Your Mom Was Too Tired to Make Everything From Scratch. But Her Food Was Just as Good.

After Rodrigo Bravo followed his girlfriend to New York, the San Antonio native wanted to impress his beloved with a home-cooked meal, one that would evoke his youth in South Texas. His cooking skills, though, were lacking. So Bravo, my friend and frequent travel companion, did what many young men do when they need to cook something: He called his mother, Ana Sylvia Martinez, and asked for her recipe for tacos. Bravo believed his mother’s food was comida casera, the Spanish term for scratch home cooking. He learned a difficult truth during that phone call. Martinez’s secret to her flavorful ground beef was commercial taco-meat seasoning. “When she said that, I was like, ‘Wait, what the hell?’” Bravo says.Bravo asked his mother why she would use…

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