How to Make Beef Tacos

Beef taco dinner

By now you probably know that I love tacos.  They are easy to make.  They are easy to eat.  They are easy to serve to the family.  You can add extras or leave out ingredients to your tacos.  Today, I want to show how I make our tacos.

Ground beef we sometimes use

Browned ground beef

First, we brown the ground beef.  We use a bean smasher to break up the big pieces.  That's just something I came up with.

Spices added to browned beef

Delicious taco meat

You can use taco seasoning from a package, either from the Old El Paso package (pictured below) or you can add your own spices of: cumin, black pepper, and onion salt.  Also, to stretch the meat, you can add half a can of diced tomatoes.

Once you have your taco meat going, you can decide what your meat will go into.  You can use the taco shells like the ones below or use softened corn tortillas.  You could even use flour tortillas, but I don't use those too much because they are fattening and hard to digest.  Also, flour tortillas are not friends to diabetics.

Old El Paso Taco Dinner Kit

If you will be using taco shells, preheat oven at recommended setting.  Then, find some cookie sheets and cover with aluminum foil.  Aluminum foil is perfect to cover those old, ugly cookie sheets.  Also, the heat will warm the shells more efficiently.

Cookie sheet for taco shells

Taco shell on wrapped cookie sheet

Make sure to time these taco shells!  You don't want burnt shells.

If you want to make soft beef tacos, then you can use some corn tortillas and lightly fry them with coconut or olive oil.  I personally like olive oil.  You can use two spatulas to slowly flip the tortillas.  You don't want to splash the oil and cause a grease fire.

Simple ingredients for softening corn tortillas

Olive oil in pan ready for corn tortillas

Let olive oil warm up.  Heat does not have to be super high.  I usually like mine at about a 4 out of 10.

Old plate used to catch the softened corn tortillas

Plate covered with paper towels

Cover the plate with paper towels.  The paper towels will catch the extra oil.  Just place your softened corn tortillas (like those I've used in my Easy Cheese Enchilada Casserole) over the paper towels.  

Now, you are ready to add your meat to make whichever taco.  You can sprinkle: cheese; your choice of greens, like lettuce or spinach; tomatoes; avocado; and sour cream.  For sides, you can have beans and Mexican rice (or fideo, also known as vermicelli; elbows; and shells).

Well, thanks for reading about how to make beef tacos.  I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it up.

 

What about you, my readers? Do you like beef tacos? What would you add or subtract from beef tacos?  Tacos are versatile.  They are truly delicious.  My family love beef tacos.

May God bless you with His peace and wisdom, my beloveds.

This has been an entry for Saturday Spreads. I hope you enjoyed it!

Easy Cheese Enchilada Casserole

Ingredients for cheese enchilada casserole

Today, I want to show how I made an easy cheese enchilada casserole.  Now, I'm not saying this is a healthy meal, but you can see that some of the ingredients are healthier alternatives.  Corn tortillas and extra virgin olive oil are healthier than the flour tortillas and other oils.  The other ingredients are Borden's mild cheddar cheese, which is pre-shredded, and the Wolf Brand Chile with beans.  The last ingredient also has ground meat in it which satisfies my craving for meat.

Softened corn tortillas

In low heat, I poured the extra virgin olive oil in a flat pan.  I placed each corn tortilla, one at a time, just enough to soften them up.

Cheese added to one tortilla

I waited about 20 minutes for the tortillas to cool down, before attempting to place a decent amount of cheese in each one.  There's no right or wrong way of doing this.  You can make each enchilada as skinny or as fat as you would like.

Rolled-cheese-filled taco

I rolled up each "taco" and squeezed it right at the edge of each other.  Notice how I started at one end.  What side would you start with?  (I'm left-handed, and I started on the left.)

Cheese tacos completed

I made fourteen of these little "tacos" or enchiladas fit in this casserole dish.  Like I said before, there is no right or wrong way of making these enchiladas.  You might have cheese coming out of the corn tortillas.  It's okay.  You don't have to be perfect.  The most important thing to remember is to have clean hands before touching your food.

Wolf brand chili with beans on top of the cheese tacos

Once all the little tacos are made, you can dump and spread the canned chili on top.  Just make sure to coat the tortillas until you hardly see them.  Whatever is exposed will turn a bit crunchy.  That's not bad if you want some of it crunchy.  I want to say here that having coated the corn tortillas with the olive oil will keep the enchiladas from sticking to the casserole dish.  That's just a little tip I'm giving because it helped this time around.

Casserole covered with aluminum foil

I preheated the oven at 325 degrees for about 5 minutes.  After completely covering the top of the casserole dish with aluminum foil,  I baked the enchiladas in the oven for about 20 minutes.  It was enough to melt the cheese and make some of the corn tortillas a little crispy.  It gave a nice contrast of textures.

End product--cheese enchilada meal

 

The end product of all the hard work was delicious, easy cheese enchiladas in a one dish casserole.  I added beans and rice.  The beans had been in the freezer from when I had made them previously.  I simply reheated the beans.  I started the rice, while I let the corn tortillas cool.

 

These enchiladas are great as leftovers!  
Simply reheat in the microwave and enjoy even more crispiness.

 

Someday, I will show how easy it is to make beans in another blog entry.  Beans were the first thing I learned to make when I was fourteen years-old, and I'd like to pass that knowledge to my kids.

 

 

Well, I hope you liked my version of cheese enchiladas.

