Tacos on the Road

For dinner on Wednesday, I made some chicken and steak tacos for everyone.  For the chicken and steak marinade, I basically combined a few recipes: I used 1 thinly sliced orange, 1 thinly sliced onion and 5 cloves of smashed garlic scattered around the meat.  I then poured over the meat 1/2 a cup of soy sauce, 1 cup of light beer, and a cup mixed with juice from 1 lime, 1/2 cup of orange juice, 1 tsp of honey,  1/4 cup of olive oil, 1 TB of chili powder, salt and pepper.  I let the meat marinate for about four hours.  Ideally I would have grilled the meat if I had a grill, but I just pan seared them until cooked, tented and let it rest for a couple of minutes and sliced into strips.

I made a couple of different handmade toppings for the tacos: a corn and black bean salad based on Giada's recipe (I also added some garlic and chopped red peppers when sauteeing, used a little honey instead of agave, only 1 can of black beans, omitted the jicama, and chilled it in the fridge), pico de gallo based on Marcela's recipe, my usual homemade guacamole and chopped cilantro and chopped cabbage for some crunch.

I heated up some corn and flour tortillas wrapped in aluminum foil on low heat directly on the stove burner for a few minutes and let everyone help themselves.  Everything was great; the toppings went really well with tacos and there was good variety.  I've been impressed with the produce up here.  It was great to use fresh local corn from local farms which I shucked myself (there's no local corn in California!), and the organic selection in the supermarkets are pretty good.  For both meals, I was able to use pretty much all organic ingredients that looked fresh and tasted good.  For dessert, we had some fresh strawberries and blueberries, drizzled with a little honey and mint.  A simple dessert for a warm summer evening.