Fixings for Tacos
The key to a healthy but tasty meal is to load up on the vegetable fixings. That’s just what we did last night for our tacos and taco salads. This has become a favorite dinner for all around here. For some it’s about the meat (ahem, Louisa that means you); for Annie, that means the cheese and sour cream topping; for me, all of the salad ingredients piled up with the meat and the cheese and the sour cream. I like the combo texture thing, creamy, chewy, crunchy from the taco shells. Joe, I’m not sure how you feel about this – you were too busy eating for me to get a read on you.
Its also an incredibly easy dinner to fix, no shortcuts required. Chop an onion and saute with a little olive oil. Add ground beef, saute some more. Add seasonings such as chile powder, cumin, salt, pepper – I did use a pre-blended taco spice mix from Penzey’s, but it simply saved me the time of pulling out a few extra spice jars from my drawer. While the meat is sauteing you can chop up all of the fixings such as lettuce, tomato, cilantro, avocado (dice them last to keep the green bright), and grate the cheese. For all of you gourmet readers, I used iceberg lettuce. Yes, after years of eschewing the salad for darker greens for the higher nutrients and lower water volume, I now choose iceberg here and there. Why? Because I like the crunch. Like popcorn. And taco shells. And all other crunchy things. Perhaps I was a t-rex in a former life, enjoying the crunch of my dinner between my massive jaws. You can keep the chewy – give me crunchy any day.
Don’t forget to serve with sour cream and salsa (I didn’t make my own but used the Whole Foods jarred version instead). Oh, and then you need taco shells or tortillas. Joe prefers the tortillas because it’s neater to eat them. But the girls like the taco shells and, as I said, I like the crunch, so that’s what we go with. After our first very messy taco, both Joe and I switched to taco salad so we didn’t need to pretend to eat it like a sandwich. By doing that, we were able to load up on even more salad greens.
Best of all, I was able to fix it, eat it, and clean it all in under an hour so we could run out after dinner (again!) to soccer awards. I just love tasty efficiency.
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Do you make you own tortillas and do you prefer flour or corn?
No, I don’t make my own tortillas. I suppose that’s another shortcut I use! But there are tine limits to my scratch cooking.
Overall I prefer flour, but sometimes corn seems more suitable to my recipe and I’ll used that. I recently tried red chile flour tortillas and they were very good too for quesadillas.