How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Taco

To the inexperienced home cook, most recipes look something like this:

Step 1: Become competent at cooking.
Step 2: Produce delicious meal, using sorcery.
Step 3: Make out with Giada DiLaurentis.

One thing you will notice is that all three of these are very hard to do, and may inspire a would-be chef to order a pizza and cry his or herself to sleep.

This does NOT have to be your fate! You CAN create delicious, original, healthy meals without any prior experience! All this is possible through the magic of tacos, and I am about to prove it.

For instance, can you dump things into a pot? Can you safely operate a fork and knife? How are you at sitting down and watching television? If you answered "Yes," "Yes," and "I double-majored in Sitting Down and Watching Television," then you are well on your way to a spectacular taco experience. Here we go.

Hungarian-Style Pulled Chicken Taco with Cool & Spicy Slaw

Ingredients:

• 3-ish pounds boneless chicken breasts, no skin
• 1 can (roughly 8 oz.) tomato sauce (for the extra-health-conscious, use reduced sodium)
• 3 tbsp. Paprika (preferably sweet)
• 1 clove of garlic, finely grated or chopped
• 1 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce (pronounced "WUSS-ter-sher")
• 1 small onion, finely diced
• roughly 1/2 tsp. sea salt
• Whole-grain tortilla (or if you like a crunch, standard taco shells will do)

Equipment:

• 1 big ol' slow cooker/crock pot
• 1 cutting board
• fork and knife
• Season one of BBC's "Being Human" or sweet-ass TV series of choice

Process:

1. Combine tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, paprika, garlic, salt, and onions in your slow cooker. Stir until well integrated and smooth.
2. Put whole chicken breasts into the slow cooker. Cover with the sauce.
3. Set slow cooker to "Low" and put the lid on securely.
4. Put DVD's into your DVD player. Sit down and watch them for about five hours.
5. Once five hours have elapsed, transfer chicken breasts to cutting board. Pull apart and shred the meat with a fork and knife. The meat should be super DUPER tender at this point and will shred nicely.
6. Put shredded chicken meat back in slow cooker and mix with the sauce.
7. Put one large ladelful of saucy, chickeny goodness onto tortilla or taco shell.

NOTE: This recipe makes quite a bit of taco filling. If you're not serving, say, four or more people at a time, you can portion out the leftovers and put them in AIRTIGHT freezer bags for use later. And because there's very little fat and the meat has already been super-cooked, the texture won't be appreciably altered when you thaw it out.

Now, you could go right ahead and eat this as-is. The rich, rustic flavors of the paprika and tomato sauce with that slow-cooked, tender chicken stands quite nicely on its own. But I like a little bit of crunch to go with that soft deliciousness, and I enjoy contrasting-but-complimentary flavors. If you are of a like mind, then follow the recipe below for my cool and spicy slaw, which you can put right in the taco (or on the side, if you prefer).

Ingredients:

• 1 English cucumber, fresh as you can find
• 1 medium-sized carrot, fresh
• fresh cilantro (to taste)
• fresh Napa cabbage
• 1 Jalapeno pepper
• pinch of turmeric
• 3 tbsp. cider vinegar

Process:

1. Using a SHARP* 8-10" chef's knife, finely jullienne the cucumber, carrot, jalapeno, and about one large-ish leaf of cabbage. For culinary neophytes, "jullienne" means to cut VERY thin strips. TIP: If you're squeamish about spicy food, remove some or all of the seeds from the pepper, as this is what gives it most of its heat.
2. In a medium mixing bowl, combine jullienned veggies with cider vinegar and turmeric until well coated.
3. Rough-chop the cilantro and combine to the mixture.
4. Add a pinch or two of sea salt, to taste. TIP: Add salt slowly and taste often, so that you don't overdo it. It's easy to add more salt, but pretty much impossible to take it away.

That's it. Seriously. And it's AWESOME.

By the way, this dish goes very well with a crisp summer ale, a chilly glass of un-oaked chardonnay, or a nice unsweetened iced tea.

