Casares Sylvia - The enchilada queen cookbook: enchiladas, fajitas, tamales, and more classic recipes from Texas-Mexico border kitchens

ST. MARTINS GRIFFIN NEW YORK

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This book is dedicated to my parents and brothers, my dear children, my close friends, and the many loyal and very supportive customers who have cheered me on year after year and have embraced my restaurants from the very start.

A special thank-you to my parents, Severita and Everardo Casares, most loving parents who gave me the foundation to do all I have done in my life. And, to my very dearest companion and my strongest resource, my faith in God, which gives me wisdom, encouragement, and protection to achieve this lifetime goal.

She wasnt always the Enchilada Queen. Before she appeared on the Food Channel, and graced the cover of the Houston Chronicles Dining Guide every other week, and made Texas Monthlys list of top Mexican restaurants in Houston, and USAToday ranked Sylvias as one of Ten Great Mexican Restaurants in the US, she was just my older sister. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Sylvia Maria Casares entered the world as the third child of Everardo and Severa Casares, neither of whom descended from royal lineage but did what they could to provide us with a stable and loving home. We lived on the east side of Brownsville, Texas, in a small three-bedroom clapboard house with light-blue trim and a carport that leaned to the right. An enormous grapefruit tree reigned in the backyard and held its ground when Hurricane Beulah whipped through in 1968. Back then, Brownsville was a town of about fifty thousand people, with only one high school, a junior college, a small airport (which is still a small airport today), and two bridges that connected us to Matamoros, where we would go sometimes for groceries or a haircut or something more involved like a tailored suit or a wedding gown. Our mother worked in Brownsville as a clerk at HEB, and later at another grocery store called El Centro. Our father worked as a tick inspector for the USDA, a job that also required that he patrol the Rio Grande on horseback, watching for stray livestock. When he came home for dinner there was the arroz con pollo, there were the calabacitas, there were the taquitos, there were the fresh-made flour tortillas. And there was Sylvia watching our mother prepare these meals, as my sister had also once upon a time watched our grandmother, Mam Grande, do.

Sylvia with her brothers, 1966

Later, when Sylvia moved away to attend the University of Texas at Austin and earn a degree in home economics, with the intent of teaching high school, on the weekends she would take the long six-hour drive back home to Brownsville and, again, watch my mother cook. After graduating, instead of teaching she took a job in the test kitchen at Uncle Bens Rice in Houston, where she watched and learned to cook meticulously, with an emphasis on taste. Still later, when she went into food sales for companies like Heinz and Sara Lee and Kraft, she watched how restaurant kitchens worked from the inside out, where they splurged and where they cut corners and how this affected the final taste of the food. It was this collection of ingredientsthe down-home cooking of our mother and grandmother, the analytics of the corporate test kitchen, and the understanding of how a successful restaurant operated, starting with the mom-and-pop outfits all the way to the chainsthat led Sylvia to take several leaps of faith, from watching to doing, from learning to experimenting, from cooking to serving.

Its easy to look at her success now and think it was simple enough. But shes had her ups and downs like every other businessperson. And shes had her setbacks, some of which she will talk about in more detail. Today, her customers know her as the Enchilada Queen, but very few of these people were actually around back in 1995, when she started her first restaurant along Highway 90 in Rosenberg, in a tiny place that the previous owners had painted a certain shade of pink that made it look less like a Mexican restaurant and more like an outlet store for Mary Kay. And later, after she had some success and moved the business to the big city, there were still several years when she struggled to get noticed while she was located in a lonely shopping strip, tucked in between a nameless donut shop and a place called Puppy World.

Now here she is almost twenty years later, the Enchilada Queen. And here you are, holding the book that contains many of the recipes that got her here. But will this make you the Enchilada Queen? Well, theres already one of those in Texas and I dont think shes stepping down anytime soon. On the other hand, with some careful reading and a little prep time theres no reason you cant be your own familys Enchilada Queen. Or King.

Oscar Casares, January 2016

My maternal grandmother, Manuela, with her mother and father, Inez and Julian, and her sister, Juliana, in 1901.

My parents, Everardo and Severa Casares, on their wedding day, March 22, 1939, in Donna, Texas. My mother was sixteen and my father was twenty-five.

Grandmother Sarita making tamales on Christmas Eve in 1960.

Me at my desk at Uncle Bens Food Labs (most likely talking to McCormick Labs) in 1984.