Apologies for those of you waiting for my report on last Monday's family cooking lesson: it was really good and I learned a LOT of dishes and techniques. But I foolishly left my camera at home so my mom and brother took pictures with theirs. I haven't yet gotten the pictures from them, so when I do I'll do a thorough write-up.

For now, though, let's talk Tacos. Megan loves tacos and taco night has been a standard option for us since we've gotten married. Partially because it's nearly automatic and it's always satisfying. Last night, however, we were feeling adventurous and decided to do a "gourmet taco" with some more home-made ingredients. The results were spectacular, and so, here's a post about it.



Taco Components

1lb of Ground Beef (you can substitute Turkey...but you know how I feel about that)
Homemade Guacamole
Black Beans
Grated Cheddar Cheese
Tortillas (duh)
Olives (I didn't put any in mine: Megan loves olives)
Homemade Taco Seasoning
White Onion
Sour Cream (another Megan-only thing)

Taco Seasoning
This is the original recipe

This is what I ended up using. It's nearly identical, it's just missing cayenne. Not that I don't like it, I just didn't have any.

1 teaspoon chili powder

1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

1/4 teaspoon dried minced onion

1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes (or more to taste)

1/4 teaspoon oregano

1/2 teaspoon paprika

1 1/2 teaspoons cumin

1 scant teaspoon sea salt

1 teaspoon black pepper (about 40 grinds)


Mix and throw on your taco meat, then add about a 1/4 cup of water. Pretty simple. It looks like a lot of seasoning, but throw it all in, it needs it. The flavoring is amazing, much better than the Lawry's packs we used to use (cheaper too, since we already had all of the spices in the rack). We personally missed the cayenne; it could stand to be spicier in general, especially when you use cheese and sour cream, etc. Still, it's a very savory seasoning that doesn't quite have the strange acidy bite that the Lawry's packets have and it's quite satisfying to have done it yourself.


Taco Meat

We bought the beef from Trader Joe's. I was surprised in the immediate difference in quality: so much better! And cheaper. Anyway, I only put this here to mention that we put white onions in with our meat as we cooked it. I think next time I'd put the onions on first, then add the beef to the pan so that the onions have a chance to get extra-cooked. Maybe a bit of olive oil next time too: the beef was so lean that it was hard to get the onions to sizzle the way I wanted them to.


Guacamole
1 Avocado
Juice from 1/2 lime
Salt and pepper

All right, since I know this place is frequented by Prices I'm sure to get a lecture on proper Guacamole making (I hope I do, anyway) but since this was my first foray into making it, I kept it simple. Mash the avocado (I used a potato masher: worked well, took about 5 seconds to get to the correct consistency) then squeeze half a
lime over it. Add salt and pepper to taste. Simple but effective. A neat trick for your next party? Perhaps!

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The in-laws are coming over on Monday so I have to think of an interesting chicken dish. We'll be doing roasted cauliflower for sure that day, which I think some of you might enjoy. I just have to pick appropriately.

It's time to blog about food.

Why? Who knows. I feel like writing about it. Plus, I might be able to use this a chronicle/recipe notebook as time goes on so I can figure out what I did wrong, etc. So fair readers of the blog, prepare to read about food now and again.

First, I should note that I like cooking. It's quite a creative endeavor, if you think about it. Sure there are some rules to follow (ex: do not replace "chicken" in chicken recipes with something unrelated...like Cheerios.) and some things to think about in terms of cooking thoroughly, etc. (ex: do not add milk to chicken and eat in bowl as if they were Cheerios.) But all in all, it can be a fun and somewhat improvisational experience.

Lately I've been trying to expand my repertoire, so the improvising is sort of on the backburner as it were. The last thing I did improvisational was add chili powder to the Lawry's taco mix. It was good, but not exactly a stroke of genius. They won't be asking me to host a show on the Food Network just cause I put something into something else, that's for sure.

Anyway, with upcoming legal programs in my future and Megan continuing work and school, I've been searching for recipes that will make good, relatively quick-make dinners for Mon/Wed and yet have enough leftover for Megan to eat some on Tues/Thurs (I'll have to go straight from work to UCLA, so it'll be a ton of Subway for me, I'm afraid.) As a result, I've been perusing the Food Network website trying some new recipes and I've met with some mixed success. Here's a rundown!