One of the best things about slow-cookers and recipes like this is that you can play around with it. You could substitute shin beef for the chicken. You could make a barbecue sauce, or add different spices. You can do... well, pretty much anything. So have fun with it! Experiment! My only advice is that you should TASTE OFTEN when you're making whatever you're making. Otherwise, you could end up being very unpleasantly surprised.

NOTE: Pictures and nutritional information forthcoming.

*A sharp knife is the safest kind of knife, as it will slide much more easily through the food you are cutting. Dull knives make you press much harder on the blade, which could cause it to slip and cut you.

Pinto Bean Quesadilla

I don't know why it took me so long to incorporate quesadillas into my regular diet. When I was first living on my own, I was so eager not to be a cliché that I spent too much on food and cooked meals that were more elaborate than necessary. In retrospect, the occasional (or frequent) addition of quesadillas to my menu would've saved me loads of time and money.

For lunch today, I made a pinto bean quesadilla using the following ingredients:

• 1 onion
• ¼ cup dry pinto beans
• 2 whole wheat soft taco shells
• 4 cups water
• ¼ tsp. Sea salt
• ½ cup shredded Montery Jack cheese

Ideally, I would have soaked the beans overnight, but I was in a hurry to have something to write about for the blog, so I went the quick and dirty method. In my experience, dried beans are ¼ cup per serving, and I've found that 2 cups of water for every serving of beans is ideal for soaking purposes.

To start, I put the beans and water in a pot (plus a ¼ teaspoon of sea salt) and brought it to a boil. After two minutes, I moved the pot off the heat and let it sit for two hours while I went to a totally sweet dinner party.

When I returned, the beans had soaked up most of the water, so I added another 2 cups of water to the pot, brought the water to a second boil, covered the pot, and let it simmer over medium heat for a half hour.

At the end of the half hour, I drained the beans, which were still firm. I've never managed to overcook dried beans, and I still typically wind up with black beans that are crunchier than I'd like them no matter how long I soak or cook them for. I prefer dried beans to canned because they're less expensive and you don't have to deal with all the preservatives that are packed into the canned stuff. The next time I make this recipe, I'll have soaked the beans overnight, so I imagine they'll be a little softer cooked that way. Also, I'd like to invest in a masher I can turn the beans into more of a spreadable paste.

When the beans were nearly cooked, I preheated the oven to 350 degrees and rough cut a small onion. I like larger chunks of onion, so I quartered and sliced the onion, then separated the ribs by hand rather than dicing it all up.

When the beans were ready, I drained them in a colander, then spooned half the beans onto one half of each taco shell. Next, I divided the onion between the two shells, then added a ¼ cup of cheese to each.

I wasn't thrilled about using that much cheese (¼ cup = one serving) but trying to spread ¼ cup across both shells wasn't going to be enough to make the quesadilla cohere later.

Next, I put the shells on a baking sheet and put them in the oven for 7 minutes. which was long enough for the cheese to melt and bubble. Once out of the oven, I folded the empty half of each shell over the filled half and popped them into a Tupperware container for today's lunch.

I usually like to have some salsa handy for dipping with a quesadilla, but I wanted to see how this tasted without help. The beans were pretty crunchy, but not distractingly so. The onions and cheese provided most of the flavor, while the bean taste was inoffensively bland.

This is obviously only the tip of the quesadilla iceberg (which would totally be the most delicious iceberg ever) and we'll have bigger and more exciting recipes in the future.

Here's the estimated nutritional value for the meal. The second serving of cheese really packs on the fat and the calories, and the bulk of the carbs and sodium come from the taco shell:

Calories: 530g
Fat: 18g (28%)
Protein: 28g (56%)
Carbohydrates: 77g (26%)
Cholesterol: 53mg (18%)
Sodium: 598mg (13%)
Fiber: 17g (68%)

Have you tried this recipe? Do you have your own breakfast burrito recipe you'd like to share? Let us know by leaving a comment below or emailing us at thetacodiet@gmail.com.

NOTE: Once again, I took pictures for this post, but haven't added them yet in my haste to post something new. In the next couple of days this post (and the blog in general) should have more pretty pictures to look at.

Good Morning, Burrito!

