National Taco Day - Recipes & Reviews

Today is National Taco Day, the most hallowed of culinary days in my cocina (kitchen.) I can have tacos morning, noon and night. So read on and you'll know what I mean - just click on any taco name, or highlighted text, to see all the tasty details from my blogpost recipe or review.

In the morning it's spicy Mexican chorizo with scrambled eggs and refried beans nestled into a warm corn tortilla.

Breakfast Tacos

And my Chorizo & Egg Taco is about as cheap as you can get. I get Mexican chorizo from the 99c only Store natch, and all kinds too, like beef, pork and even soy (which is a recent favorite.) Eggs still show up at my local Dollar Tree.

The simplest breakfast taco to make is one made of Scrambled Eggs & Refried Beans. You can used canned refried beans or make my Homemade Mexican-style Pinto Beans.

And for Breakfast Tacos, it all about the salsa toppings. I like salsa from a jar, but sometime I just gotta go for it and make my own Homemade Salsa, and it's easy to do.

I'm ready to party on this auspicious day, and when this cheap$kate does it you can bet pennies will be pinched without a sacrifice in flavor. For my backyard soirée it's my favorite taco: a slow-cooked pork Carnitas. Just check out my video below to see what I'm writing about.



I buy a 5 to 6 pound budget pork shoulder, and I can get a couple dozen tacos out of it, too.

 And boy it's the perfect budget recipe that your friends and neighbors will line up for. You let them do most of the work -- they get to build each taco to suit their taste. I like to set out some chopped onion and cilantro. You can make your taco bar any way you like, go ahead and add a bowl of shredded cheese, chopped lettuce and tomato, and a cheap jar of salsa, too.

Chicken is one cheap protein. My Chicken Tinga recipe will have your guest coming back for seconds...and thirds! Chicken Tinga is a stew simmered in tomato sauce with a can of spicy chipotle peppers, but you can make a mild version with a can of enchilada sauce.

 Chicken Tinga

One of my most unique tacos came about one summer while on vacation at our spectacular national parks in Utah. I stopped to eat and had an Indian Frybread Taco. Frybread is flour dough that's rolled out and deep fried. You top the frybread with chili beans, lettuce, tomato and cheese.

Frybread Taco

Carne Asada, or grilled steak, is a favorite taco of mine. Just make my marinade for thin sliced steak, let it set for an hour, then slap it on the grill. After the Carne Asada is done you chop it up and serve on a corn tortilla

Carne Asada Taco

The marinade is a simple mix of lime juice, oil, cilantro, cumin, garlic, salt and pepper.

Drive anywhere in Los Angeles and you will see taco trucks, sidewalk taco vendors, and taquerias on almost every street. And I've stopped at most of them. What follows are a few of my faves - with a few recipes I cribbed from them, too.

When I moved to Los Angeles over 40 years ago, I discovered the taco truck. Boy, have they evolved over the years. In the beginning it was just hamburgers and tacos made with ground beef. Well, that all changed about 9 years ago when a hotel chef named Roy Choi, who was down but not out, rebounded from couch surfing to start Kogi Taco Truck.

A fellow co-conspirator came up with the idea of a Korean taco, and Roy Choi assembled the taco ingredients of Korean barbecue short ribs with an kimchi-style coleslaw, served on corn tortillas. His truck was an instant hit, and Kogi jump-started the ongoing nouveau taco truck renaissance.

Kogi is still around and I still love them. Check out my video below, where I hang out night and day, for L.A.'s most uniquely mouthwatering taco.



Inspired by Kogi's mashup of Korean BBQ and Mexican Tacos, I came up with the Loxaco, that combines Jewish and Mexican cuisines.

A Loxaco is comprised of homemade lox (cured salmon) in a fast food crunchy taco shell topped with cream cheese and thin sliced red onion. I introduced this preposterous concoction at a book signing in Libros Schmibros, a lending library in East Los Angeles. How did it go over with book lovers? The following video is a twofer, you get a recipe plus a literary happening scene.



After a double feature at my fave art house cinematheque like the Egyptian or New Beverly Theater, on the way home I swing by Leo's Taco for a few al pastor pork tacos. They just cost a $1.25, and the line can be long, now that the word is out.

This is porcine perfection on a paper plate. It's tender and flavorful grilled marinated pork, that's cooked in front of a gas grill called a trompo. A cook manning the grill slices off thin slivers, finishing the taco with flare: a flying slice of pineapple. Check out the yummy action below.



I've followed the Two Hot Tamales from the beginning, when the Border Grill was in a storefront with half a dozen tables on Melrose Avenue. Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken are fixtures on the L.A. dining scene who jumped on the taco truck train, bringing their neuvo take on Mexican cuisine to four wheels. They primarily park their taco truck in the environs of Silicon Valley West Coast, Santa Monica.



