[Urbane Guerrilla]

Try the condensed-milk Lemon Meringue Pie recipe from The Latest Recipe Thread. It isn't uniquely area-specific -- little of that thread is, it's more generalist and rather reflects some of my travels about the globe -- but it is the sort of thing Americans would assemble. It has two secrets: make your own graham-cracker crumb crust up out of grahams, sugar, and butter; do not buy them premade, they aren't the same. The other secret is include the juice of one lime and a teaspoonful or two of its zest -- piquant.

More specifically regional-American would be the Key Lime Pie variant of this dish. It takes less lime juice to flavor the filling, so don't just switch 'em volume for volume. I also recommend crumb crust for this pie. Gingersnap crumb crusts are also a good variation. These don't need sugar, I don't think.

This locality's specialty is marinated triangle-tip of beef, but I'd have to research it. The general picture is once marinated -- citrus marinade, I think -- it then gets full-on barbeque treatment with plenty of sauce, slow cooked until it's about fork tender. It's invariably called tri-tip.

More widely distributed is the Burrito. There are a LOT of good burrito joints in California and a couple of national restaurant chains make a specialty of them -- Chipotle, and Taco Bell, with Pollo Loco a distant third. All are tasty in their various ways. Pollo Loco specializes in grilled marinated chicken, Baja California style, and offers it in a burrito. Taco Bell's burritos are, well, fast-food and rather engineered-tasting, and I usually get my burritos elsewhere. Chipotle is determined to keep their burrito offerings lively and high quality, and their ambiance is something between Baja and Aztec-ish.

The funny thing is that the burrito is hardly seen in Mexico; they regard it as something novel and exotic from up North. Not that they dislike it when they run into it.

So: what is it that makes a decent burrito? The outer wrapping is a large flour tortilla, sometimes quite large indeed -- in the east San Francisco Bay Area, burritos come the size of sucking pigs. Bring an appetite. Bring two. There's a filling of rice and beans, generally either black beans or pinto beans, a/k/a habichuelas. There's a choice of meats, usually chicken, beef, and shredded pork, each of which are usually seasoned. Hot salsa of varied strengths is in the mix. Around here you can get your chile salsa either in red, often hot, or green, usually milder. An optional squirt of sour cream and a generous sprinkle of shredded cheese, either cheddar and Monterey Jack or some white Mexican cheese along with cheddar builds the basic burrito.

The customer often adds some more salsa, like the fresh salsa cruda of onions, tomatoes and peppers all chopped together; cilantro either with the salsa cruda or separately; or perhaps green tomatillo salsa, which is most often milder than the red salsa offerings, which can be all the way up to haban~ero -- firey.