To me, being an adult means that you are able to consistently wake up early enough in the morning to make yourself a real breakfast before you go to work. Logically, that means that despite what my birth certificate says, I am not an adult.

If I'm lucky, I manage to grab a banana and a glass of milk before I go to work, and if I'm really running late, that means I'm just downing coffee all morning in anticipation of lunch. What I have found doable in the past is scrambling up some egg whites (out of a carton, I'm not ambitious enough to separate the whites from an actual egg), which gave me a good jumping off point for a breakfast burrito.

To minimize the amount of preparation and shopping necessary for my first attempt, I used ingredients that I had around the house:

• 1 whole wheat soft taco shell
• ¼ cup egg whites
• 1 tsp. olive oil
• 2 tbsp. Salsa
• ½ avocado
• ¼ cup cheese

The key to an efficient breakfast is spending as little time on preparation as possible, so I gave myself a head start by cubing the avocados the night before. I'm sure there's a better way to go about doing this, but what I do is cut the avocado in half (forcing the knife through the pit), remove the pit halves, quarter the avocado, peel off the skin, then cube the remainder.

From a nutritional standpoint, I'm a big fan of liquid egg. They're low-calorie, low-sodium, have no cholesterol, and are packed with protein. I cook mine in olive oil, which, while free of cholesterol, carbs, and sodium, packs a shocking amount of calories and fat per serving. One tablespoon of olive oil has 120 grams of calories and 14 grams of fat, so I reduce that to one teaspoon, which cuts those values by a third and is a sufficient amount for this recipe.

Since I'd chopped up the avocado last night, I was able to get through this recipe from start to finish in five and a half minutes - and I think I can get it down to under five. To start, put the olive oil in a small skillet and warm it over medium heat. Once the oil slides easily around the pan, it's time to add the egg whites.

Don't leave the egg whites alone, because an amount this small will firm up quickly. I use a wooden paddle to push the egg whites towards the center of the pan from the edges, but after a few pushes, it's just a matter of pushing around the mass of congealed egg whites until they're cooked to your liking.

Once the egg whites are ready, put them onto a soft taco shell, then add the salsa, avocado, and cheese. Fold it up so that at least one end is closed (I had some spillage on my first attempt) and enjoy. The salsa is the dominant taste here, with the avocados giving everything a slightly crunchy texture. From preparation to cleanup, this recipe only takes 10 minutes total, which makes it doable even if you're in a hurry.

I'd like to add a piece of fruit to this going forward, but my personal produce section didn't have anything that would have been a nice complement at the end of the meal this morning.

Here's the estimated nutritional value for the Good Morning Burrito, along with the percentage for the daily recommended amount. I know that fat content is a little startling, but most of that's coming from the avocado, while the cheese and the taco shell are the biggest offenders in the Sodium department:

Calories: 442g
Fat: 29g (45%)
Protein: 24g (48%)
Carbohydrates: 35g (12%)
Cholesterol: 25mg (8%)
Sodium: 482mg (20%)
Fiber: 7g (28%)

Have you tried this recipe? Do you have your own breakfast burrito recipe you'd like to share? Let us know by leaving a comment below or emailing us at thetacodiet@gmail.com.

NOTE: I took pictures for this post, but haven't added them yet in my haste to post something new. In the next couple of days this post (and the blog in general) should have more pretty pictures to look at.

Tacos Are Objectively Awesome

To a lot of people, tacos are a junk food indulgence - they're usually available in large quantities for little money, and any resulting gastrointestinal distress is considered part of the bargain. When people order tacos (or burritos or quesadillas or enchiladas or nachos) from a fast food place or even a lot of restaurants, they're not doing it for their health - they're usually making the decision to forgo nutrition for one meal in pursuit of taste.

It doesn't have to be this way. If you make tacos (or burritos or quesadillas or enchiladas or nachos) at home with the right ingredients, you can make meals low in carbs, high in lean protein, full of fresh veggies and loaded with flavor.

This blog will document the misadventures of two (kinda dumb) guys as we create and follow the Taco Diet. We'll have recipes, calorie counts, and comparisons of various ingredients. If you have a recipe of your own to share, let us know and we'll try it out!