Fall has fallen

BRR! After the absolutely blistering summer we had in Houston, it's so nice to actually have to break out a jacket to go to work in the morning. And let me tell you, the new drop in the mercury has definitely got me thinking soups and stews. Maybe this weekend I'll get adventurous and try making something like that... hmm. Of course supposedly it's going to go back to being in the 80s, so maybe not.

Last night was taco night at the house - especially after we discovered that 3 corn tortilla taco shells only have 135 mg of sodium total (or at least the Old El Paso brand ones do, anyway.)

So on the table last night we had the previously mentioned taco seasoning mix, which was just as good as we remembered. It worked just as well with beef as it did with chicken, even though I got the 73/27 ground beef at the store, forgetting how greasy it was. I don't know if it was just a half-assed job of draining the meat after browning or what, but man that was greasy.

As an aside here, I almost always throw in some Mrs Dash when I'm browning pretty much any kind of meat. The thing I like about that is that there are a million different varieties of it, and as far as I know they're all salt-free. I wouldn't rely just on the taco seasoning afterwards, though I don't know why... but instinct tells me that it would turn out bland. In my completely unprofessional opinion, seasoning while cooking melds the flavors a little better. Add some chopped onion about halfway through browning and yum.

I also made Buffy's Refried Beans again, but this time I tried using 2 tbsp (unsalted) butter and 2 tsp vegetable oil instead of the lard/bacon drippings, and I seasoned it with a sprinkle of the taco seasoning instead of straight cayenne pepper, though I did add a miniscule extra dash of that. I have to admit, I was REALLY thinking it wasn't going to work at first. The beans didn't seem to be absorbing the butter very well and there was this weird kind of butter-and-bean-juice sort of sludge hovering around, but once I added 1/3 cup of chicken broth it finally came together. I reduce the recipe to suit 1 can of pinto beans, since there's just the two of us, but if you're really all about the beans or you have a large family do the 3 cans. It seems like it would be an insane amount of beans but it's actually not - splitting one can in half yields just about enough to fill one of these 6-oz custard cups. In the end, I thought they were every bit as good with a change in seasoning, and using reduced sodium beans and chicken broth didn't seem to alter the flavor at all. I did add a tiny bit of salt, but it was a tiny round perhaps the circumference of a pea in my hand, and it honestly would have done fine without.

I also made Mexican Rice, which Chris said tasted great. (For some reason by the time food was done I just wasn't in a rice mood, and I forgot to taste it anyway.) This time the Kroger brand of tomato sauce won over the Hunt's, despite being much lower sodium - 280 mg in 1/4 cup as opposed to 410 in the same amount of the Hunt's. We tasted both and the latter tasted MUCH too salty to us - so either it's just excessively salty in general, or we're starting to get used to this. As one commenter recommended I softened up the onion in the oil first before I added the rice to brown, and like everyone else my rice didn't even come close to "puffing" while browning. I also added about 1 and 1/2 tsp of the taco seasoning at the end of the browning, just before I added in the chicken broth and tomato paste.

Now with all that chicken broth running around here, this may not really be the lowest sodium thing ever, but that was really the only source of sodium in any of it aside from the tomato paste. Well, and whatever amount of cheese went on the tacos. And the beans. But still it wasn't too bad, and there were no complaints so I think this is going in the save box.