Ready, Set, TACO!

Happy Day 1, everyone!  I've been amazed to see all the taco pictures posted with #30daysoftacos hashtags on Twitter today.  It's fun to see real evidence of how everybody wants to be just like me! :)

Kidding.

Ok, but seriously, folks...
I was excited to leave my helluva-work-day behind and head home tonight for a beer and some tacos tonight.  Today we had Chicken and Goat Cheese Tacos with brown rice and black beans on the side (a new favorite side-dish of mine.  How did it take me this long to discover pre-cooked rice in a bag?) and a glass of Delirium Tremens.  Delirium is super tasty beer, and totally worth the hella-mad dollaz it costs at the liquor store.  Seriously, go buy some. 

I'll wait.....

......

Welcome back!

Now that you have a tasty beer to sip on, lets continue.

So yeah, Chicken and Goat Cheese Tacos.  I made some baked hard shells with the hard shell baker thingy, too.  It works pretty well!  Tonight I used corn tortillas.  The shells weren't quite as good as the store-bought hard kind, but I'll make them again.  I'm sure over the next month I'll have an opportunity or 2 to try out a few different methods.  Maybe I'll spray some cooking spray or something to make them crispier.  Unless, of course, spraying them makes them softer.  Do you guys know what'll happen?  Any ideas?

And here it is!  The recipe made a kind of a mayo-free chicken salad.  It was very tasty in tacos, and I'd make it again for sure, either for tacos or just to have as salad.  Goat cheese is good in everything, and this also has a healthy dose of cilantro. 

I love Cilantro.  If it was legal, I'd totally marry Cilantro.  But it'd have to ask me, first.  Me asking Cilantro to get married would just seem desperate.


You may have noticed that I linked todays recipe a couple of paragraphs ago.  I'm not totally sure what I want this blog to be, so for the time being I'm linking recipes.  I don't know if this is going to be a "cooking blog," or a "trying new things  the same things 30 times" blog, or maybe I'll just write whatever about whatever...or whatever.  I guess we'll all grow together.  Whichever way it ends up going, I don't really want to write out recipes.  Mostly because they aren't mine and I'm pretty sure plagiarism is frowned-upon, even on the internet.

That's only partially true.  Really, nothing is frowned-upon on the internet. 
Nothing other than things with 'comments' sections at the bottom, which are frowned-upon by weirdo jerk stranger with nothing better to do than comment mean frowny things when all you want to do is tell the world how much you like whatever.
Nothing and everything is frowned upon on the internet.
Deep Thoughts.
If you're still reading this, congratulations!  Your reward is for this post to end so you can go crack open another Delirium and plan tomorrows taco.

G'nite
B

Restaurant, preparedness, and a little indecision...probably.

So okay...

Tomorrow is day one of 30 Days of Tacos.  You guys ready?  Have you chosen your first recipe or restaurant?  Have you ever spelled the word "restaurant" correctly on your first try before?

Me neither.

To the spelling thing, not the preparedness thing.

I do, however, have enough tortillas to last for a few days, and all the ingredients for DAY 1.  Ooh, and I also picked up this (hopefully) great little baking device that (according to package directions) will turn tortillas into baked hard-shells.   

Pictured here with a few tortillas, it makes (or so it says) 4 hard shells in, like, 7 or 8 minutes.  Who's got 2 thumbs and is TOTALLY PUMPED!?!??! 

Woah.  Calm down, guys.

I haven't tried the thingy yet, but I have high hopes for it (clearly). 

I was thinking I may also use April as another month of writing, since I haven't touched my NaNoWriMo novel since November.  Did all ya'll know that stories don't write themselves?  It's true.  I think I've been avoiding it because 1. I'm lazy, and 2. I like my main character, so I don't want anything bad to happen to him.  Sadly, that does not a gripping-story make.  So I'll maybe spend some time this month taking him out back and beating the shit outta him.

Not really.

Or maybe.

We'll see.

I'm gonna go eat a snack now.  See yous guys tomorrow!!



