I haven't really dined at Pecos Bills since they converted the menu to Tex-Mex. I miss the burgers and those topping bar smells wafting in the air as you exit the Country Bear Jamboree and get dumped right smack into the corner of Pecos Bills. Yes… there are still smells… but they're more of the Fajita and pepper variety than the sautéed onions and beef smells of yesteryear.

It looks like Tex-Mex is here to stay though, and so I'm taking baby steps and trying a transition food at Peco's… the Churro Nuggets (or mini churros as they like to call them) with Chocolate Dipping sauce.

I consider the dessert nuggets a transition food because they don't really seem to fit into either a Southwest Burger theme or a Tex-Mex theme. While I choose to trace the origins of the churro back to Portugal, most would simply consider them a carnival food item that would seemingly be more at home in Casey Jr & Pete's Circus Tent-land (well shoot... they're just calling that Fantasyland now aren't they?).

Anyhow, the Churro Nuggets at Pecos Bills were good. Not great, not bad, just good… just tasty enough so that no one should complain about the $5 price tag (hey, it's less than most cupcakes at the Magic Kingdom).

Judging from the tapered ends, this isn't a large churro that's been pulled or cut apart into mini bits. They're probably frozen that way and dumped into the fryer bulk-style. This is where the issues can arise though. Toss too many at a time into the fryer and the temperature of the oil lowers instantly, requiring more time to cook, and then in-turn… more oil in the churro. (Ideally, you'd fry these little guys in a pan, with a really small amount of oil, but that's not going to happen in a high-volume location.)

While mine were slightly crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside, they were a bit doughy and oil-heavy. That tells me they were cooked too long with a lower than needed heat, or they simply sat under a heat lamp for too long after the frying process. They did seem a bit salty (for Churro dough anyway) but most won't notice that under the cinnamon, sugar, and chocolate sauce.

The "milk" chocolate sauce (a gluten free product from Sanders)… was good. Just for my personal tastes, I would have went with a dark chocolate sauce, (because the churros themselves have sugar and cinnamon on them), or something completely different, like a punchy raspberry.

All in all… a good warm dessert/snack that works just fine in context. Will they become a legendary must-get snack like the Dole Whips? Probably not.

I'll be back Pecos Bills… in the name of research. Actually, some of the food items that I spied on the plastic trays of walkers-by as I enjoyed the Churro Nuggets looked pretty interesting, and worthy of a closer examination.