Tacos, or, officially, Hoparound's Hamburger Tacos

When I was in undergrad, my best friend Rachel and I used to joke about ingredients for really obvious recipes: 'Would you like a gin and tonic?' we'd ask each other. 'I have all the ingredients,' we'd add slyly, and then we'd both crack up while one of us stirred the bacon we were cooking (we ate a lot of bacon in college), and the other one poured more gin. I feel similarly about this taco recipe: if you've ever made tacos, these are the tacos you've made. It's a self-explanatory recipe that doesn't really merit an explanation, but despite the dearth of Mexican restaurants here in Edinburgh, I always kind of assumed that everyone in this city was doing like Judson and I do and making their own tacos. Then I realised that no one else here eats tex-mex as frequently as we do, and that tacos are less commonplace the farther you get from... well, the equator.

There's only one store in all of edinburgh that sells la preferida. I never realised how important it would be to me until after we moved here.

This is food for the kind of people who like to eat but don't like to cook-- the kind of thing that I ate for dinner at least two nights a week before I got married and suddenly was able to try new recipes for someone besides just myself. (Someone, I might add, who was not content to eat tex-mex for 1/3 of his dinners each week.) But seriously: it's not a hard recipe, this one, and it's cheap. You can buy all the ingredients for these tacos for less than a tenner AND eat leftovers for at least three meals (which you won't mind, because they're delicious.)

So anyway, this one goes out to the Scottish readers, who, I've realised in the last few months, are not as familiar with Mexican food as we Americans are. Because, let's be real, this is not really a recipe at all. It's just an ad with suggestions on how to make tacos on the back of a recipe for quiche. But, rules are rules, and since I now live in a country where I've had to explain sangria, margaritas, and queso dip to different people in the last month, I figured it was about time I posted a recipe about this.

Happy Cinco de Mayo to those of you who are celebrating! And to everyone else, make these and a tall glass of sangria and you'll be well on your way to celebrating soon.

Happy Tuesday!

The verdict:

5 spoons out of five. Tacos are my favourite food. Seriously. When I was eight years old, my mom sat me down and explained to me that I could have whatever food I wanted for my birthday, even if that meant tacos instead of pizza, like all my friends had. 21 birthdays later and I've never looked back, and still have never had a bad taco. These are foolproof, delicious, and they pair perfectly with warm weather and cold wine. What more could you want out of dinner?

THE RECIPE:

Easiest Tacos

the ingredients:

1 lb ground beef (or 1 lb boneless skinless chicken breasts)
3 tbsp Taco seasoning
2 c refried beans (or black beans)
1 pkg hard taco shells (or soft)

Toppings:

Shredded lettuce
Tomatoes, coarsely chopped
Taco sauce
Salsa
Tabasco sauce
Grated cheese
Sour cream
Sauteed onions and peppers
Fresh jalapeños
Pickled jalapeños
Fresh lime wedges to squeeze over your taco

THE DIRECTIONS:

Saute ground beef with taco seasoning until cooked through.
Drain beef well, but do not rinse.
Warm beans in the microwave or in a pan over low heat.
Fill taco shell with beans first (they act like glue!), then meat and whichever toppings you prefer.
Eat with great gusto.

Note: these are easily made vegetarian or vegan with the omission of the meat (I prefer mine meatless) and/or sour cream and cheese (I don't prefer mine dairy-less). If you're making them vegan, be sure to check your beans to make sure they don't have meat stock in them!

Eleanor's Sangria

It's almost Cinco de Mayo, and while that means very little here in Scotland, I still miss the days of bottomless salsa and endless sangria that always came along with Cinco back in the US. Growing up in Florida will definitely teach you how to appreciate a cold drink on a hot summer day, and let's be real, in Florida, those hot summer days are all year round.

I, however, have always been slightly indifferent to restaurant-purchased sangria. I mean, let's be real: it's usually all apples, which don't impart any flavour (or juice) onto the wine, and it's usually watered down and too sweet from melted ice or, heaven forbid, 7Up that's been added to cut it. Every summer since Judson and I met, though, I've been making black and white sangria for his birthday in July. It's a melange of two recipes I found, and it's basically white wine, white peaches, black cherries, a wee bit of sugar, lemon juice, and triple sec. It's incredibly good on a day at the pool in Georgia, where the peaches are so soft you can spread them on toast. But it's a pain to make. The peaches have to be de-stoned, peeled, and chunked, and the cherries have to be individually pitted and halved, which means that ultra-simple recipe takes at least an hour or two of prep on the night before you want to drink it. This recipe is much simpler, more traditional, and just as beautiful.

Eleanor's recipe for sangria is so stained with red wine it's barely legible (there's a note next to 'brandy' that I can't read, but it ends with 'very quiet,' and I can't fathom what THAT could possibly be about), and she recommends making it with her own '3 ½ tablespoon wooden spoon,' which might take the cake as the single most useless piece of cooking advice to which I have ever borne witness. Furthermore, I'm thinking the recipe might have been written down after imbibing a few glasses of the sangria, because it's more or less useless in terms of quantities, timing, and order. I did my best to follow the directions, and while I know I got all of the ingredients right, the quantities were anyone's guess. Judson thought my batch was a bit too sweet, I thought it could have been a bit stronger, and the friend we shared it with, who had only had the terrible kind of sangria you drink in college, thought it was wonderful because it wasn't made with bottom-shelf rum. I've tweaked the below notes in accordance with our tastes, but final results will depend on the type of wine you use, the length of time you allow the fruit to soak, and how sweet you like your sangria.

