2/21/2012 - Taco Salad

What's for dinner? Well, folks, tonight it was steak taco salad, a recipe I picked up from the folks at Serious Eats .

This is what it was supposed to look like:

[Photograph: Nick Kindelsperger]

This is what mine actually looked like:

Now there are a couple of reasons why mine doesn't look as good. The main reason is because I'm not a food stylist. Next, in the recipe, he used those pretty slices of steak. I couldn't find the same cut at our little Santa Fe market so I got some other cuts. Nice pieces of beef but very, very thin so it was virtually impossible to cook them to carmelized perfection on the outside and still be medium rare on the inside. Also, although those slices are pretty, they'd be a pain in the butt to eat without a knife so I cut mine into bite-size pieces and tossed them with the rest of the ingredients. Also, the dressing. The recipe calls for salsa mixed with sour cream and I did that. It was pretty. But, after removing my steaks from the pan, there was no way I could let all that crusty, spicy goodness that was stuck to the bottom of the frying pan just get washed down the drain. So, I poured a little cheap red wine in the pan to deglaze it and this resulted in a rich, brown sauce that I added to the dressing, turning it into an ugly, lumpy brown liquid. Looked like hell. And, it added a bit of a withered look to my salad.

However, the damn thing tasted great. I got to use up a red bell pepper that had been hanging around a little too long (not called for in the recipe), a dab of sour cream that has been lurking in the bottom of the refrigerator, and most of the salsa that I made a few days ago but haven't eaten. AND, there's enough left over for dinner tomorrow night (maybe lunch, too).