Thrown-Together TACO Salad
Posted by Fleming Turner in Healthy Food Guide
Friday night, I pulled a tiny roast (1 lb.) out of the freezer. We finished dinner last night, and what was going on in my mind? Dinner for tomorrow, of course! Since I was lucky enough to think about this early, and the roast was mostly thawed by now, I pulled out the crock pot.
Hmmm… I wasn’t sure how to cook it. I had a head of lettuce in the fridge that I forgot to use the other day for my lunchtime salad, so I decided to make some kind of shredded beef salad. I’ve heard in the past that the meat shouldn’t touch the bottom of the crock pot dish if it can be avoided, so used two quartered onions to “hold up” the meat. Not yet prepared to make a taco salad, I covered the meat with Season-All and called it “good”.
I put the thing on HIGH and planned to turn it down to LOW when I went to bed, which I amazingly remembered to do. We planned to eat our healthy dinners at noon and probably 6PM. Because it was Sunday, I figured we’d have the big “to do” first, then eat the same thing or other leftovers later in the day. It would be nice to get the harder meal out of the way.
Time to eat! Here’s what I grabbed and threw on the table – forget the fancy serving dishes and keep it easy! (This was also when the meal turned into TACO salad.):
- The crock pot of meat. My hubby shredded it with a fork.
- Lettuce.
- Cheese and the cheese grater.
- Fat-free sour cream. We had bought this for chili that I plan to make on Monday, so hopefully we don’t use too much of it.
- A tomato. I had this left over from my planned lunch salads, and it was getting very ripe.
- We opened a can of kidney beans.
- Salsa.
- Corn. We had this in the freezer, already half-gone from other similar meals, and we just nuked like 3/4 cup of it for our salads for 2 minutes.
- Chips. Seriously, we had like 1/2 cup left from taco salads a month ago. I’m glad I didn’t try eating them as a midnight snack some other time! Now, my taco salad will be complete.
- Tortillas. Really, there were not enough chips, so we’ll see who gets what!
So, I was successful at figuring out how to make a healthy taco salad. I ended up counting 3 Points for the meat (that thing had NO fat, and it better not, for only being 1 pound in size), and I got to have a lot of meat flavor mass due to the onion overload. Mmmm… those onions were surprisingly good on the salad. I counted 2 for the cheese because I put more on about halfway through, 1 for the sour cream, 1 for the chips, 1 for the beans and corn together, and that is it! It’s another one of my healthy lunch ideas and for some reason my salads always end up being 8 Points or less.
Oh! I must mention that one of the boys had a salad, too. My wife and my middle son made some PHAT burritos with all the same stuff in them, minus the chips. It was amusing to see my 5-year-old holding the over-stuffed tortilla, but he ate more than half of it!
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