Buffalos and Tacos

Taco night. I hate taco night. It's too easy and therefore makes me feel like I'm not living up to my domestic goddess aspirations. Daniel, however, loves taco night, and why not? It's always successful, as opposed to my usual mealtime experiments, which never fail to be overly complicated but almost always fail to be tasty. Last night on the way home from work Daniel picked up the necessary supplies- tortillas, ground turkey, chips, avocados and taco seasoning. I already had some tomatoes, an onion, and a black bean dip that I made earlier in the week. What followed was dinner delight.

The Meat

I prefer not to buy ground turkey if I can help it. After reading Eating Animals I decided turkey is a no-go, but how do you do tacos for a meat lover without taco meat? He only eats meat, cheese, and sour cream anyhow so it's not like I can just have him sub-in veggies. Sprouts was running a special on ground bison so I went to the brand's website and checked it out. Their bison basically run free on 10,000 acres of land (how's that for free range?), eat pesticide-free grass (and whatever else bison eat), and aren't given any hormones, steroids or antibiotics. It doesn't get much more "granola" than that! Sign me up! I went to sprouts to acquire said bison meat and found they were totally out of fresh and only had frozen left. Bummer, but not a deterrent. At the freezer I found the last package of bison meat and my jaw dropped. Blood-central. The frozen meat was encased in a solid block of bloody ice. Yuck. Free-range ideals went out the window, I could just call Daniel and have him pick up some Jennie-O turkey on the way home. And that was the end of that.

The Veggies

Typically I just eat sliced bell peppers, spinach, tomato and avocado in a tortilla, but I used the last of my bell peppers in my black bean "hummus" and I wanted to save my spinach for a pesto in case snowmageddon continued to lock us in the apartment, so I had to get creative. In my crisper I had a zucchini and a yellow squash, so I decided to toss them with olive oil, red wine vinegar, garlic and some Nature's Seasoning and roast them. In the meantime I started to make some pico de gallo. I diced my onion and tomato and tossed them together with parsley, as I didn't have any cilantro, and some garlic. When the zucchini and squash finished roasting I took them out of the oven and last minute decided to throw them into the pico. It ended up being quite tasty, though my onion-to-every-other-vegetable ratio was way off. Still, the pico made a great taco filling and a surprisingly great pairing with some pasta and cheese the next day (snowmageddon decidedly made me more creative in my eating habits).

"Refried" Black Bean "Hummus"

The secret to this next dish is that it is neither "refried" nor "hummus." On Monday I decided I would try my hand at making a black bean hummus. I took Giada's White Bean and Roasted Eggplant recipe and basically substituted every ingredient with other ingredients. Eggplant became bell peppers. White beans became black beans. Lemon juice became lime juice. I tossed in some cayenne pepper and onion powder as well. It didn't taste much like a hummus at all, and though Daniel actually liked it, to my total amazement, we both thought it lacked something (if you play with this recipe and figure out how to make it better, let me know). Enter taco night. In scanning my fridge for veggies I saw the concoction and decided to heat it up to use in a bean burrito or two. What a success! It's very "granola" to see something you made earlier in the week for one recipe and use it in another. Mark that.

Dinner was delicious and satisfying and took less than 30 minutes to make. Really, what more can you ask for? That should be good enough, but it's not. You see, typically we buy our tortillas at the store and although they are handmade at Kroger and have a very short shelf life (having a short shelf life is also very "granola") they still have a ton of ingredients in them that I cannot pronounce. This I cannot abide. "Maybe next taco night I will make my own tortillas," I say to Daniel. His response? "So you mean next week?"

Taco night is here to stay and though it's not the domestic goddess meal of choice, it's something I can feel good about.