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| Talking Story with Arlo |
By Arlo Agogo
My name is Arlo—yes, like the folk singer, no, I don’t play guitar—and I just pulled off the greatest culinary ambush since the Boston Tea Party, only this time the Brits didn’t see it coming and they loved it.
It all started on a Friday night when my phone did the electric slide across the nightstand. One text. From Doris Day—my desert darling, my daredevil, my personal 5-foot-10 tornado of blonde hair and throttle.
Everyone else calls her Doris. I call her Desert Darlin’ because she’ll smoke your doors off in a 1968 VW dune buggy faster than you can say “God save the Queen.
”The text was short and dangerous:
“British mates in town for a summer desert adventure. Sunday desert potluck. You. Me. Dune buggies. Bring food or I’ll leave you in my dust again.
”Challenge accepted. Doris is cultured. Doris once corrected my pronunciation of “Worcestershire” while doing 60 mph across a dry lake bed. She announced she was doing a desert cookout for her mates who rented Jeeps to venture out in the Arizona desert mid summer.
I could practically hear the smug radiating through the phone. Game on, lady. I spent the next 48 hours turning my backyard smoker into a weapon of mass deliciousness.
I smoked a brisket until it was cowboy perfection.
I smoked potatoes until they surrendered. I even smoked the carrots because why the hell not? Then came the evil genius part:
I poured Yorkshire pudding batter into a screaming-hot cast-iron skillet, but instead of letting it rise into dignified little cups like a civilized human, I swirled it thin like a crepe—basically a giant, fluffy, golden tortilla of British tradition.
Yorkshire pudding is a British tradition for Sunday dinner along with roast beef. Me mum was British and would nearly every Sunday have a roast rotating on her Faberware cooker. Grand mum made the Yorkshire pudding.
I loaded those bad boys with sliced smoked brisket, smoked roast potatoes, smoked veg, a sneaky smear of horseradish cream (for the kick), wrapped them like a Southwestern burrito, and named them absolutely nothing that would give away the plot.
They just looked like innocent, oversized burritos.
Perfect.Sunday. Avi Casino parking lot. 9 a.m. sharp. Two yellow 1968 VW dune buggies sitting side by side like we’re about to film Mad Max: Retiree Fury. My cooler is packed with 24 mystery burritos the size of newborn babies.
Doris eyes it suspiciously. “Arlo, my love, tell me those aren’t from Taco Bell. “Darlin’, the only bell these rang was the Liberty Bell of flavor.”
She rolled her eyes so hard I thought she’d see her own brain. We blasted five miles out into the desert to the legendary Desert Bar road—technically the Nellie E. Saloon, but everybody just calls it the Desert Bar—where roughly a several hundred sunburned cowboys, off-road lunatics, and one very confused British tour group were already halfway to Tipsy Town.
Someone had a flatbed truck with a country band, someone else had bongos, and the beer was flowing like the Colorado River after a dam engineer falls asleep at the switch.
Doris’s British posse—ten of them, ranging from Nigel who wore a Barbour jacket in 110-degree heat to Penelope who kept asking where the “loo” was (girl, pick a cactus, we’re in the desert)—were politely terrified of everything.
Perfect victims.
We set up the potluck table: burgers, hot dogs, seven kinds of chips, and then… my burritos.
24 foil-wrapped torpedoes of deception.
The Brits circled them like they were unexploded ordnance. Doris, sensing mutiny, went full mum-mode: “Come on, darlings, Arlo’s usually decent in the kitchen. Try one. For Queen and country.”Guilt is a hell of a drug. One by one they grabbed a burrito and sat down.
I waited. First bite. Silence. Second bite. Eyes widened to dinner-plate size. Nigel actually dropped his monocle (okay, he wasn’t wearing a monocle, but he should have been for dramatic effect).
“Blimey… this isn’t Mexican. This is… this is YORKSHIRE PUDDING.”Penelope started crying—happy tears, I think, it was hard to tell through the dust and tequila.
“This is better than my mum’s and my mum has been dead for twelve years!” Another one stood up and yelled, “Oi! This cowboy just kidnapped Sunday dinner and held it for ransom inside a burrito! I feel violated and DELIGHTED!
Doris looked at me like I’d just invented fire.
Her exact words: “You absolute madman.” The country band stopped mid-song because the lead singer was too busy inhaling a burrito. Someone started a chant of “USA! USA!” which felt ironic coming from people who still owe us rent from 1776, but whatever,
I’ll take the win.
By the time the sun started doing its golden-hour Instagram filter thing, the Brits were my best friends. Nigel tried to knight me with a plastic spoon. Penelope asked if she could take six burritos back to Manchester in her carry-on (“Southwest might object, love”).
Doris just kept shaking her head, grinning like she both wanted to murder me and marry me on the spot. As the sky turned nuclear orange, everyone packed up before the desert turned into a black hole with teeth.
Doris and I fired up the buggies for the traditional farewell race back to the casino. She beat me by half a length—mainly because she’s a demon and I was still digesting my brisket—but when we skidded to a stop, she killed the engine, marched over, grabbed my leather vest.
Using both fists like she was about to head-butt me into next week, yanked me in, and laid on me the kind of kiss that was slow, wet, passionate and breathtaking long.
When she finally let me breathe, she whispered, “Arlo, you ridiculous, brilliant, burrito-sorcery cowboy… never change.”
Then she hopped back in her buggy, did her traditional 360 burnout, honked her goofy VW horn—beep-beep!—and disappeared in a cloud of desert smoke and pure triumph.
I stood there in the parking lot, covered in sand, lipstick, and victory, happier than a man has any right to be. So yeah. That’s the story of how I weaponized Yorkshire pudding, pranked an entire delegation from the United Kingdom, made my desert darling proud, and lived to tell the tale.
God bless smoked brisket, Yorkshire style.
And a Yee-Haw to Doris Day, the fastest, kissiest, most glorious dune-buggy queen the Mojave Desert has ever seen.
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