Saturday, July 2, 2016

I made this! Celebratory Multicultural Ambiguously Ethnic Tacos Edition.

Today, Schmoobs finally came home after spending the near entirety of June traveling to and fro, hither and thither, participating in a multitude of musicky symposiums and workshops and such. The good news is that we have had plenty of experience dealing with long summertime stretches apart (read: Nerd Corps and summer festivals), but it's still always a nice return to banal normalcy when he comes home. Fast forward to two days later when he has an errant sock or something on the living room floor and I'll be ready to send him away again. Hahaha. (I KID.)

Also, while I was playing Miss Independent for the past month, I have been trying really (really really) hard to maintain a somewhat healthy, disciplined, and responsible lifestyle, in the way of not buying convenient and easy fast food. And since I am completely incapable of cooking meals for only one or two people, I usually ended up cooking one meal that yielded enough to last me an entire week. Which is fantastic in theory, given my aforementioned goals. But no matter how delicious a home cooked meal is, there are only so many straight days of eating the same thing that you can take before your taste buds begin waging protests. Long story short, I made this tasty spaghetti dish at the beginning of this past week. It had chicken, and marinara sauce, and watercress (healthy super food!), and vegan cheese (blergh). It also yielded about twenty servings. I was pretty over it by Wednesday. And really over it by Thursday. But I pushed through like a champion and ate that goddamn final serving for dinner on Friday and dreamt that night of the Trader Joe's cabernet beef pot roast thawing in the refrigerator just waiting to be turned into a New Freaking Meal At Last the next day, just in time for Schmoobins to come home!

So here's what I did:



1. Pull out whatever is in your refrigerator and/or countertops that could feasibly be stewed with a hunk of meat and transformed into some delicious taco filling. For me, that meant an onion, a couple of carrots that survived The Great Carrot Juicing of June 2016, aging jalapeƱo peppers, and a sweet potato. I also noticed this jar of Tennessee Chow Chow in the back of the bottom shelf of our refrigerator, which started my brain juices...


2. In the meantime, I browned the roast in the awesome and pretty aluminum dutch oven that I got from my mom. Hooray for beautiful cookware! Don't forget to drizzle the pot with olive oil beforehand, doy. Make sure the stove is on medium high to high heat. It shouldn't take but just a couple minutes on each side for the meat to brown sufficiently. Also try not to put your face in the way of the oil splatters that are bound to fly off the stove. I mean, I wasn't very successful at this (mothereffer!). But try anyway.


3. When the roast is browned and flipped, just start throwing your assorted chopped whatevers in the pot. Along with all the vegetables, I added, I don't know, maybe a half a cup of the Chow Chow (with a lot of the juices). I did this because Chow Chow contains a lot of vinegar, spices, and sugar. And every good Filipina knows that this makes for an excellent start to...a Filipino Adobo! So it was at this point that I decided that this was going to be an adobo-inspired taco. Here's to cultural celebration and ethnic integration! I added several glugs (a proper unit of measurement) of soy sauce, and a sh*tton (also a proper unit of measurement) of garlic. If I had remembered that I totally used up all of my bay leaves the last time I made adobo, and bought some more at the grocery store, I would have thrown a couple of those in there as well, because that is something that you do when you cook adobo even though nobody actually knows what bay leaves do. Oh well.


4. Then, all you need to do is throw the lid on that sucker, put it in the oven that has been preheated to 350 or whatever degrees, and go do stuff for like three or four hours. What I did was maniacally sweep, mop, and vacuum the house, wash the dishes, do way not enough reps of weighted lunges before my ass muscles gave up, do one and a half loads of laundry, watch a couple Youtube videos of fabulous drag queens, take a shower, and go pick Schmoobles up from the airport!


Here's what it should look like after 2-3 hours. You can start shredding the meat just to see how cooked it is. It's probably well cooked after 2 hours, but you want it to be pull-apart tender.

Like this. The great part about adding sweet potato and carrot in there is that it lends its own natural sweetness. Filipino adobo sometimes has some sugar in it, but it's unnecessary in this dish if you incorporate some other sweet component.

5. Chop up whatever toppings you want to put in your tacos. I went the minimalist approach this time around and just went with fresh cilantro, onion, and avocado. Don't forget to take a photo for Instagram. I REPEAT: DO NOT FORGET TO TAKE A PHOTO FOR INSTAGRAM.


And here is the finished product! As you can see, I also added a dollop of Toffuti sour cream (The second best fake dairy product there is. Ben and Jerry's dairy free ice cream is number one, FYI.). So pretty. So delicious. So socially progressive.

Enjoy!

ps. Here's a recipe for adobo, if you are curious. Do it. It's delicious.

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