I would love to have a Chihuahua but I don’t speak Spanish

My grandmother’s friend actually said this once after seeing those Taco Bell adverts with the talking dog. Seriously, I am not making that up. Since we have come home form the Voyage of the Damned I have been craving tacos. This is probably because we ate tacos 3 times whilst in the US--twice at Taco Bell. I know what you’re thinking. Spidergrrl, how can a GLUTEN FREE VEGAN eat at TACO HELL? Well, you’d be surprised.  

Ÿ         If you get the crunchy taco shells--bang! That’s gluten free.

Ÿ         If you ask for beans instead of beef you get refried beans in your taco.

Ÿ         Ask for fresco style and you get fresh salsa instead of cheese. It is a fat saving measure to provide low-calorie food on the menu, but it makes it vegan.    

Sure, it’s probably not health food, but in a pinch it works and was cheap. In the airport we ate at a place called Salsarita or something like that. It was kinda like a Subway but with tacos. There were all sorts of cool salad-y fixing’s to put on top and you could get either black beans and rice or refried beans. I was so hungry at the airport that I actually went back and ordered another one it was so delicious. Sadly, it was not so cheap as we were paying airport prices, but it got me thinking about making some tacos at home.

Here are some we ate last week. Twice even--as a box of 12 crunchy shells feeds us for 2 meals (3 at each meal) I am not a huge fan of refried beans (despite having even them 3 times recently) as they can be a bit too gloopy for my liking. So I cooked some millet in some marmite stock to give it a savoury “beefy” flavour and then added a 200g tin of chopped tomatoes and half a packet of fajita spices and a tin of red beans. This was served hot in my crunchy shells.

I also heated the shells as per the directions which was nice when we added the cool fixings.

The fixings were some Greek style soy yoghurt with a squeeze of lemon to make sour cream, some sharp cashew “cheeze” sauce  and some “vine ripened tomato and chipotle salsa” that I got on a mark down as it was close to the sell by date.

I also made some Pico de Gallo type salad with fresh tomatoes, cucumber, spring onions, red bell pepper, sweet corn and lime juice and some red pepper flakes.

We served it all up with warm millet/red bean stuffing topped with salsa, “cheeze”, lettuce, Pico de Gallo, black olives and dollop of sour cream. Then more lettuce and Pico on the side. Plus some roasted broccoli I had hanging out that needed to get used up. Broccoli goes with everything, right? After the photo we had the brilliant idea to drizzle some “cheeze” on it. Mmmmm.

It was a glorious mess (it is a good thing there wasn’t anyone to see me licking my fingers and smacking my lips--Spiderman gave up and made his more into a taco salad)  that tasted amazing and fresh. Plus the millet/red beans made enough for 2 meals so on the next day I just heated that up whist I heated the rest of the shells and pulled out the leftover “cheeze” and sour cream and olives. All I had to remake was another batch of Pico de Gallo.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy.