By Michael Minorgan for Curtains Up minorganmichael@yahoo.com
PORK OR CHICKEN TACOS
Taco is a traditional Mexican dish usually eaten as a snack or sold as a typical Mexican street food. A taco is com posed of a corn tortilla (soft or fried) folded around a filling that could consist of: beef, pork, chicken, seafood or vegetables and cheese. They would be garnished with salsa, avocado, cilantro, tomatoes and lettuce. Tacos filled with small fish were originally eaten by the indigenous people of Mexico predating the arrival of Europeans (1)
Feel free to experiment and use your own ingredients, but leave the knife and fork out of the picture these tasty morsels are to be eaten with your hands only…….Enjoy!
Ingredients
- For the pork or chicken
- 350 g skinless pork belly or chicken
- 1 heaped teaspoon fennel seeds
- 1 heaped teaspoon sweet smoked paprika
- For the beans
- olive oil
- 1 good pinch cumin seeds
- spring onions
- cloves of garlic
- 1 x 400 g tin of black beans
- For the salad
- 1 fresh red or green chilli
- 2 little gem lettuces
- ½ a bunch fresh coriander
- 1 ripe avocado
- 1 large ripe tomato
- 1 eating apple
- low-salt soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
- 1 lime
- To serve
- chilli sauce
- 4 tablespoons fat-free natural yoghurt
- 8 corn taco shells
Method
Cut the pork or chicken into 1cm dice and tip into the large frying pan with the fennel seeds, paprika, salt and pepper, and stir regularly • Put 1 tablespoon of olive oil and the cumin seeds into the medium frying pan • Trim, slice and add the spring onions, squash in the unpeeled garlic through a garlic crusher, then stir in the beans and their juices, and simmer
Finely slice the chilli, lettuce and most of the top leafy half of the coriander, then halve, destone, peel and chop the avocado, along with the tomato • Toss and pile all this on a platter, coarsely grating or matchsticking the apple on top • Ripple a little chilli sauce through the yoghurt in a small bowl
Stir, mush and season the beans to taste • Drizzle the salad with a little soy sauce, the extra virgin olive oil and lime juice, then toss together • Drain the fat from the pork pan, then serve everything straight away, with a pile of taco shells and all the other elements, sprinkled with the remaining coriander leaves
(1) wikipedia
Original recipe courtesy of www.jamieoliver.com
