Shredded Beef Chipotle Tacos

You may have thought that we were tired of tacos, but since we've been diagnosed with TNS we decided we might as well go all out. This time we decided to pull out the slow cooker and do a recipe from our Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. We loaded up the slow cooker with some thin cut round steak. Then tossed in some diced onion, fire roasted tomatoes, minced garlic, cumin, and mexican oregano. Couldn't have been easier: 10 minutes of prep in the morning, then let it cook all day. Here's what we put into the slow cooker.

We also made some great pico de gallo. We finely diced some roma tomatoes and onion. We added a dash of sugar and salt and the juice from 1/2 of a lime, and more of Wendy and Jerry's serrano peppers (thanks guys!). It was a nice, fresh topping for the tacos. Gina decided to cut a few extra calories and ate the meal on lettuce.

I, on the other hand, ate mine on corn tortillas. We both topped our tacos with some shredded Mexican cheese and some plain nonfat yogurt (sour cream substitute).

Overall the tacos were pretty tasty. We've done a similar recipe out of Rick Bayless' cookbook, Pork Tinga Tacos. While these shredded beef tacos were very good (especially with the pico de gallo), I would have to say that the Bayless recipe is much better. I really love the flavor of chipotle peppers en adobo. It adds a smoky taste with just the right amount of spice. If you've ever had the chipotle tobasco sauce at Chipotle Mexican Grill, that's right where it is. I kind of wish Chipotle actually used some chipotle peppers in their meats, but we can't have everything :(.

We're interested in adding two new aspects to our blog: pricing and calories. We figure it's something that we're concerned with, and it's not too difficult to determine.

Meal pricing
So, to do the pricing we simply added up all of the cash we spent on the ingredients. In certain cases, such as spices, we didn't use all of the ingredients. In these cases, I just calculated the cost of the spice per teaspoon and multiplied by how many we used.

Who knew, the density of dried oregano is available online in 209 different measurement units! Anyways, it works out to be 0.0357 oz / tsp.

Also, the density of ground cumin can also be estimated using online sources. 600 grams per liter, or 0.104 tsp per ounce. Anyways, forget all the mathy details, the final results works out to be as follows:

This worked out to a total of $14.13 for the whole meal, or $2.36 per serving (assuming this yields 6 servings, which may be a slight underestimate). That's pretty good when you're on a tight budget!

Anyways, any feedback on the pricing would be good. If there's something you'd like to see that I didn't show, or if you think it's totally lame: don't be afraid to comment!

Calories
We also did a quick calculation of the calories. There are plenty of websites nowadays where you can enter in what and how much you ate for the day to get a rough estimate of whether you'll lose weight (myfitnesspal.com). We were able to enter what we used in the meal into one of these engines to get an idea of how many calories each serving was. Gina came up with 267 calories (for all  when we included the yogurt, cheese, beef dish, and pico de gallo). Since she ate it on lettuce, that's all she gets. I ate it on tortillas, so add 65*3 to that and I get 472 calories for my serving. This seems pretty low, but in reality the recipe doesn't have much. Besides the beef (which is lean cut) there are only vegetables and spices. So we get loads of flavor for very few calories! This is of course good on the waistline.

Well, we hope that you enjoyed our post on tacos. I bet you guys are thinking: "How can they keep eating tacos? Aren't they sick of them?" The answer is no, we'll never be sick of tacos. We could live at Chipotle and be the happiest people in the world. And based on the number of calories that we came up with, this isn't necessarily a bad thing!

Happy cooking, everyone!