a hotel when there are only three tiny elevators from last century to get you up there.
NACHOPROVICON was excellent in theory, but that theory was under the false assumption that the nachos would all be good, or at least not all meh. Perhaps the next NachoProviCon will be better...
MYSELF , well, I quite enjoyed myself, but not even a nacho lover like me should eat as many nachos as I did.
While there may be many things about the city that ol’ Howard would recognize from his time, all in all the changes would have probably disgusted him. While Lovecraft may have been Providence, Providence is no longer Lovecraft. The very idea of nachos probably would have disgusted him, from the fact that they were invented by a Mexican to the uncivilized way you consume them to probably just them being spicy. But whatever, he and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, so let’s just enjoy him for his writings and not for his views on race nor food. I think that is something all Lovecraftian scholars can agree on.
NachoProviCon was over, but the one day the stars would be right again and it would return. Maybe the nachos would be tastier then, maybe not, but we will see. As the Innsmouth Jews say “Next year in R’lyeh”, I say “Next year in Providence”.
You may be Providence, the city, but in matters of nachos certainly not Providence, the noun.
Another day in Providence, another day of sunshine with the lurking threat of cosmic horrors trying to worm their way through to our plane of existence. Madness was obviously in the air as immediately outside the hotel I was accosted by a homeless gentleman accusing me of being the 1% and that I was responsible for his situation, only this was relayed with a lot more salty language. If I was H.P. Lovecraft I probably would have gone into paroxysms of terror, become physically ill and then write a racist story about the event, but I knew the fellow must have noticed my Vistaprint made Nachonomics shirt and recognized me as an up and comer in the world of nacho reviews, so I paid him no mind. Fun Lovecraft fact of the day: he once called his friend’s wife a vegetable. What a ladies’ man. At least he didn’t refer to her with a racial slur.
Chili, Cheddar Cheese, Salsa, Hot Peppers, Scallions
Today’s nachos come courtesy of Spike’s Junkyard Dogs, which are best known for their delicious hot dogs, but they make a mean order of nachos as well. After finding the fair of the area restaurants rather lackluster I needed to branch out to something quick and dirty, which these definitely are, but they were honestly the best I had in Providence. There’s no doubt that they’re just glorified concession nachos, and what they call “cheddar cheese” is just nacho cheese, but man, they are a taste sensation. Are they as good as their hot dogs? I don’t know if I would go that far, but compared to the rest of the nachos you might have had in town, definitely a vast improvement. When something covered in nacho cheese beats out a bunch of regular restaurant nachos, something must be going wrong with the very fabric of reality...
The afternoon was spent learning about how calling Lovecraft’s oeuvre “The Cthulhu Mythos” is a misnomer and how it should instead be called “The Yog-Sothoth Mythos” as that was who he wanted his main creation to be. Did that just blow your mind? Probably only if you are a casual fan, as a real fan would have already known that and a not fan is probably only here for the nacho reviews and can’t wait until I get done with all this NachoProviCon nonsense. For dinner I would have gone to some other place for another order of most likely subpar nachos, but instead I had dinner with the renowned game designer Sandy Peterson (He put the Lovecraft references in DOOM and Quake) at a restaurant so fancy that it didn’t even have nachos. What it did have was a massive steak and a delicious slice of Key Lime Pie, both of which I ate, wishing with every bite that they were nachos instead...
Who would have thought this crew would be lovers of complicated board games based on the writings of early 20th century horror authors?
The night ended with a Providence event by the name of WATERFIRE, where they light the very canals which run through the city on fire, much like the Cuyahoga River, play some Nordic music, and just come off as thoroughly badass while the frightened citizens cower in terror. What made tonight’s events all the more terrifying were the addition of chanting cultists and Lovecraftian monsters flopping around and gibbering in the streets in honor of the conference. You can hear their terrible chants here, or you can take my word for it that it was BADASS, for the first few minutes that is. Fifteen minutes of chanting later I was bored out of my mind, unable to find any nacho vendors, and headed back to my hotel room. They may have summoned Cthulhu after I left, but I wouldn’t know. I’d obviously be a terrible cultist.
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The day began like any other that you might spend in a hotel, with the overly complicated alarm clock failing to go off. If not for the forethought that failure of electronics is a side effect of the thinning of the veil between the spheres I could have kissed going to another day of panels on whether Lovecraft was a racist or not goodbye. This not being the case, I dressed and was promptly birthed from the hotel into the downtown, or DT.
There are currently fewer people living in Providence now than in Lovecraft’s time a hundred years ago. If judging from who I saw around me, most of them appeared to be the sort of folks that you would find at a bus terminal, which is to be expected considering that their bus terminal is located directly downtown. They’re also the sort of people that Lovecraft would have been terrified of, if you know what I mean, but that's unsurprising considering he was also afraid of seafood. Fun fact of the day; Lovecraft really loved ice cream. He also had nice things to say about Hitler, although to be fair that was before he was aware of what was going on over there in Germany. But how about those nachos.
Pork, Mole, Cotija Cheese, Cilantro, Crema
Today’s dish was at Viva Mexico Cantina Grill, a lovely establishment serving authentic Mexican food, and, if you go Friday evening, a live mariachi band. Service was slow, enough so that I mention it here because usually I let that slide, but not today. Also they don’t technically have nachos, instead they have “Chips Rancheros” which for something they don’t call nachos are a lot closer to nachos than the ones yesterday down the street at Ri Ra. The chips were fine, nice and homemade. They were covered with Cotija Cheese, which is that powdery Mexican cheese that looks like Parmesan or Feta but isn’t, so if you’re not a fan of that watch out. The Pork was fine, nothing super about it one way or another.
Where the trouble began was the mole. Mole has the interesting property of when it’s overheated it turns into a kind of bean cement that’s not particularly appetising, and that was the case here. The bottom of the dish was a mass of chips glued together in a crunchy beany conflagration that was not so pleasant on either the eye or the tongue. This was the same for several other parts of the dish where what would have been correctly sized delicious bites had overheated in several places and turned into large ungainly chunks. Overall, again not impressed with the state of Providence’s nachos.
The remainder of the day was made up of more panels and more scholarly debate on whether he was a racist/homophobe/xenophobe/misogynist/anti semite, or just no more of any of those than anyone else during his time. No consensus was reached, but when one of the panels talked specifically about racism in Lovecraft and not only were none of the speakers people of color but 99.99% of the audience were also honkeys, not sure how good a sign that is. H.P. also loved cats! Does that make up for something?
Guess the stars weren’t quite yet right for the end of days/nachos. Perhaps tomorrow will be...
It only took five and a half hours, but we managed to save Arkham from the foul Shub-Niggurath. Good thing the ton of nachos I had for lunch were enough to power me through.
