Taco Seasoning

Recently I scoured my cupboards, pantry and fridge looking for transfats. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that we had nothing in the house (or so I thought) that contains transfats - although I admit I was surprised that there were none in the Doritos.

Today, when I took down the box of taco shells for a quick Friday night dinner, I was astonished to see that there are 2.5 grams of transfat per serving of hard taco shells. Here I thought I was serving a somewhat healthy meal when making tacos as opposed to ordering pizza.

Sodium is another issue. I usually try to be careful not to use too many prepared items in order to keep the sodium content down. Hard taco shells 135 gr. of sodium which is high, but then when I looked at the seasoning mix package, I felt defeated: 560 mg, or 23% of the recommended daily intake. So, if a person were to eat 4 hard tacos, they would ingest 795 mg of sodium!

OK, I'll admit, I don't really know that much about nutrition, but I figure that anything I can make from scratch is probably healthier than something mass produced that has the shelf life of at least 2 years. I did a search for recipes for taco seasoning, and after a little experimentation and borrowing from 3-4 different recipes, here's what I came up with:

1 onion finely chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed/minced
Saute in olive oil until tender.

Add 1 lb ground beef

While beef is cooking, combine the following ingredients in a small bowl:

1 tsp salt
1 tsp corn starch
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp cumin
½ tsp paprika
¼ tsp oregano
dash of cayenne pepper

Add to meat mixture with water to reach the desired consistency. (I had an open bottle of water next to me on the counter which I poured in little by little and I forgot to measure how much I used.)

The result was good. I think that ground oregano would be better than dried, and I'm certain that the freshness of the spices have a great effect on the final taste (some of my spices are fresher than others - it's time for new chili powder). When the kids ate it, I asked what they thought and they all thought is was the same as usual. I don't know what the sodium content was, and we still ate the hard shell tacos (complete with transfats) but I felt a sense of satisfaction at having eleminated another pre-packaged item from my repetoire. From now on, it's taco seasoning made from scratch for us!