The other day I bought the cutest little tortillas at Von’s. They are called Mission “Street Tacos.” They are tiny, flour tortillas – something you would see sold on the street. I love tortillas of any kind. Flour. Corn. Homemade. Low-carb. Even whole wheat. The only tortillas I don’t really care for are hard shell tacos. Unless you make your own hard shell tacos, which an ex-boyfriend of mine once did. Those were amazing! At any rate, I love most tortillas and most types of tacos.
I’ve been sick for longer than a week with very little taste buds so I’ve been dreaming about getting better enough to have the energy to cook something and I’ve been dreaming about eating something I could taste. I’ve been living off toast and grilled cheese and even the grilled cheese I really couldn’t taste all that much. Not even when it was slathered in chipotle mayo.
For some reason I got the idea in my head that buffalo chicken would make an excellent taco. I figured it would be spicy and hot enough that even if my taste buds still weren’t up to par that I would be able to taste them. So I found a couple of recipes on the internet for buffalo chicken tacos and kind of came up with my own really easy recipe. Really. It was really easy.
taco ingredients.
- boneless, skinless chicken breast
- buffalo sauce
- tortillas (whatever kind you fancy)
- blue cheese crumbles
- garnish (cilantro, chopped tomato, avocado, buffalo sauce, onion, cole slaw, blue cheese dressing, shredded cheese – really the possibilities are endless)
buffalo sauce ingredients.
- 6 T. butter
- pinch of salt
- ¼ c. hot sauce
- 2 T. white vinegar
directions.
- Make the buffalo sauce. In a small pan over medium heat, heat and stir all ingredients until butter is melted and sauce is uniform.
- Cut the chicken breast into tiny pieces. Think of what you would feed a very small child. If you’ve never fed a very small child, just make them smaller than bite-size. In a saute pan over medium-high heat, drop a little bit of canola oil. You don’t need to cover the bottom of the pan and we are not deep-frying the chicken. Just put some in there so your chicken doesn’t totally stick. Brown the chicken. To brown any meat you simply let it sit cooking, unstirred for a bit. For cubed meat you would brown on each side. For this chicken just let it cook until it’s browned a bit then stir it up and let it sit some more. You’re not going to get all sides browned.
- Meanwhile, prepare your garnishes.
- Once your chicken is browned toss it with some of the buffalo sauce. I didn’t measure.
- Serve hot over warmed tortillas with whatever garnish you like.
To be honest, I wasn’t overly enthused with this dish. To be fair, my taste buds are not fully back in business. I couldn’t really taste the buffalo sauce but could taste the blue cheese, which must have been really strong. And I could taste a sprig or two of cilantro What I really wanted to do was “bread” the chicken because I believe that buffalo sauce sticks better to chicken that’s breaded in some capacity. I just didn’t feel like futzing around with any breading so I opted not to but I do think that would have made a big difference in how I felt about this dish. If I could taste the food that would certainly help as well!
I plan to take the leftovers to work with me for lunch this week so hopefully one of these days my taste buds return in full and I can give a more accurate depiction of my thoughts on this recipe.
As an aside, I wasn’t overly thrilled with the tortillas. I like the size but these babies were thicker than normal flour tortillas. The texture seemed to compete with or detract from the meat.
Food Snob 