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.
Why Are My Shortcuts Never Short?
Last night I decided to use up a soup starter mix that I had in my pantry. It was from Williams-Sonoma and had been passed on to me by my mom since she found those soup starters just weren’t her thing. Whether it was because she discovered in another mix that there was too much sodium, or she just knows deep down inside that she can do better than that herself without any stinking starter, I’m not sure. But she’s right, wise woman, knowing she can do better herself. And so I inherited the mix from her because sometimes I will use a shortcut, even while knowing I can do better. There you have the difference between me and mom, she has her pride intact.
This shortcut starter was a combination of dry beans, a little packet of pre-mixed southwestern spices, and a little packet of dehydrated vegetables. I needed to add water, chicken broth, chiles and cooked chicken at various stages in the cooking process. Sounds kind of easy, right? Well, since I didn’t have any pre-cooked chicken I had to cook the chicken for my shortcut. I was also missing canned chopped chiles, so I had to defrost and chop frozen chiles. I had to shred the chicken after it was done cooking. Then, we can’t just have chicken chili, can we? So I mixed up a batch of homemade cornbread (from scratch, yes my pride was restored). I also cleaned, trimmed and chopped swiss chard and a handful of garlic cloves to make a vegetable side dish, because clearly the specks of dehydrated vegetables in this chili weren’t sufficient to qualify as one of our 5 daily servings.
So my shortcut dinner actually took closer to 1.5 hours to prepare. I should have made the chili from scratch for all the time it didn’t save me.
Egg and Cheese Casserole with Chiles
Last night I prepared this egg, cheese and green chile casserole for dinner. I found the recipe in the Sunday paper a few weeks ago. It’s Nick Jonas’ favorite comfort food since it reminds him of home. I figured if it was good enough for Nick Jonas, it should be good enough for us. I decided to make it last night, anticipating it would be a good meal to prepare prior to Louisa’s basketball game, that we could eat upon returning home. That part of the plan was right. But was it my favorite comfort food? Not really. I’ll take mac ‘n cheese any day. This recipe probably had even more fat and calories than mac ‘n cheese since it included 1o whole eggs, 1 pound of grated Monterey Jack cheese, 4 cups of cottage cheese, 1/2 cup of mascarpone cheese and a stick of butter. Kind of makes your hair stand on end, doesn’t it? And yet it still doesn’t deliver the warm, gooey comfort of mac ‘n cheese. My feeling is that if you’re going to load up on fat and calories, it had better be worth it. This recipe won’t be happening here again.