Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe! Did you all enjoy our two-and-a-half week holiday break? Don’t answer if it would hurt my feelings. I for one had a great time working in Leavenworth, seeing my friends, and getting sick in new and frustrating ways. (I had a wheezing cough for a week or two, pulled my left hamstring, and just last night,  while packing up, I got hit with a migraine. But since I was mid-packing, I couldn’t find my meds, so I just laid on the couch for 2 ½ hours.) And we’re looking to start things off this year with a brighter take on how we closed out last year:  memories. Because today is a special day. But if you want to skip all that and get straight to eating, here’s a link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Ol’ Papa Palindrome

So, part of the reason we had to take a 2.5 week break is because I realized in December that I had done some math wrong; originally, I only intended to take a week off, but that changed when I realized that, in order for today’s post, 1/03, to be KC 301, we’d need to skip another one. (For you Brits/Continentals, I guess just assume one day we’ll get to 1000, and it’s 03/01) And I really wanted that to happen, for a very specific reason. Because it’s a palindrome, AND because I wanted something as special as a palindromic post-date match-up to commemorate another very specific fact about today.

I really need to check if I actually found better pictures of dad before I make these posts.

January 3rd, today, is my father’s birthday. I debated whether to say “was” there, given his passing, but I’d argue the day is still that, regardless of whether he can celebrate it with us or not. In any case, once we realized that this year’s first post would be on the third, I immediately wrote in this recipe as the topic of choice. It is, personally, the recipe I most readily recall my father cooking: there are other dishes he liked more, ones that spring to mind more readily with him, but in terms of “things I can remember Dad making in the kitchen”, it’s basically this recipe, and, like, Sunday breakfasts.

Now, I said IN our last post that I thought it might be too heavy. Rest assured, I have no intention of making today’s post that same weight: At the moment, I’m riding a post-migraine high, and also that feels like a bad way to start a year. It’s also, in many ways, a tragic way to remember my father. As we discussed before, my dad was many things, but “maudlin” or “morose” weren’t in his vocabulary. And while that’s something of an indictment of the Californian public school system of his youth, it’s also aspirational. So let us start the new year off with some good times, and simple meals.

Tacos from Tijuana

That title is misleading, but I distracted myself with research, and my post-migraine high is fading. THE POINT is that my father grew up in Southern California, as we discussed in our Dia De Lost Muertos post, and, as a creature of habit, many of his favorite dishes could be readily traced back to childhood experiences, menus, and opportunities. Fun detail: you remember how in our Spring Sauces post, I mentioned that my grandfather is older than Ranch dressing’s invention? Well, my dad used to tell the story of when it finally made it to his neighborhood. Like, my dad actively remembered trying Ranch dressing for the first time, and then getting his mother to make the mixture to serve instead of normal sour cream with some go-to dinner of the O’Guin home. (One I cannot confirm at this time, but do believe to have been taco-adjacent. Like, it might have been straight-up tacos, or taco salad. Something like that.) As such, my dad loved carne asada, margaritas, and he loved tacos.

My dad and I disagreed about many things, but the love of margaritas was solid.

Now, on the other hand, I will make not pretensions to this being haute cuisine, and it even comes to the very edge of what I would call a “recipe”. But that’s good, I think. I mean, back half of our November catalog was CRAZY, looking back at it. There’s a place for simplicity. This recipe actually carries with it a special bonus: see, the reason I call them “production line” tacos is that you’re going to make a LOT of them. This was a meal my dad would cook on Monday, and we’d still be eating on Thursday or Friday.

I don’t know if he learned this recipe from a co-worker, from his mother, or it was his own invention, but it’s definitely deeply rooted in that So Cal oeuvre, but not the modern Cal-Mex style: a sort of “Tex-Mex by way of Baja”.

Some Quick Facts before we Fry

Given the simplicity of the recipe, I thought it would be valuable to tackle a couple quick and simple definitions and explanations. Because, as mentioned, this dish itself doesn’t have a particularly distinguished pedigree or etymology to unpack, so we’ve got some spare space.

“Taco” is one of those words with a complicated linguistic history, in that no one really knows where it came from. The word has other uses in Spanish, with its existence predating their discovery of the foodstuff from the indigenous Mexican peoples, and it is a versatile word in that sense, meaning something equivalent to…”wad”, or “plug” or “block”. It used to be used to refer to a bunch of things, like pool cue-sticks, ramrods, etc.

Meaning that, technically, if you’re offered a ‘taco’, make sure you haven’t pissed off a pool player, or you might get a serving you can’t swallowed.

