How To Make Taco Salad

Unless you're really good friends with them, you probably wouldn't serve franks and beans to dinner guests.[1] And unless you're hosting a party for kids, your wife may not let you make tuna puffs or BP&J. But some things, no matter how much you love it, you have to admit to yourself that it just doesn't look good enough to serve to anyone else.

I'd like to believe this salad doesn't fall into that last category, but looking at the pictures I've got to say I'd be a little suspicious of it if someone else offered it to me. I could probably "fix" that by assembling it like a "normal" salad: lettuce on the bottom, then toppings, then dressing on top. But this is how I've eaten it ever since my aunt first served it to me out of a zip-top bag at a picnic when I was eight years old. So I'm not changing it.

Ingredients

Taco meat

1 pound ground beef
1 can (12 ounces) plain tomato sauce
1/4 cup chili powder (or taco seasoning)
3 cloves garlic (optional)

Salad

1 head iceberg lettuce
1/2 pound sharp cheddar cheese
1/4 large onion (about 1/2 cup diced)
4 Roma tomatoes (about 1/2 cup diced)
1-1/2 cups thousand island dressing
5 ounces (about half a medium bag) corn chips

Directions

Brown the ground beef in a frying pan with some salt, breaking the beef up as much as possible. (The same was as in the chili dog chili sauce recipe.) Add the garlic and chili powder (or taco seasoning) and the tomato sauce.





Cook until everything is heated through, then remove from heat and allow to cool while you prepare the salad.

Dice the onion.



Cut the tomatoes into quarters and remove the seeds. Slice the meaty part lengthwise into thin strips.



Then finish dicing the tomatoes.



(Hmm, I think I need to do a post on dicing tomatoes ... )

Core and chop the lettuce.




If I really wanted to be strict with my mise en place, I'd shred the cheese into a bowl, but I had left it out too long by this time. When you shred warm cheese, it tends to start sticking right back together if you put it all in one big pile. So I shredded it right onto the lettuce.



I didn't use that entire block of cheese. That's about three-quarters of a pound, and I used a bit more than half of it.

Add the tomato and onion.



Toss everything together a little, then add the thousand island dressing.



Look at your bowl and realize that yes, you should have used the biggest bowl for this. (Damn, I hate when I do this.) The bowl can't just be big enough to hold everything, it has to be big enough to mix it around easily. When you're mixing, you generally want a bowl at least twice as big as you'd need just to hold all the ingredients.

Once you've got it in a big enough bowl, toss the salad until it is well coated with the dressing. Then add the corn chips.



(This is not product placement. You can't see what brand that is. These are not the corn chips you are looking for ... )

Add the taco meat and stir to combine.



You want to do the corn chips and taco meat last. Otherwise the chips will get soggy, and the warm meat will melt the cheese. If you're not going to be serving this right away, let the meat cool all the way before adding it, and don't include the chips. Bring the salad in a zip-top bag or a bowl with a tight lid, and add the chips when you're ready to serve.



And that's it.

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1 Why is that, anyway? Why do we try to impress strangers, we'll at least straigten up for friends, but if we're just serving family they're lucky if we're not still in pajamas? I can't remeber where I got this line, but we'll spend money we don't have buying stuff we don't need to impress people we don't like.

If you have any recipes that you love to eat, but won't serve to guests, tell me about it in the comments below. I want to do a whole roundup of "too good for guests" meals.

How To Make Thousand Island Dressing

Every now and then when I stop to think about it I wonder why ketchup is so much more popular than thousand island dressing. As far as I'm concerned thousand island is much more flavorful, and works on just about everything ketchup works on. Any fast food place that brags about their "secret sauce" is really talking about thousand island. (Oops, now it's not a secret any more.) One of my favorite uses -- and the one that gets the strangest looks, is to use it instead of duck sauce with egg rolls. Mmmmmmm.

If you look carefully and shop around you may be able to find a brand that isn't mostly canola oil and corn syrup. But if you can't find a good one, this recipe is just what you need. It's way better than any bottled brand I've had, and only takes a couple of minutes to make a batch.

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Ingredients

2 cups mayonnaise

Mayonnaise

2 extra large eggs
1-1/2 cups olive pomace oil
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon mustard powder

2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup diced onion
1/4 cup diced pickle (sweet, dill, or combination)
1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
1 extra large egg, hard boiled (optional)

Directions

Dice the onion.



Dice the pickle. If you have small ones, cut them in quarters ...



... and chop several at once.



For larger pickles, you may want to cut out the seeds before dicing the rest.

Set the onion and pickle aside. This is for your mise en place.




Mince the garlic.



If you're making the mayonnaise from scratch, put the eggs, white vinegar, mustard powder and oil in your mixing cup in that order. Put the stick blender all the way to the bottom, turn it on and slowly pull it up to the top. Don't worry if it's not thick enough for a sandwich, this is going to be in dressing.



Rather than get the food processor dirty, add the onion, pickle, garlic, tomato paste and balsamic vinegar to the cup the mayo was in.







Process it with the stick blender -- it doesn't have to be very smooth -- then add it to the mayo and stir.



Check the taste and add black pepper if needed.



And that's it. You could eat this by itself, it's so good.



One extra touch is to add a diced hard-boiled egg.

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Regular readers might notice I did lettuce yesterday and salad dressing today. You might think that means I'll be doing some kind of salad in the next day or two. That's very observant of you. But I'll be you don't expect taco salad.

Okay, now you expect taco salad. This is another one of those "delicious but not pretty enough for company" recipes. Why do we do that? Have favorite recipes that we won't serve to guests? I've never understood that. If you have any recipes that you like, but you won't serve to guests -- or your wife won't let you serve it to them -- post it in the comments. I'm thinking about doing a collection of "Too Good for Company" recipes.

How To Core And Chop Lettuce

Some people swear by ceramic or plastic knives for cutting lettuce. The idea is that metal knives cause the leaves to turn brown at the edges faster. Actually, it's not the metal that does it. What happens is any cutting will cut cells, which then turn brown. If you want your lettuce to last longer don't cut it. Rip the leaves by hand.

I usually don't see the problem, though. When I buy lettuce, I have salad at every meal until it's gone.

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Directions

First up, the core. You can cut this out if you really want to. But it's way easier this way:



Set the bottom -- the side you just pulled the core out of -- down and cut it in half.



Then in quarters.



You could stop now and serve what the trendy restaurants are calling a "wedge salad".



If you haven't seen it they literally take those wedges you see above and pour some dressing over it. Yeah, that's a salad. Okay.

But for normal people who aren't trying to impress anyone, it's better to do just a little more work and get the lettuce into bite-sized pieces. So put one half -- two quarters -- down flat, start at one end, and chop about an inch wide all the way across.



And that's it.