The Rules 2.0

Actually, before I start talking about rules again, let me just say that we probably should have Googled "30 days of tacos" before we decided to make it a thing and start a blog.  I didn't actually read any of the number of hits per se, but they did have "30 days of tacos" in the title.  The Other One (it's an official title when it's capitalized) seems to be about eating tacos in resteraunts for a month.  Ours is more of a creativity experiment than an endurance test. 

Which brings me back around to the updated rules. 

Your comments forced me to think about The Point.  After deliberating with Derek I've come to the conclusion that 30 Days of Tacos is a celebration of delivering delicious filling to ones face in a folded-in-half-circle with one hand, head tilted to one side.

Or, to be slightly less verbose, it's about Taco shaped stuff.

And so, THE RULES 2.0

1. Some sort of taco must be eaten every day, for any meal.
2. They needn't be the main course of a given meal.  Like, "I don't feel like cooking and I'm not leaving the house during this mid-April blizzard that we keep having all the time.  Imma throw some pizza rolls, tater tots, and mini tacos in the oven.  Lets move to Florida."
3. Tacos need not be Mexican.  Taco-shaped food and/or food that can easily be explained into a taco are acceptable forms of taco.  i.e. Chinese Lettuce Tacos.
4. Foods with the word "Taco" in them do NOT automatically count as tacos.  For example, dessert tacos DO count but taco pizza DOES NOT.......(please hold while i add "pizza taco" to my list of possible recipes)
5. No exact repeats allowed.  Meaning:
1. The same concept may be cooked more than once, so long as ingredients are changed.  ex: using chunks of chicken instead of ground beef for what I'll probably call "Normal Kind" tacos.
2. Ordering the same item from menus at different restaraunts is ok, since they'll be pretty different.  This means Derek can order Fish Tacos from more than one joint.  This works out well, since that dude lurves Fish Tacos.
3. All that said, lets us all try to keep things as interesting as possible.  I've built this little "but it's chicken this time"  loophole into the rules because I'm not entirely confident that I'll be able to come up with 30 completely different foods, but I'd sure love if no one had use Rule 5.1as an excuse for a meal.

Coworker Michelle and I were discussing the finer points of some of the rules, and she brought up an excellent point and I didn't quite know what the answer was.  So....a little help, you guys?

She was all, "what about fajitas?"
And I was all, "But they aren't tacos.  That's why they call them 'fajitas.'"
And then she was all, "They're eaten in a taco shape, with a tortilla and everything."
But I was like, "I don't think it counts as a taco even if it's the same shape if it has another official name."
To which she snottily replied, "Then you can't really rename lettuce wraps 'low carb tacos,' can you?"
Which made me be all, "Shouldn't we be working?"

She wasn't actually snotty.

But she did bring up an excellent point.  Do other things that are taco-shaped but already have names of their own count?  Gyros?  Fajitas?  A big part of me would like to eat a 'Greek Taco' in April.  I'm all for using nontraditional 'shells' and non-texmex filling, but how do you guys feel about renaming existing food?  Should they have to be changed some to count?


I feel like I'm spending too much time thinking about 30 Days of Tacos. 

ok, Killa B  OUT!

Hi, there!

So Derek likes tacos.  I do too, but he, like like like's tacos.  Since April is 30 Days of Biking, he started joking about also having 30 Days of Tacos. 

Cut to me thinking about tacos.  I thought, "ya know, with a few well defined rules, I bet we could totes eat tacos every day for a month without going into May with a serious hate for them."

And so 30 Days of Tacos was born.


THE RULES

1. Some sort of taco must be eaten every day, for any meal.
2. Tacos need not be mexican.  Taco-shaped food and/or food that can easily be explained into a taco are acceptable forms of taco.  ie Greek Tacos, Chinese Lettuce Tacos.
3. Foods with the word "Taco" in them count as tacos.  Examples include but are not limited to: Taco pie, taco pizza, taco salad, breakfast taco, dessert taco, ChocoTaco

mmmmm...Chocotaco......

As 30 Days of Tacos doesn't start for another week-and-a-half, there may be some rule-editing.  So far, I only have about 16 taco recipes, and looking at them makes me feel a little sick of tacos (don't tell Derek).  Let me know if you have any rule suggestions, and by all means, let me know if you're going to join us!