Taco Night

I Loved my Mom's food. I thought she was a fabulous cook. I was always starving by the time dinner rolled around (and we ate HOURS earlier than I feed my kids dinner!)

Here is a list of all the dinners I can remember my mom making when I was a kid:

Lasagna

Spaghetti

Tacos

Beef Stew

She made meatloaf occasionally but my Dad always complained about it. He called it Killer Meatloaf. I liked it, though.

Then there were the dinners that consisted of a meat with sides, The meats were pretty much always:

Steak, Chicken Breast, or Pork Chops

Occasionally she would make Fried Chicken (which to this day, could quite possibly be my favorite dinner) and I always got a drumstick. (It was a good gig being the only one in the family that liked dark meat.) But now that I'm a mom I realize what a ridiculous amount of work and clean up making fried chicken is and if you don't get everyone to the table right when it's ready it loses its crispiness, and it's just way too frustrating. As much as I love it, I almost never make it. Much easier to let SaveMart do it for me. (Which may be why we all loved Kentucky Fried Chicken so much back then. That was back in the day before anyone ever thought to call it something so sacreligious as "KFC", and if you called it "Colonel Sanders'" people wouldn't look at you funny and would actually know what you were talking about.)

Every once in a while Mom made fish, but Dad always complained when he came home from work and the house smelled like fish, so we didn't have that very often.

I do remember her making liver once, but that didn't go over very well.

In the Summer Dad Bar-B-Que'd whatever meat we were having for dinner just about every night. (One year he even went so far as to Bar-B-Que our Thanksgiving Turkey. It wasn't ready until well after dark.)

And the sides, like I said, were always the same ...

Baked Potatoes (with butter and salt) or

Mashed Potatoes or

Minute Rice (with butter and salt)

French Bread (with butter) or

Brown and Serve Rolls (with butter)

Frozen Corn (corn on the cob in the summer) or

Frozen Green Beans or

Frozen Brussels Sprouts (with melted Velveeta) or

Boiled Cauliflower (with melted Velveeta)

sometimes boiled carrots (those were the days before those bags of baby carrots)

and sometimes just a sliced tomato

In the Bar-B-Que days of summer, we ALWAYS had a salad which ALWAYS consisted of: Iceburg Lettuce, Tomatoes, Celery, and Carrots chopped like round coins. (Except when I had braces, then I got shreds of carrots from the potato peeler.) Oh, and sometimes little cubes of cheddar cheese and croutons if we had them. Dressing choices were invariably: Ranch, Italian, and Thousand Island.

She was NOT a casserole kind of gal.

It's funny to me how predictable dinners were. This was before the days of the internet, mind you. Now you can browse through a million recipes to not only find something that sounds yummy, but a version of it to match the ingredients you have on hand and how much time and effort you want to spend on it. My mom had a Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book, and I'm pretty sure all (or most) of her recipes came from that.

But ... this post is called Taco Night because the white-girl way my mom made tortillas has stuck with me and is still something I crave and make for my family. She would pour a little oil in a skillet and fry the tortilla. When she took it out of the pan she would sprinkle both sides with parmesan. That's it. Really small thing, but it's a taste and texture that sticks with ya.

The rest of the taco was always the same, too. Ground Beef cooked in Taco Seasoning, Shredded Cheddar Cheese sprinkled over that, Shredded Iceburg Lettuce, and Chopped Tomatoes. Totally not authentic in any way, but definitely comfort food, and totally worth coming in for even in the middle of a court-wide game of hide and seek.

My mom is always a little weirded out with all my ethnic soups, curries, stir fries ... FISH Tacos???
Kinda funny I turned out that way. ;)