Could have been bad Taco Salad

I have a confession to make.... I waste TONS of money on spices. I have every spice known to man. Or at least every spice that's available in a small rural Nevada town.

See my spice cupboard? (yes, it does need some organizing) And yes, that is a jar of garlic salt upside down on my little "kitchen" TV. It fell out of the cupboard when I opened it and I left it there to prove my point of having too many spices.
Once every year I go thru and throw them all away and start all over again. So, they are always

fresh. Mostly. Pretty much. Kind of. (okay....not as fresh as they could, should be!)

I also need glasses. I am not necessarily vain, because I do buy the "magnifiers at Costco and Wal-mart, I just don't like the feel of glasses on my nose and ear. Which means I probably should go in and have a professional fit me, so that they don't annoy me and feel heavy on the bridge of my nose.

But I am getting side-tracked about trivial things and there you sit reading this wondering what my spice cupboard and my needing glasses have in common, right? I will tell you.

It's been a hectic week and I haven't cooked at all. We've had some leftovers and some easy meals. My husband even cooked one night and he took me out once too.

He has been talking about Taco Salad for a couple of weeks now....so I thought I would make it for him since he's been so good to me this week. (not that he isn't always, but... ) this too is an easy meal, but I thought I could still blog about it and just ask people how they do their taco salads, etc.
Taco salads being what they are, are all pretty much the same, but also very different. (like spaghetti sauces and potato salads....different people take the same ingredients and no two are the same...a fact that always intrigues me)

Some people put a dressing on their Taco Salads, which I like, but my husband does not. He just likes to put on some taco/hot sauce and call it good. He crunches up some tortilla chips and he is good to go.
I like them all...dressings with sour cream, taco salads in tortilla bowls, meat that is seasoned with the little packets of taco seasoning by Schilling or McCormick.

Oh...and I neglected to say that my husband doesn't like his taco meat sauced up. He just likes browned ground beef. Salt and pepper.
But I usually put some spices in with the salt and pepper....so it isn't so bland. Some Cumin and I had some chipolte pepper powder I thought I'd try.

So, I opened up my spice cupboard without my glasses and grabbed what I thought was cumin. It wasn't. It had the same color as cumin, same look thru the glass bottle. I even took pictures of the spices...which are blurry because I didn't have glasses on....thinking I was taking pictures of cumin and chipolte peppers. WHO couldn't read coriander???

I sprinkled the cumin on the meat...it smelled funny. For cumin.
But it didn't smell funny for coriander. Because that's what it was.
I know that coriander didn't ruin the taco meat...coriander is used in a lot of Mexican cooking, BUT it could have been a disaster. Could have been. I could have used nutmeg or cinnamon.

(see? they look similar)

I am making my carrot cake tomorrow (see sidebar....grab it and MAKE A CARROT CAKE.... you only have one week left. You could win a great prize!!) and it would have been disastrous if I put coriander in the carrot cake.

I promise I will wear my glasses tomorrow while reading my carrot cake recipe.


Taco Salad
(these are the things I put in mine. amounts depending on how you like them)

I fried some flour tortillas to use like a tostada shell. I don't always do that.
lettuce
tomatoes
cheese
olives
avocados
taco meat (seasoned however you want)
green onions
kidney beans
garbanzo beans
a dab of sour cream
a dab of guacamole
a bit of taco/hot sauce
crushed tortilla chips if you want

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It's been a week of cheese and sour cream and beans and guacamole. For Super bowl Sunday I made the Pioneer Woman's Mexican dip.
Check out her recipe here. It's really good. Doesn't it look good? Don't you just want to take a chip and dip it? That's the whole point silly!