How To Make Taco Salad

Unless you’re really good friends with them, you probably wouldn’t serve franks and beans to dinner guests.[1] And unless you’re hosting a party for kids, your wife may not let you make tuna puffs or BP&J. But some things, no matter how much you love it, you have to admit to yourself that it just doesn’t look good enough to serve to anyone else.

I’d like to believe this salad doesn’t fall into that last category, but looking at the pictures I’ve got to say I’d be a little suspicious of it if someone else offered it to me. I could probably “fix” that by assembling it like a “normal” salad: lettuce on the bottom, then toppings, then dressing on top. But this is how I’ve eaten it ever since my aunt first served it to me out of a zip-top bag at a picnic when I was eight years old. So I’m not changing it.

Ingredients

Taco meat

1 pound ground beef
1 can (12 ounces) plain tomato sauce
¼ cup chili powder (or taco seasoning)
3 cloves garlic (optional)

Salad

1 head iceberg lettuce
½ pound sharp cheddar cheese
¼ large onion (about ½ cup diced)
4 Roma tomatoes (about ½ cup diced)
1½ cups thousand island dressing
5 ounces (about half a medium bag) corn chips

Directions

Brown the ground beef in a frying pan with some salt, breaking the beef up as much as possible. (The same way as in the chili dog chili sauce recipe.) Add the garlic and chili powder (or taco seasoning) and the tomato sauce.

Cook until everything is heated through, then remove from heat and allow to cool while you prepare the salad.

Dice the onion.

Cut the tomatoes into quarters and remove the seeds. Slice the meaty part lengthwise into thin strips.

Then finish dicing the tomatoes.

(Hmm, I think I need to do a post on dicing tomatoes … )

Core and chop the lettuce.

If I really wanted to be strict with my mise en place, I’d shred the cheese into a bowl, but I had left it out too long by this time. When you shred warm cheese, it tends to start sticking right back together if you put it all in one big pile. So I shredded it right onto the lettuce.

I didn’t use that entire block of cheese. That’s about three-quarters of a pound, and I used a bit more than half of it.

Add the tomato and onion.

Toss everything together a little, then add the thousand island dressing.

Look at your bowl and realize that yes, you should have used the biggest bowl for this. (Damn, I hate when I do this.) The bowl can’t just be big enough to hold everything, it has to be big enough to mix it around easily. When you’re mixing, you generally want a bowl at least twice as big as you’d need just to hold all the ingredients.

Once you’ve got it in a big enough bowl, toss the salad until it is well coated with the dressing. Then add the corn chips.

(This is not product placement. You can’t see what brand that is. These are not the corn chips you are looking for … )

Add the taco meat and stir to combine.

You want to do the corn chips and taco meat last. Otherwise the chips will get soggy, and the warm meat will melt the cheese. If you’re not going to be serving this right away, let the meat cool all the way before adding it, and don’t include the chips. Bring the salad in a zip-top bag or a bowl with a tight lid, and add the chips when you’re ready to serve.

And that’s it.

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1 Why is that, anyway? Why do we try to impress strangers, and we’ll at least straighten up for friends, but if we’re just serving family they’re lucky if we’re not still in pajamas? I can’t remember where I got this line, but we’ll spend money we don’t have buying stuff we don’t need to impress people we don’t like.

If you have any recipes that you love to eat, but won’t serve to guests, tell me about it in the comments below. I want to do a whole roundup of “too good for guests” meals.