RECIPE: REC: to say thank you..

RECIPE:
C

Charlotte

Active member
Not just for this time, but for all the times you came to my rescue.. for all the notes have lifted from your posts. For all the times I've said, oh! THATS how you do that!

My treasured recipes are few, but the ones I have, I've kept for a lifetime. When I was a kid, I worked for an Arctic Circle Drive In..in Central Oregon. I liked all their food and probably gained a good ten pounds with that job, but the one that I could not get out of my head was the taco filling. I did okay with it most the time, but Wednesday was Taco Day 10/S1.00. The smell was unreal with a. kind of old-school flavor. Not like the packages you got in the stores.. Before knew it I was snitching tacos.

Almost a decade ago, my family and I started giving out fish tacos for Halloween. Not a few. We average about four hundred year. I had it in my head that I need to copy that old Arctic Circle recipe. I just had to do that. I went to Great Lengths. I hunt down my old boss. She told me what she did when she made the feeling long before I should have for work. Unfortunately the seasoning came in a packet and she could only guess. The last thing she said in our conversation was, if you managed to copy this? Call me back. We'll start a business! We both thought they were that good.

Every year was a new experiment....some of them..notsogood. It took me a long time to figure out that you can't completely copy commercial food with home ingredients.

But.. I finally nailed it. Or at least as close as I'm probably going to get. The smell is right. The taste was very close. The method isn't the same as the original, but it works very well.

This really is only just playing taco seasoning. But it's one I worked on for a long time and, I want to share it with you. If you have any thoughts on improving? I am all ears! In the meantime, should you try it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it up.

Thank you.💕

Arctic Circle Tacos

Ingredients

1/2 diced fresh onion or 1/4 cup dehydrated onion flakes

1 lb ground beef (85%) turkey or chicken

1 med potato processed to size of rice grains

1-3 cloves garlic, minced, or granulated garlic

1 tbsp chili powder

2 tbsp sweet paprika

2 tsp ground cumin

2 tsp ground coriander

1/2 tsp coarse black pepper

1/2 tsp salt

Pinch of anise seeds, crushed

1 cup tomato sauce (one small can)

Oregano?

Small corn tortillas heated on the grill.

minced fresh jalapenos, other fresh chili peppers, or chipotle peppers in adobo, optional. Cayenne or crushed pepper flakes work.

Steps

Heat oil in a medium skillet over medium heat until shimmering. Add onion, and cook, stirring often, about 4-5 minutes.

Increase heat to medium-high and add the meat. Cook, breaking up fine the meat with a wooden spoon, until no longer pink, about 3 minutes.

Stir in the garlic, chili powder, cumin, coriander, anise and salt (and onion if using dehydrated. Original used dehydrated). Cook, stirring, for about 30 seconds, until fully incorporated and fragrant.

Add tomato sauce and minced peppers. Cook, stirring occasionally, over low heat for 10 minutes. Simmer to absorb liquid.

Pico de Gallo:

Seed and chop 2-3 Roma tomatoes, 1/4 red onion, and cilantro. Seed and mince half an jalapeno. Mix all in a small bowl together, with a squeeze of lime juice.

Notes

Pico de gallo is our addition. Mostly we just use store-bought from Costco or something. Original tacos came in crispy corn shell, topped with finely shredded cheddar cheese and shredded iceberg lettuce. We just used the cheese and pico de gallo with some hot sauce on the side

 
What did they serve on top of their tacos, any lettuce, tomatoes, avocado?

Thanks for the recipe, kind of like how I do my tacos except for the addition of cumin, anise and paprika. I make a big green salad and use avocado. tomatoes, cucumber, radishes. We top the taco with fresh, chopped onion, then the salad, then extra sharp cheddar, then Lindy's Taco Sauce. Yum! My mom made our tacos this way, and I have been doing it for 57 years!

 
That sounds wonderful!..

These tacos originally came from a little hamburger place that I worked for when I was in high school. They would use store bought formed corn tortillas, then the filling, topped with shredded cheese, shredded iceberg lettuce, and you could get a packet of hot sauce if you wanted it. Most people didn't. This was the 70s in Central Oregon. We weren't really into spicy food yet.

When we have them out at Halloween, there's shredded cheese and pico de gallo on the side with a bottle of hot sauce. Since we make so many, the toppings are kind of basic. The corn tortillas we use are the type to get in the tortilla section. We just heat them up.

The main difference in this is the anise in particular. It really compliments the filling and you can smell it for blocks.. and it's a bit of a surprising flavor profile.

I live in the Sacramento area now and we have a lot of Hispanic friends who've taught me tricks. When we make tacos at home, there's Crema and avocado, lots of fixings. Line. But for 400 people? Just the salsa and cheese.

 
I totally get what you mean about the quest to reproduce foods you had long ago. I've done it...

...a couple of times, and just recently found one I've been looking for since I was a young man. Taco shop carne asada.

Anyone who enjoyed a childhood in southern California knows what I mean. Taco shops serve some of the best street food I've ever had. The chopped carne asada that went into burritos and street tacos was something I could never get 'just right'.

I tried complex recipes with tons of ingredients and simple ones with only three or four. Then, I happened across a video from a guy I watch on TV when I'm in San Diego. His name is Sam Zien, a.k.a., Sam The Cooking Guy. His show has been syndicated in a few markets across the US, but he's mostly a San Diego icon. The recipe nails it!

Here's a link to his video. Strong Language Alert, though. Sometimes he drops some pretty salty language in his YouTube vids. Sorry!

 
Thank you for sharing the link!

I will try it!

