Tacos Tacos Tacos
Friend L really likes Mexican food and had been wanting to make tacos for weeks, so we finally caved in and made tacos for dinner today. (Friend L is one of those people with actually no cooking experience at all but somehow ends up cooking food that looks more legit than what we make. I don’t understand it at all. She also runs the blog Surf Surf Revolution.)
Tacos consist of three to four things to cook, depending on your tastes: 1) a thing made from flour to hold the stuffing, 2) mexican rice, for the stuffing, 3) beans, for the stuffing, and, optionally, 4) meat, for the stuffing.
For the thing to hold the stuffing, Friend L decided to make our own tortillas. It was pretty easy – make a dough, flatten, then cook on pan with oil.
**Protip: when recipes call for “dust work surface lightly with flour”, they actually mean “dump large amounts of flour on your work surface until you can’t see the surface anymore”. **
**Protip: it’s a lot easier to filp things when you dual wield. **
We didn’t flatten the dough balls enough, so the tortillas looked more like naan instead. At least we know what to do if we ever want to make Indian food…!
For the rice, we followed instructions on the internet and obtained various ingredients from various places. Instead of cooking the rice on a stove, we dumped everything in a rice cooker because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
We didn’t have long-grained rice so used medium grain instead, which was completely wrong but it can’t be helped. As expected from rice cookers, the rice turned out quite well.
The beans were a little bit more work; Friend L had been soaking the dried pinto beans in water ever since last night, and we started slow-cooking the beans well ahead of time, but they still weren’t done by the time they’re supposed to. We left the beans in the slow cooker for another hour but they were still hard… We ended up taking out the beans we wanted to eat and microwaving them instead. That worked quite well.
**Protip: beans always takes longer to cook than you think it will. Plan ahead of time. **
Friend L also bought organic ground beef, which was delicious and fatty and possibly the easiest thing to make besides the taco shells. Making the meat was just doing the generic “brown onion and garlic, brown beef” sort of thing. We tossed some extra jalapeno peppers in the meat for taste.
The end result was pretty great. I think the rice was my favorite part of the dish. Rice and beans and flour turned out to be super cheap, too! (The ground beef, not so much…)
