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
- Some sort of taco must be eaten every day, for any meal.
- 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."
- 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.
- 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)
- No exact repeats allowed. Meaning:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
I like the new rules. As with most Mexican food, the shape seems to have more of an impact on the name than the actual ingredients. "It's a tortilla with meat, cheese and vegetables." Looking it up in the dictionary doesn't seem to help. I Googled it quick and got:
ReplyDelete"A corn tortilla folded around a filling such as ground meat or cheese."
I looked up burrito and got:
"A flour tortilla wrapped around a filling, as of beef, beans, or cheese."
If we go by the assumption that the flour and corn parts aren't important (I've had flour tortilla tacos before) it's apparent that "folding" is what makes a taco a taco. Just don't serve the filling on sizzling platters and I think you can avoid the fajita confusion.
Either way for it to be interesting you'll have to take a couple liberties with the definition. Personally, I think that some sort of either Mexican tortilla or Mexican filling is required. Just making a gyro isn't enough. It hast to be in a Mexican tortilla and then folded. Alternatively you could put traditional taco fillings into a pita.
The same concept could be applied to the lettuce wraps. If you just put taco filling in lettuce leaves you have low carb tacos. You can also put lettuce wrap filling in tortillas and call them a taco. You can't, however, just make lettuce wraps and claim they're tacos.
Perhaps to avoid confusion with other Mexican dishes you should have to make sure what you make isn't already defined as something else. Serving fajita filling and flour tortillas means you're having fajitas. However, if you serve fajita filling with hard taco shells then you might be able to get away with calling them tacos.
At a restaurant it has to be called a taco on the menu to count. I think that trumps all other rules, too. I've been to Mexican restaurants that served "tacos" that were just fajita meat cut into cubes instead of strips and served in flour tortillas.
In short, and it may be way too late for this, just use common sense.