Ok, these are not your corner taqueria style of tacos. Let's start with the curry!
Curry Chicken Tacos- Fusion Baby!
What you'll need:
- Chicken, thighs, breasts or ground is fun too- your choice
- Madras curry powder, I like the SWAD brand in a big bag. DO NOT BUY CURRY IN A LITTLE SPICE BOTTLE
- Chili powder
- Garlic powder
- Chopped onion, one whole onion will do
- Olive oil
- Potatoes if you have chosen ground chicken
So you've decided to start this time with chicken breasts and thighs. Get the bones out of there and cut or tear the chicken up into pieces a little bigger than a golf ball, bigger than bite size because you're going to cut them up after they're cooked some more.
Make sure you wash your hands because food poisoning sucks and dive into your spice drawer and get the dry spices. Put them into a little bowl, alright let me explain the curry thing. You're going to start with a BIG pile of curry in your little bowl. Of you're making this with four chicken thighs or two chicken breasts, you want five or more tablespoons of curry. Now it's easy to understand what a waste it is to get a small, expensive jar of it. Besides curry power from Whole Foods or Dominick's, even McCormick fancy spice kind is just bad. It doesn't taste the way it's supposed to. So then add chili and garlic powder to your curry, add some and taste. Make it as hot or as garlicky as you like. Your bowl should have a substantial amount of spice powder in it- you want to have a lot. Now add the olive oil to it, starting with a tablespoon and stirring it to make a paste, adding more oil as needed. Yes, you can also buy curry paste and this is done for you! Make the paste a little more oily so it can coat the chicken.
Chop up your onion and throw it into the container with your chicken. Get ready to make those fingers yellow! Dump the curry and oil blend in with the chicken and onions and get everything nice and curried up. Put this in the fridge for two hours, even longer, even overnight. If you decided to do this with ground chicken, everything is the same except you can use less oil in your paste because you don't need it when you work the spices into the ground chicken with your hands. When you cook it, you'll first cook some chopped potatoes in oil, dusted with curry and the other seasonings as they cook. Then add the chicken and follow the cooking instructions below.
Now get your super awesome wok, or a boring frying pan and put a little oil in there. Heat it up and dump in your chicken stuff. Cook it until its all lightly browned. Let it cool. Next you can put it back on the *cleaned and sterilized* cutting board and cut the chicken up further so it starts to look like taco meat strips. Serve with lettuce and tomato, cheese if you want. Toast some corn tortillas for your tacos. Salsa from the small cans is good with this. The kind that has tomatoes, onion, jalapeño and cilantro. Fresh cilantro is great with this taco filling also as it's used in Indian dishes as well. If you don't want a total fusion meal, for the most curry chicken flavor, don't use a salsa, just lettuce, onion and cilantro. You're gonna like this one!
Tempeh Tacos... What!?
What you'll need:
- Organic tempeh, one pack
- Garlic powder
- Onion powder
- Annato powder
- Ground cinnamon
- Soy sauce
- Veggie oil
Ok, what is tempeh? For those who haven't tried it, it's a fermented soybean product originally from Indonesia. It comes in different varieties, some of which have wheat in them. I stay away from too much wheat, so I use the flax variety that has cultured soybeans, flax seed and brown rice in it. There are other tempeh taco recipes online, so people are eating this and its very good!
Prepare your brick of tempeh by slicing it into thin strips and then the strips into smaller squares. Now it's ready for a spice dusting! If the spice mix sounds a little like the one used in preparing arrachera, that's because it's almost the same, although there are many different recipes for arrachera... I didn't use lime with the tempeh... only because I didn't have it at the time. Sprinkle the spices in equal amounts over your tempeh squares stirring them around to get each square spiced up. Now you can take one packet of soy sauce (everyone has those lying around) and sprinkle the whole packet evenly over the tempeh, which will soak it up. This is how it's gonna look!
It looks very much like tofu, but its more dense and firm. Put the tempeh in the fridge to marinate. I think overnight is probably a bit much because it's not meat- an hour should be enough.
Get your wok and put some veggie oil in there, be generous. Add the tempeh and cook until its golden brown. Toast some tortillas and pick out your taco toppings. The tempeh is seasoned the same way you'd season thin strips of pounded steak for tacos or fajitas, so the toppings you choose can be the same as I mentioned above, or any other traditional Mexican ones you like. Grilled poblano pepper is good or fajita style with peppers and onions, jalapeños, cilantro, salsa and so on... Give it a try, weird can be good!
