The Taco Salad experiment !
Last night Nikki and I had the rare opportunity to actually enjoy a home cooked experiment. With Nikki working and me working to find work we find ourselves trying to avoid complicated meals. To be honest most of the time what we eat either comes out of a box, bag, or can. This time though, Nikki got off work a little earlier than usual and we decided that we would try something a little different, Taco Salad.
Now I know what your thinking, "Taco Salad", really? It is not that difficult of a meal. Well you might think that at first, I certainly did. After assessing our pantry for what ingredients we already had, Nikki headed out to the store to get what we needed. Something you need to understand about what we had in mind is that we wanted actual Taco Salad bowls for our Taco Salad. I don't know how many of you have tried to find these in the store but apparently they are not exceptionally popular, so very few stores carry them. If you can find them, what most stores stock tends to be something like the Old El Paso brand corn Taco Salad bowls. Needless to say that's not exactly what we wanted. We had envisioned the light flaky tortilla shell like Taco Bell has. Well to our dismay grocery stores in Auburn don't sell those. At this point most people probably would have either settled for the corn shells or would have given up all together and just gone to Taco Bell, not us.
I started searching online for the best way to MAKE a tortilla taco bowl and guess what I found? I found a whole lot of information on how FRY your own shells using specially made forms, which I obviously didn't have. Again most people probably would have given up hope, but for those of you who know me, you know that I do not give up easily. I got up from the computer, wandered back into the kitchen and began blankly staring at the ingredients we had pulled out earlier. One of the things I saw was two giant soft tortilla shells left over from the last time we made wraps of some kind. Then it hit me; I know how I can make them. I proceeded to pull out a large cookie sheet, a medium sized Pyrex bowl, and a can of smart balance cooking spray. I preheated the oven to 375 degrees, sprayed both sides the tortilla shells with the cooking spray, draped each one over a different bowl, placed them in the oven, and began praying that I didn't burn them because they were the last two tortilla shells we had. Magically about 10 minutes later I pulled out two perfectly formed golden brown Taco Salad bowls.
By this time Nikki was back from the store. I had already cooked some ground beef for Nikki and some fajita steak for me, (Nikki doesn't like fajita steak), and so we built our salads; first piling some lettuce in the bowl, then adding some meat, tomatoes, cheese, and finally topping it with sour cream. The result was two, near perfect, restaurant quality, home-made, Taco Salads and probably at least a monthly tradition.
Now I know what your thinking, "Taco Salad", really? It is not that difficult of a meal. Well you might think that at first, I certainly did. After assessing our pantry for what ingredients we already had, Nikki headed out to the store to get what we needed. Something you need to understand about what we had in mind is that we wanted actual Taco Salad bowls for our Taco Salad. I don't know how many of you have tried to find these in the store but apparently they are not exceptionally popular, so very few stores carry them. If you can find them, what most stores stock tends to be something like the Old El Paso brand corn Taco Salad bowls. Needless to say that's not exactly what we wanted. We had envisioned the light flaky tortilla shell like Taco Bell has. Well to our dismay grocery stores in Auburn don't sell those. At this point most people probably would have either settled for the corn shells or would have given up all together and just gone to Taco Bell, not us.
I started searching online for the best way to MAKE a tortilla taco bowl and guess what I found? I found a whole lot of information on how FRY your own shells using specially made forms, which I obviously didn't have. Again most people probably would have given up hope, but for those of you who know me, you know that I do not give up easily. I got up from the computer, wandered back into the kitchen and began blankly staring at the ingredients we had pulled out earlier. One of the things I saw was two giant soft tortilla shells left over from the last time we made wraps of some kind. Then it hit me; I know how I can make them. I proceeded to pull out a large cookie sheet, a medium sized Pyrex bowl, and a can of smart balance cooking spray. I preheated the oven to 375 degrees, sprayed both sides the tortilla shells with the cooking spray, draped each one over a different bowl, placed them in the oven, and began praying that I didn't burn them because they were the last two tortilla shells we had. Magically about 10 minutes later I pulled out two perfectly formed golden brown Taco Salad bowls.
By this time Nikki was back from the store. I had already cooked some ground beef for Nikki and some fajita steak for me, (Nikki doesn't like fajita steak), and so we built our salads; first piling some lettuce in the bowl, then adding some meat, tomatoes, cheese, and finally topping it with sour cream. The result was two, near perfect, restaurant quality, home-made, Taco Salads and probably at least a monthly tradition.
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