Everyone loves tacos! I mean, right?!
So over here week 16 of the Steemit Iron Chef contest has assigned us avocados as our theme ingredient. I may not have really "elevated" the avocado, but I think I used it where it's best!
I left a olive oil, butter, lime, salt and pepper out of this picture, but otherwise, here are my ingredients:
The pink jar is pickled onions leftover from a previous challenge, so reincorporating that was fun. (I also still had in the fridge, some of the avocado-based sauce that I wrote about a month ago, but I decided that it was a little funky and tossed it in the compost. Alas!)
I think all the other ingredients are obvious except for the stuff in the upper left. On Sunday, I made a veggie hash with white beans and decided to set some aside for this meal. So I melted some butter and roughly-mashed those ingredients: navy beans, broccoli, potato, carrot, celery, etc into it and let is simmer and thicken a bit.
Then I fried the tortillas in shallow olive oil to get them puffy and golden. I wish I had a better way to extract the oil afterwards, but that does such great things for the flavor and texture.
At that point it was just a matter of assembly. I laid down a spread of the veggie-beans, added a fan of avocado slices (they're quite thick because they were supposed to dominate the taco), placed the carrot rings and "planted" a basil blossom in each one, added some thing jalapeno rings, pickled onion, pea shoots, cilantro, and a light sprinkle of aged crema.
I made three plates and we each also used some combination of: salt, pepper, and squeezing a lime-half that we passed around. The interesting thing to me is that my wife and daughter are both very likely to think this kind of food needs a sprinkle of cheese, but neither one even mentioned it. I could have used a cashew yogurt thinned with lemon juice instead of the crema and margarine instead of butter and it would have been vegan.
And here are some of the obligatory close-ups. I think I did a better job this week of capturing attractive images than I have done in some of the past entries. I especially like the first one with the blossom in the "planter" and the last one with my bar in the background!