This is one explanation given for the modern usage: perhaps Mexican silver miners, who used “plug” explosives that resembled tacos (paper wrapped around gunpowder filling), may have started calling the foodstuff “plugs” as a joking reference to the tool.

Others point out that in Nahuatl, the word “tlahco” means “half” or “in the middle”, so perhaps the word comes from there. Or maybe it comes from Nahuatl’s “tlaxcalli”, meaning “tortilla”. Personally, as an amateur linguist, I bet it’s some ugly (in a linguistic sense) mid-point. Some miscommunication, or mispronunciation ( A Nahuatl street vendor is selling “tlachos”, their Spanish-speaking customers say “tachos”/”tacos” since that’s easier, term catches on, etc.) and the happy accident of the word making sense made it stick. That’s one of the reasons people think the French Dip is named that. As we’ve covered before, that sandwich was definitely invented/popularized in Los Angeles, and it’s named for either the first guy to order it being named “French”, the fact it was served on French rolls, or that the chef was part French, and connected the jus portion of the sandwich with that heritage.  No one’s sure, but the name “works”, so no one really cares.

“Is this actually French?”
”It’s got au jus, right? that’s French.”

So that’s tacos: tortillas wrapped around stuff. Originally and typically corn tortillas, given the importance of corn as a crop for the region. Flour is fine (and in some applications, preferable) but the default is corn.  Now that we’ve laid that base-work, let’s get to making this dish work.

Several Simple Steps, Sequentially

My addiction to alliteration and assonance will one day ruin me, but that’s neither here nor there. This is, as alluded to, a very basic recipe, that’s not particularly ‘authentic’, but it IS authentic to how the dish is made in my house, so neener neener neener.

There are basically 4 steps to the process:

1.       Chop Veggies

2.       Cook Meat

3.       Fry Tortillas and Assemble

4.       Repeat Step 3 until out of Meat.

So, first step: chop veggies.

Not even like, a LOT. Just enough for a 5 person taco bar.

Yeah, that’s it. I suppose I should illustrate the structure that we’re going with here: the tacos that come out of this process will not be hard-shell tacos, but they’ll have more structure than a fast food “soft-taco”, but that’s kind of the metric to compare them to: home-made fast-food tacos. (That statement will become even more obvious in a minute.) As such, you’re producing hot tortillas, meat, and melted cheese, so if you want freshness or anything other than grease, corn, and beef, you’ve got to have it pre-sliced and ready to add. This is also part of the adaptability of the process: by heating just the meat, cheese, and tortilla, you make it so everyone can customize with the toppings of their choice. And a pro-tip for this: our recipe ended up making something like 26 tacos. Which is more than anyone wants to eat in a reasonable meal. So it’s very common for our family to store the tacos in 3-taco ‘serving’, popping into Ziploc bags to reheat later. Leaving the fresh toppings OFF before chilling the pre-made bundles means you don’t have to deal with hot tomatoes or wilted lettuce in your future lunches.

Next up, the meat. This is very much a “whatever you’ve got” situation. We made this batch the day after Christmas, when (somewhat weirdly) all the 1 pound packages of ground beef except the 95% lean were gone. (Did a lot of people decide to make meatloaf for Christmas this year? Like, I’m not against it, that’s a solid frugal option, I’m just surprised.)

Next, you brown it, and then follow a secret recipe called “Whatever your packet of Taco Seasoning spices says”.

Very hard to find secret techniques.

Yeah, you COULD make your own taco seasoning spice mix (basic ingredients: chili powder, onion powder, garlic powder, cumin, paprika, salt and pepper, and dried oregano, which one recipe site stated brings “spiciness”…is oregano spicy? That feels wrong. There’s a Hot and Spicy breed of Oregano, but I would call the basic variety as having “floral bitterness”.) and if you want to make this recipe your own, I suggest you either do so, or find your own preferred pre-made. Once they started making Taco Bell taco seasoning, that was the only version my father used. Today we went with a different kind, because, again, shortages.

So brown the meat, then simmer it in water and spices, and when that’s starting to wrap up, it’s time for the only actually interesting part of the process: frying the tortillas. This process is…I don’t know if it has a name, I just now the sound it makes when it takes a life. Sorry, distracted. You’re basically doing a shallow fry (as opposed to a deep fry) of the tortillas, so that they’re fully floating on top of the frying oil. You want like, ½ cup or 3/4 cup of oil in a small skillet.

Today, “Jon tries to demonstrate relative depth of a clear medium by pictures from above”.

