Today is Mid Autumn Festival and we celebrated with mooncakes for tea time. We only had the fruit and nut mooncakes left so we had those. I decided to be extra ambitious and make dinner - tacos! Why not? Tacos are kinda round, like the moon right? I'm not sure why, but I felt like going all out and making tacos from scratch.
Well, first of all, I had to make both vegan and non vegan options as my diet is quite troublesome. But in the end, I tried both anyway! 😂My weekday cheat I guess... I really wanted to try what I had cooked!
Well, tacos are quite elaborate. I had to make the taco shell from scratch. Out of flour. Then I had to make the minced meat and vegan option which was chickpeas. These were cooked with taco seasoning from a packet. Then I had to make salsa... oh wow, a lot of work went into this dish. But the salsa can be eaten as a dip well after the tacos are done. I will do a separate blog post about the salsa.
Also, I cut up romaine lettuce. For the cheese, we grated cheddar cheese and for the vegan version I spooned out some of my previous
vegan cheese dip.
So for the taco shell, I made a tortilla from scratch using this recipe from Grow a Good Life blog. It was really easy and yielded 8 tortillas! Yay... that meant each of us could have at least 2. It ended up being enough. Phew! Was afraid it was too little. Anyway, I split up the dough into 8 pieces and rolled them out into circles.
They weren't really round... I couldn't get them to be round. And they couldn't stay thin so I had thick ones. I'm not sure what went wrong. My mom said maybe I over handled the dough. Anyway, I ended up with 8 irregular shaped thick tacos! At least they were edible... is what I always say.
For the meat, I cooked ground pork (we didn't have beef) and added taco seasoning. You can buy it at Western supermarkets like Ben's. I can't remember but I think my brother bought it for us. Anyway, I made the chickpeas using the same taco seasoning. They were really yummy. Slightly spicy and quite salty. I dunno why but I prefer the chickpeas. Maybe my tastebuds have changed and I am starting to crave plant based foods. I hope so!
Anyway, in the end, this is my taco. The vegan one. It is assembled with chickpeas, then salsa, then lettuce, then cheese dip and a last dollop of green chilli sauce.
This is my mom's taco. First ground pork, then salsa, then lettuce and last grated cheddar cheese. She didn't want the green chilli sauce.
And this is the final product for my mom's taco. Folded over nicely and ready to pop in the mouth! Tacos do get messy so expect to get your hands dirty!
In the end, we had plenty of meat and chickpeas left over. So I will see what I can do with those. My mom told me to make a pizza with the leftover meat. So will explore that option.
Anyway, I had a good time making and eating these tacos! Enjoyed it and happy Mid Autumn Festival everyone!
Labels: dinner, home cooking, meals
