i said no beef

There's something about living in the middle of corn country that makes people gloss over, block out, or otherwise ignore the words "No beef" when they're taking your food order. The concept is fairly simple. I want the food without the beef in it. But perhaps when you're in the middle of farmland where cows are slaughtered on a daily basis, the concept of food without the beef is a hard one to grasp. Or maybe it's just me.


I have to pick on our local Taco Bell here, the only one that I know of for miles and miles and miles. Back home they're a dime a dozen, and I had my favorites--the one along the route to X (wherever I was going), the one with the fastest drive-thru, the one that's ten cents cheaper than all of the others, the one that can't mix their pop (soda) right, the one with the best food. Out here, having no choice in my Taco Bells, I go about once or twice a month to the one that, probably eight times out of ten, has given me beef on my nacho supreme when I say, "No beef." Sometimes they come without the beans, sometimes they come with everything, but when I pull away from that window forgetting to check my order, odds are there is beef on the nachos.

I try to give taco-bellians the benefit of the doubt by reasoning that it must be hard to hear the difference between beef and beans over a speaker. So I have resorted to different things in the past. Once, after trying to spell the word and realizing (when she still couldn't get it right) that b-e-e-f and b-e-a-n-s may still sound similar over a loudspeaker, I said not to give me any cow. That apparently offended the person taking my order since she repeated, in a very snotty tone of voice, "Okay, that's a nacho supreme minus the cow." Lately I've resorted to saying, "No ground beef," and that seems to work well. Unless they don't hear you at all and gloss over those words entirely, giving you (me) a nacho supreme with everything.

What's my problem with beef? Nothing. I eat it regularly. But I was a vegetarian for seven years, and I just got used to some foods--particularly Mexican--without beef. I enjoy it more that way. But authentic Mexican restaurants out here seem to have the same problem as Taco Bell.

Last night, after an afternoon of skiing what Scott calls the Bump (aka a hill similar to Pine Knob's "ski slopes"), I was craving Mexican. The orders went in, starting with me: "No beef." "No sour cream." "No guacamole." The orders came back. No guacamole. No sour cream. Beef chunks.

The person who delivered our food was not our waiter, but he must have told the waiter there was a problem with our order. I explained to him that I had ordered the plate without any beef. He looked mystified, and I'm sure he would have sworn that I didn't specify that when I ordered (although the rest of my table heard it, and since he was standing next to me, he shouldn't have had any problem hearing it). He took my plate, smiling, and a minue later brought back another plate. The quesadilla had ground beef instead of beef chunks in it. He looked at me quizzically when I almost started laughing. "No?" he asked.

"I don't want any beef at all," I said. "None?" he asked. "None," I said. He took my plate again.

This time when he returned my plate he practically threw it at me, didn't smile, and didn't say anything. He didn't wait to make sure it was correct. But it wasn't my fault! He just had some type of "no beef" block--the rest of my table understood perfectly fine what I wanted. Ugh. It almost makes a person want to eat beef on her Mexican again. Almost.

The pic here is of a cow standing in the road that's in front of my land in New Mexico, outside of Albuquerque. In the horizon are mountains, not stormy sky.