I hope to show how to make my version of Mexican rice, too.  Stay tuned!

 

Thanks for reading this blog entry.  I hope you enjoyed this picture-filled entry.  I wanted to show how to make an easy cheese enchilada casserole.  As always, you can add more or less ingredients.  Perhaps, I will even show a different version of an enchilada casserole, this time with ground beef.  Yum, yum!

 
How about you, my readers?  Have you made enchiladas lately?  Why or why not?  I encourage you to add your own ingredients; you can add bell peppers, diced tomatoes, and onions.

This has been an entry for Saturday Spreads.

Healthy Soup

Healthy soup with many ingredients.

This is a soup I had made when the weather was still cool.  Whenever I make a soup, I add whatever ingredients I have on hand.  I start by first browning the beef or boiling the chicken.  In this case, I made a chicken soup.  I also love adding all kinds of ingredients.

Healthy soup includes wet vegetable ingredients.

I made the white rice separately.  I opened the cans of tomato paste, corn, diced tomatoes, and mixed vegetables.  I also added some frozen bell peppers.  I had bought and cut the various colored bell peppers and had frozen them in their individual plastic baggies.  Doing the cutting and storing into the freezer always cuts down on cooking.

Healthy soup includes these dry spices.

Spices add wonderful taste to soups.  In the soup, I added lemon pepper, cumin seeds (which I placed in the used bottle of minced onions), salt, celery salt, garlic salt, and dried cilantro.  Dried cilantro is good for detoxification.  Cumin is a good source of iron and aids in digestion.  Garlic helps the immune system.

Healthy soups can be accompanied by other foods.

Finally, I served myself.  I put some of the white rice within my bowl of soup.  I warmed up some corn tortillas.  I added some lemon juice, which has vitamin C.  The soup was delicious, and I definitely did not feel guilty eating it.

How about you, my readers?  Do you like soups?  Do you like to make soups?  If so, what do you like to put in your soups?  I hope you add lots of healthy ingredients.

This entry has been part of Saturday Spreads series.  I hope you enjoy it.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints that I discussed here are just my opinions.  Please consult your physician before altering anything relating to your health.  I am only suggesting here to take charge of your health.  Don't just leave your health in the hands of your doctors; become your own advocate.  You know best how your body is doing.

Eating Colorful, Healthy Foods

Colorful foods help you want to eat healthy.

It's been said that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.  I say that the way to feed my loving husband is through providing visually appealing foods.  Adding rich tomato sauce--a red color--into rice is good for a man's prostate.  It appears delightful even though I add real garlic (helpful for the immune system) and other good spices.  My husband gobbles up the food with his eyes before he even puts a spoonful of it into his mouth.

Today, I want to discuss the importance of a balanced meal.  What is a balanced meal?  Well, you need to have your carbohydrates (or starches), protein, and veggies.  Here, I have chicken soft tacos with beans and rice.  I'm not going into detail about how to throw it together.  

I just want you to look at the colors.  Isn't it beautiful?  If you are a visual person, then you are enjoying looking at that plate full of colors.  I learned a while back that to get someone to eat your food, you should use different colors to have a good food presentation.  Here, you can see the yellow, orange, brown, green, and red calling to you to eat it.  

I bet you're drooling!

You can also see that the plate is colorful.  I thought it added a nice touch to the dinner that was on it.  Notice that the plate is not big, either.  I did that on purpose.  We need to eat smaller portions, and a small plate helps you do that.  

Did you know that you should only eat the amount of meat or cooked grain that fits in the meaty part of your hand? Yes, your palm.  That means that your meat slice should be lean, not thick, and be the size of your hand, minus your fingers.  If your dinner time calls for only one or two meat portions, check it against your palm.  That will give you a good indication of how much protein or starches you should eat in one meal.  

Of course, if you are eating small meals throughout the day, as some doctors and fitness books recommend, then you would probably only eat one portion of protein.  Just make sure to  match up a protein with a good carbohydrate, especially if you are diabetic.  In this case, I matched each meat to a corn tortilla, which is better than the white flour tortillas.

Beans have both carbohydrates and proteins so it can really stand alone, but I'm a Mexican American and used to eating a meat entree with some kind of pasta (like rice, shells, elbows, or vermicelli) and beans on the side. 

Adding the roughage of spinach helps the food push through your body, and the tomatoes are good for you, too.  Tomatoes are good for your eyes.  My eye-sight began to improve when we grew tomatoes in our garden and ate them.  The avocados provide the fat that is good for your body.  I even sprinkled a little lemon (which has vitamin C) juice on the avocado.

I've come a long way from my earlier days of cooking.  That was about 15 years ago.  I am not perfect, but I have striven to provide delicious, wonderful-looking meals.  I have tried to balance them out with a good drink and a fruit on the side.  I don't always get to make my meals totally healthy, but I am hopeful to get  there some day.  For now, adding good veggies, like spinach and tomatoes, is a step in the right direction.

How about you, my readers?  Do you prepare your foods for all of the senses?  Do you try to make it taste and smell delicious?  I encourage you to include the different colors of the palette.  It just might make it more fun to eat a healthy meal.

God bless you with His peace, my beloveds.

This has been an entry for Saturday Spreads.  I went link-crazy, but I hope you like it.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints that I discussed here are just my opinions.  Please consult your physician before altering anything relating to your health.  I am only suggesting here to take charge of your health.  Don't just leave your health in the hands of your doctors; become your own advocate.  You know best how your body is doing.