Beef Tacos
Get some beef and tortillas. Then Lawry's taco seasoning and add 2-3 pinches of chili powder. What, come on, you know you wanted to know what I did.


Campfire Pan-Roasted Chicken
Here be the link.

The name of this recipe confuses me to no end: there is no open flame involved, and when I read something like that I'm expecting...I don't know, cowboy food? But this is definitely an Asian-influenced pan chicken. This was a great recipe and it came out very good. In my opinion, chicken breasts on a pan need to be sliced in half, especially if you're stuck like me using a crappy electric stove (ours is brand new, and it still pretty much sucks.) so just give it a halving before you toss it in the marinade bag. One might want to prep this on a weekend, it takes a lot of "start up ingredients" that you may not have already (soy sauce and peanut oil in particular) but once you have those you could probably make it 6 or 7 times before you ran out of ingredients. The rest you buy fresh or during your weekly market run. It's a very tangy, salty recipe, just on the border of too salty. If you're sensitive to that sort of stuff you may want to ramp back on the added salt. I made this with roasted shiitake mushrooms from this recipe but with just shiitake, not a bunch of others. Really good.



Chicken Marsala
Here be the link.

This one is from our favorite "bam" yelling friend, Emiril Lagasse. In general, I find most of Emiril's recipes to be way too complicated or time consuming for a weeknight meal and I just haven't had the courage to go for one on the weekend. This one, however, is a good recipe. Again, it takes a lot of start of up ingredients, this time in the form of spices, in order to prepare the "essence of Emiril", which is included on the same recipe link. This adds, I'd say, about 10-20 minutes to your prep time but once you've made a batch you have quite a bit left over; you can just keep it in an airtight canister. If I were at home, I'd take a picture to show you mine, but you're stuck with using your imagination for now. You'll also need to buy Marsala wine, and if you've never done that for cooking before, get the "Dry" version, not the sweet. This recipe ended up being really good too; we had a minor crises when I forgot to get chicken stock and Megan had to run to Vons and pick some up, but despite that, it wa quite good. Doesn't really need a side dish either, because of the mushrooms already used in the dish.



Chicken Faijtas
Here be the link. I just used two chicken breasts instead of the beef.

My dad has been using this recipe for a LONG time and it's one of my favorites; unfortunately, it is DEFINITELY NOT a good weeknight recipe. I prepped the marinade on Sunday then tossed it in the bag on Monday morning, and still it felt like a lot of work to cook Monday night, particularly because of the vegetables, and problems I had using a cast-iron grill pan. When using a cast-iron grill pan, you HAVE to halve your chicken breasts; this was the time that confirmed it. Otherwise the outside gets scorched while the inside does not cook, which resulted in me having to jury-rig a "cut" of the chicken in order for the heat to get to the interior. The final result was still very delicious, but all in all I think that this is best done A) on the weekend B) using a real grill. Trying to do it on a weeknight with a grill pan just makes the whole experience too stressful to enjoy, and the amount of prep work you need to do the day before is quite extensive. Still, if you're having a party or something, definitely give it a shot.


Lasagne
The recipe is on the box of Barilla ready-to-bake noodles. My variant removes the ricotta cheese and replaces it with more mozzarella.

Yikes. Epic. Fail. The entire edge of the lasagne was burned and crunchy, and was generally inedible. The center was really good, and I ate that anyway, but Megan decided to opt out and go to Baja Fresh. Oh well. I think the problem was despite following the recipe, there wasn't enough sauce, and it left a lot of exposed, un-wetted noodles to simply incinerate in the oven. The other option could be the foil: I think that maybe I didn't cover it tightly enough. Megan thinks the foil is the cause of the burning. In either case, I'll have to fiddle with the variables a bit to try and make it better. It's also just on the edge of taking a bit too long to make for a weeknight, but it's manageable, probably takes about 1 hour 20mins total to brown the meat and then bake the lasagne. Even though it takes some time, it's a pretty automatic recipe since you mostly just sit and wait, so there's an advantage in that.


Well, that's about it for the recipe report. I have a Greek Lemon chicken recipe slated for the weekend, and I think it's about time for some beef kebabs and this parmesean fry recipe I've been waiting to use for next week. I'll let you know how those turn out.

By the way, if you have a recipe you think would be good for weeknights, post it in el commentolos, and I'll give it a go.