I've always been doing this. Something will get stick my head and I will hunt it down to the ends of the Earth and back..

I'm currently working on a cookie that was out up till about 10 - 15 years ago, Hey Days? Kind of a cross between a cookie and a candy.

I've got a list of things. Including my grandmother's Fried Chicken that I haven't had since I was 12 years old.

Do you suppose its a disorder?😲

 
Curse you, Michael...I just finished my FOURTH vegan cookbook and now I watch this. The ONLY

thing stopping me from going out RIGHT NOW and trying to find flap steak (??) is the fact that I don't have a gorgeous outdoor kitchen and that I tend to set myself on fire with grills.

But man...this is NOT boding well for my will-power.

 
Me too Michael- sometimes I spend years trying to recreate a recipe

I found that even if I have a copy of my Mom's or Grandmom's recipe I grew up on, that just following the recipe doesn't work. DUH. Those ladies were fabulous cooks so they tweaked recipes and made up their own. So to recreate the right flavors and textures I've had to do the same thing. Lucky I got the tweak gene from the family so my Mom's pork roast with sauerkraut, pot roast, sour cream mushroom chicken, Thanksgiving dressing, Grandmom's lemon pie and much more have been written down for the next generation to tweak into their own. Instead of "tradition" maybe "tweakdition".

 
Fwuw..

..me too. I've been working on my grandmother's Fried Chicken for years. All I remember is her using one of those Square aluminum electric frying pans? I thought she just dipped in flour, salt and pepper..and fried it in Crisco. Well maybe she did, but it doesn't come out the same. So I found a place to get chicken that is more like hers. Plumper and meatier. And then just the other day it dawned on me that she only used self rising flour..and..it was probably originally lard..not Crisco. I'm going to get this yet.

How much do you want to bet that if I do finally get it? No one will really care but me.

 
A cookie--that reminds me of the cookie my Granma made years ago. . .

It was a thumbprint cookie BUT it had *melted Ice Cream* in the batter. Have never been able to find anything like it. It was great and was one of the only things I can remember her making us when she visited. She lived in Michigan and we in California, so the visits were not frequent.

And then there's that cursed "flying saucer cookie". A large cookie shaped like (you guessed it) a flying saucer, but it was HOLLOW and had a couple of raisins rattling around inside of it. Geeze, I must've be all of about 5, but I remember that cookie!

I did nail one recipe: a recipe for ground beef taco filling that I remember eating at a local taco joint, not fast food taco joint but Mexican-family run taco joint. I loved the flavor of the meat. I nailed the recipe when I seasoned ground beef with salt, granulated garlic and LOTS of black pepper.

 
A big part of the secret of granny’s fried chicken is the size of the chicken

When our granny’s made fried chicken it was with 2 1/2 or three pound chickens, not the giant mutants we have now. The small pieces allowed it to cook all the way through without burning the crust.

 
Also, transfat was in everything back then: Crisco, fast food....it's mostly gone now along with

the flavor memories we have, but can't accurately reproduce without the Big T.

 
Oh!

The potato is raw. I mince it in a food processor to about the size of small grain rice. No more or less than that. Ratio is about one 6 - 8 oz peeled potato to 1 lb beef.. It's added to the raw meat. The meat is high fat, and the potato absorbs the excess as it cooks. In the end, unless you add too much potato, it disappears altogether.

 
That...

...was probably more info than you were looking for.

The original recipe came out in the 50's or 60's. The instructions about the potatoes came from my boss who made it all the time, back then. Now that I think about it, I have no idea how she managed to get the potatoes in tiny pieces. There were no food processors. A food processor does a great job and quickly.

We've got friends who are originally from Mexico. We cook for one another for fun sometimes. When he makes tacos, they always have something like that. Potatoes, rice, oatmeal, corn...even pineapple bits.. it stretches out the protein. He was over when I made these few years back. Said they tasted like home.

 
My Mom used one of those square electric fryers with a lid. She did as you say...

...dipping the chicken in flour (she used regular AP) that was generously seasoned with salt and pepper. Nothing else. Then she melted a little Crisco in the hot pan and placed the pieces skin-side-down into it. She didn't touch the chicken for a long time. IDK, maybe 20 minutes or so, until she had to use a metal spatula to get the pan to release the crusty skin.

Then she flipped the chicken pieces and they finished cooking on the other side. All of the cooking time was covered, except for the first 5 minutes or so.

She deglazed the pan with water after the chicken was removed to a serving plate, and added a slurry she made in an old pickle jar with milk and flour. Or, sometimes she just sprinkled the four directly into the pan, over the drippings, and stirred like heck. Then she added milk until it reached the consistency of gravy.

Man, was that good!

Michael

 
Interesting, I have added potatoes to my taco meat mixture for decades. My cousin told me about it

She had met a lady from Mexico who told her about it and when I said, "probably to make the meat go further", she said, "No, they just add it for flavor." I did it for both the added flavor and stretching our the protein, especially if all I had was 1 lb. of ground beef. Once it is all cooked, one cannot detect the potatoes anyway. So good.

 
Temp in an electric frying pan was easy to maintain. I did that too. Start skin side

down (I used vegetable oil about a half inch). Dredge in flour, salt and a bit of paprika. Some people add a little baking powder. Cook skin side down at 350* for 15 minutes covered. Turn and repeat. It was pretty good=what we call pan fried chicken, not deep fried. Now I would use an LC oven or my mother's cast iron chicken fryer (deep pan) to keep the oil at a more constant temperature.
And now I think folks would marinate in buttermilk before dredging.

 
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