You can prepare any combination of the ingredients below to make a Taco Buffet:
Ingredients:
1 can of black beans
1 can of whole kernel corn
3 roma tomatoes diced up
1 avocado diced up. Add a few squirts of lemon or lime juice and some salt to prevent it from turning brown.
1 sweet green, red, or yellow peppers diced up
If you like things spicy, get some jalapenos or jarred hot peppers
Cooked rice (if you like it Chipotlse style, use jasmine rice and cook it with some lime juice. When it is done cooking add a ton of chopped cilantro. Recipes for this kind of rice can be found online.)
Shredded lettuce
Chopped Cilantro
1 packet of taco seasoning to be mixed into the meat of your choice.
2 lbs of the meat of your choice. In my case I used ground beef. Any kind of shredded meat works good.
Any kind of seasoning you like to use when cooking your meat.
1 bag of shredded Mexican style cheese
Sour Cream
Hot Sauce
Tortillas of your choice
Taco shells of your choice
There is probably much more that can be added to this list so be creative. This meal is so easy to pull off because the only thing you really need to cook is your meat. I like to use some taco seasoning because it gives my meat an extra touch, but you can do with just some salt and pepper. In the directions below I do steam my flour tortillas so they are more pliable without breaking, and I heat up my corn and black beans. But you don't need to do all this. You can heat things up via microwave, and steam the tortillas by wrapping them with some lightly moistened paper towels and microwave for about 30 seconds.
Directions:
I begin by cooking 1 tsp of minced garlic in 3 tbs of olive oil. I cook this on low heat for about 3 minutes until the garlic turns translucent. Make sure you cook on low heat because the garlic will burn very quickly at high temperatures.
Next I add my choice of meat. In this case I had 2 lbs of ground beef. Add your choice of seasonings. I used some dried herbs, garlic salt, and the taco seasoning. If you decided to make some rice now would be the time to get started on that. Cook the meat until it is done and easy to shred with a fork.
Now heat up any items from the ingredients list that you would like to be hot. I cooked my corn and black beans together because I eat them together anyways. To make the corn and black beans extra special you can add some ground black pepper and lots of chopped cilantro.
Cut up any other ingredients you will be using in your taco buffet. I chose to have both soft flour tortillas and crunchy taco shells. I used a steam basket to steam the soft tortillas so that they would not break when forming a burrito. I steamed them for 1 minute on each side.Or use the microwave technique if you don't have a steamer basket.
Assemble all your ingredients in its own individual container. Provide small spoons for each ingredient because usually you only use a little bit of each thing. You don't want to over stuff your burrito or it will be hard and messy to eat.
Enjoy!