But really: you should make this. It's Monday, you're probably enjoying one of the first weeks of good weather your locale has had in months, you need to practice before actual Cinco de Mayo rolls around, it's Star Wars Day!, you have a pile of fruit that you intended to put in last week's breakfast smoothes/banana bread and then forgot about, and come on, don't make me make up any more reasons for you.

Best part: if you're celebrating Cinco de Mayo on Tuesday, you don't even need to worry about making this the night before-- I made it on Friday as soon as I got home from work, and when we drank it about an hour later, it was already perfect.

 

 

The verdict:

5 spoons out of five. It's a perfect summery drink to pair with tacos, nachos, or just to enjoy by itself while you enjoy the fact that the sun doesn't set until well after 9pm this time of year. Enjoy!

The recipe:

Eleanor's Sangria

THE DIRECTIONS:

Pour sugar into the bottom of a large bowl.
Add fruit and press into the sugar firmly.
For each piece of fruit, you probably only used about half of the fruit, so squeeze the juice from the other half on top of the fruit.
Pour brandy on top of fruit, sprinkle with a dash of cinnamon, and let stand at room temperature for as long as you can, ideally at least an hour.
Pour about a cup of wine over fruit mixture and stir briskly to dissolve the remaining sugar.
Add the rest of the wine, stir, and serve in glasses filled with 'small ice.'

Serves 1 person if you're ready to party, 3 if you're feeling more chill.

the ingredients:

4 slices of unpeeled orange
4 slices of unpeeled lemon
4 slices of unpeeled apple
Optional: 2 slices of unpeeled grapefruit, one sliced, unpeeled clementine
¼ c sugar, or to taste
1/3 c brandy
1 bottle hearty burgundy
Cinnamon
Ice to serve
A wooden spoon to stir, if you're into following the letter of the law.

Magic Bars

You know how occasionally you come across a recipe where every single ingredient is delicious, totally on its own? This is one of those recipes. No baking soda or raw eggs here. No flour or water or boring leavening agents. Just pure decadence, from start to finish.* It's one of those recipes that would be hard to pass up when you read it... but since it came from the inside of a box of butter, I'm not really sure how Eleanor found it to begin with.

Growing up, I remember friends making these for potluck dinners and to bring to parties, and we always called them Seven Layer Bars, but we must have been terrible at counting, because these only have 6 ingredients. So good are these bars that I used up my precious stash of chocolate chips in order to make them. As an aside, you can't get chocolate chips in Scotland-- at least not the kind needed for baking. So every time I go to the States, I pick up a couple bags and stash them in the back of the pantry for emergency use only. Judson doesn't understand the concept of an emergency baking stash, so I'm appealing to you for compassion on this. I've tried cooking with a bar of chocolate hacked to pieces, and although it sometimes works, mostly it makes your baked goods look kind of muddy from the tiny shavings of chocolate it leaves behind, instead of clean and studded with pockets of melty chocolate.**

These are the perfect party snack, and practically foolproof. Eleanor's copy was dogeared and worn, but absent any of the notations that most of her go-to recipes have, so trust me when I say: neither she nor I have found any way to improve upon this perfection. It's truly embarrassing how good these are-- the type of thing that you could bring to a party and, despite dirtying only one pan and spending less than 30 minutes on the entire dish, start to finish, they'll be polished off within an hour, even as the plate of petit fours languishes next to it.

Nobody is gonna want to admit how delicious these are, but no one could ever say no to one of them. Oh, and if you live stateside and have the option of shredded or flaked coconut instead of desiccated, so much the better for the texture. These are the best friend of the person who no one trusts to make a decent baked good-- easy, delicious, and so decadent you'll have to cut them into small pieces, which just means more to go around.

Take it from me and Eleanor: make these tonight, take them to work tomorrow, and then count the hours til you get called into the boss's office for a promotion

*Admittedly, part of the reason for this is that the recipe relies on a crust made of pre-made cookies, but nevertheless, I stand by my argument.

**If you're looking for things to mail us, chocolate chips are way at the top of the list, along with maple syrup, Tabasco sauce, hot pepper vinegar, and most flavours of Jell-o, which, embarrassingly, I need for a lot of upcoming recipes from the box. (Oh, also something called canned grapes, which I can't even fathom, really.)

The verdict: 4 spoons out of five, if you make them with the amount of chocolate I recommend below. I knocked off a spoon because nothing this easy should really get 5 spoons, it's just awkward.

The recipe:

Magic Bars

the ingredients:

½ c butter
1 ½ c Rich Tea crumbs (UK) or graham cracker crumbs (US)
14 oz condensed milk
10 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 1/3 c flaked or shredded coconut, or 1 c desiccated coconut
1 c chopped nuts (I used pecans and hazelnuts)

THE DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Melt butter by placing it in a 13x9 baking dish in the oven.
Sprinkle crumbs over butter evenly, pressing down to ensure good contact.
Pour condensed milk over crumbs as evenly as possible.
Top with chocolate chips, coconut, and nuts, pressing down firmly.
Bake 20-25 minutes until lightly browned and nuts are toasted.
Cool and cut into bars. Store at room temperature, or cold for a chewier treat.

Yields 18-24 bars.