The fry is fairly quick, about 30-45 seconds per tortilla. You’re really just trying to “wake them up”, getting it pliable, toasting some of the corn, and so on. Once fried, you toss them onto a paper bag, to get some of the oil off. This might take a bit of practice to get right, and that’s fine! If you take them too far, they get crispy, and just become homemade tortilla chips/tostada shells.

Nate specifically referred to the process as “making bad tortilla chips”

You wanna pull them while only maybe the very edges are getting crispy, and the main body of the tortilla remains…the closest word I have for it that doesn’t feel pretentious is “leathery”. if I wanted to be pretentious, I'd call it “toothsome”: it’s not QUITE ‘chewy’, but there’s a distinct feeling of your teeth having tearing into the tortilla. Once fried, you can set them aside for a minute or two, or you can do as we do, and create the “assembly line”. One person fries the tortilla, lets it cool for 15 seconds or so, and then hands it to the meat and cheese person. That person scoops in 2-3 spoons of meat (around 1.5 ounces, but no need to be that precise), sprinkles some cheese, and hands it off to a storage vessel. We often use a 9 by 13 or 8 by 8 baking dish/casserole pan, since they’re high enough you can lean the tacos against the side, using the weight of the next taco to help pinch the previous one closed. (the peak, in my opinion, of the process, is where the residual heat of the meat and tortilla help melt the cheese so that it glues the tortilla close over the meat.

Stack them up, and sweat them down.

You can also pop those dishes into a 200 degree warming oven as you handle the other 24+ tacos, helping that process along.

Then, once you’re sick of frying and filling, you grab a couple, pry apart the top, and top as you desire.

Did I eat all of these tacos? No. Did I eat a worryingly CLOSE amount of tacos to this? Yes.

Lettuce, sour cream, hot sauce, and black olives are common toppers in my family. Black olives are not traditional for Mexican food, but are more common in Californian Tex-Mex, because Black olives are actually a California product, a story I didn’t know would be interesting until far too late, so we’ll have to handle it another time. (Basic run down: California olive farm owned by German immigrants invented black olives because their olive trees kind of sucked when allowed to make ripe olives. Olives turned out to be popular, and started new olive industry.)

I don’t think these tacos are life-changing. Or Mind-blowing. But they are rather great for the modern era of meal-planning. For 1 hour of work, you can get 8+ meals. They’re efficient, they’re a little weird, and they’re delicious. That’s enough to make them something worth trying, and a part of my family’s culinary history I’m proud of. So give them a try if you’ve got the gumption, and let’s kick 2022 off right.

THURSDAY: I ENDED UP HAVING TO SPEND AN EXTRA DAY IN LEAVENWORTH DUE TO A SNOW-STORM, SO I DON’T KNOW. MAYBE I’LL WATCH THE THIRD INSTALLMENT OF THE PRINCESS SWITCH. MAYBE I’LL WATCH MORE OF THE TACO CHRONICLES. MAYBE I’LL FINISH EATING THAT BOX OF CHEESE.

MONDAY: I THINK WE’RE COOKING WITH AN INSTANT POT. MAYBE AN AIR FRYER. MAYBE BOTH. (BUT PROPABLY JUST THE INSTANT POT: WE HAVE TWO DISHES WE MADE BACK IN NOVEMBER WE CAN TALK ABOUT.)

RECIPE 

Semi-Fried Production Line Tacos (or O’G/O.G. Tacos)

Makes 25ish tacos

Ingredients

2 pounds ground beef

2 packets taco seasoning

Water (to seasoning packet instructions)

30+ corn tortillas (2ish bags)

1 cup vegetable oil

3-4 cups shredded cheese of your choosing

Vegetables and condiments of your choosing.

Preparation

1. Prep the vegetables and condiments if planning to eat immediately. Preheat your oven to its lowest setting to keep tacos warm as you work through the batch.

2. In a large skillet, brown the ground beef, and then add seasoning and water, stirring, and cooking to seasoning packet instructions. Add ½ to ¾ cup oil to a small skillet, so there’s standing oil across the bottom, maybe 1/8th to 1/4” thick. (3-6 mm) and bring to temp over medium-high heat. Set up a station with paper bags and salt for draining.

3. Working one tortilla at a time, fry for ~30-45 seconds, until pliable, a few shades darker, and initial bubbling has decreased. Move to draining station for 15-20 seconds, then add a few spoonfuls of seasoned meat. Top with cheese, and move to an oven-safe dish to keep warm in the oven are you repeat this process until out of meat or cheese, adding more oil to the pan as needed.

4. Serve immediately, or allow to cool, chill, and reheat for later.