My Tacos El Primo video review has gone viral. That means this YouTube video gets thousands of views per month - right now it is pushing half a million. Why? I'm not sure. Let's see... in this video I review Buche and Tripas tacos, or tacos made from slow-cooked stomach and intestine. Gross right? One thing I noticed is half my visitors are from Mexico, so maybe half my audience is curious how gringos react to offal.

That doesn't seem interesting enough really, but hey, what do I know, I'll take it. I did the taco review because Tacos El Primo was a midnight munchies stop on my return home from various Hollywood treks.

When you have a neighborhood food stop, you eventually dive deeper and try eats you would not normally taste.

Tripas (intestine) Taco

Well, join the multitudes and check out my Cheap$kate video review of Tacos El Primo.



Deep fried Fish Tacos are one of L.A.'s great culinary contributions. These battered depth charges of crunchy perfection are based on the street food of Baja Mexico and other coastal communities. If you like British Fish & Chips, you will love Fried Fish Tacos.

Fish Taco

The battered fillets of fish are typically served on corn tortillas and topped with a white crema and chopped cabbage. I have my own recipe for Fish Tacos you can see by clicking on the recipe name.

And this is the best taco deal in town: Today (Wednesdays) is $1 Fish Taco day at Tacos Baja! Yeah, that's what you heard - don't believe me? Just watch the video below and see it for yourself.



Celebrate National Taco Day with me today. Hey, celebrate it any day now that I've shown you a slew of taco recipes you can make easily and cheaply.

And I'll end with a queasy taco review, from of all places, Jack In The Box's 2 for 99 cent tacos...ugh, watch it with a barf bag.

National Taco Day - Recipes & Reviews

Today is National Taco Day, the most hallowed of culinary days in my cocina (kitchen.) I can have tacos morning, noon and night. So read on and you'll know what I mean - just click on any taco name, or highlighted text, to see all the tasty details from my blogpost recipe or review.

In the morning it's spicy Mexican chorizo with scrambled eggs and refried beans nestled into a warm corn tortilla.

Breakfast Tacos

And my Chorizo & Egg Taco is about as cheap as you can get. I get Mexican chorizo from the 99c only Store natch, and all kinds too, like beef, pork and even soy (which is a recent favorite.) Eggs still show up at my local Dollar Tree.

The simplest breakfast taco to make is one made of Scrambled Eggs & Refried Beans. You can used canned refried beans or make my Homemade Mexican-style Pinto Beans.

And for Breakfast Tacos, it all about the salsa toppings. I like salsa from a jar, but sometime I just gotta go for it and make my own Homemade Salsa, and it's easy to do.

I'm ready to party on this auspicious day, and when this cheap$kate does it you can bet pennies will be pinched without a sacrifice in flavor. For my backyard soirée it's my favorite taco: a slow-cooked pork Carnitas. Just check out my video below to see what I'm writing about.



I buy a 5 to 6 pound budget pork shoulder, and I can get a couple dozen tacos out of it, too.

 And boy it's the perfect budget recipe that your friends and neighbors will line up for. You let them do most of the work -- they get to build each taco to suit their taste. I like to set out some chopped onion and cilantro. You can make your taco bar any way you like, go ahead and add a bowl of shredded cheese, chopped lettuce and tomato, and a cheap jar of salsa, too.

Chicken is one cheap protein. My Chicken Tinga recipe will have your guest coming back for seconds...and thirds! Chicken Tinga is a stew simmered in tomato sauce with a can of spicy chipotle peppers, but you can make a mild version with a can of enchilada sauce.

 Chicken Tinga

One of my most unique tacos came about one summer while on vacation at our spectacular national parks in Utah. I stopped to eat and had an Indian Frybread Taco. Frybread is flour dough that's rolled out and deep fried. You top the frybread with chili beans, lettuce, tomato and cheese.

Frybread Taco

Carne Asada, or grilled steak, is a favorite taco of mine. Just make my marinade for thin sliced steak, let it set for an hour, then slap it on the grill. After the Carne Asada is done you chop it up and serve on a corn tortilla

Carne Asada Taco

The marinade is a simple mix of lime juice, oil, cilantro, cumin, garlic, salt and pepper.

Drive anywhere in Los Angeles and you will see taco trucks, sidewalk taco vendors, and taquerias on almost every street. And I've stopped at most of them. What follows are a few of my faves - with a few recipes I cribbed from them, too.

When I moved to Los Angeles over 40 years ago, I discovered the taco truck. Boy, have they evolved over the years. In the beginning it was just hamburgers and tacos made with ground beef. Well, that all changed about 9 years ago when a hotel chef named Roy Choi, who was down but not out, rebounded from couch surfing to start Kogi Taco Truck.

A fellow co-conspirator came up with the idea of a Korean taco, and Roy Choi assembled the taco ingredients of Korean barbecue short ribs with an kimchi-style coleslaw, served on corn tortillas. His truck was an instant hit, and Kogi jump-started the ongoing nouveau taco truck renaissance.

Kogi is still around and I still love them. Check out my video below, where I hang out night and day, for L.A.'s most uniquely mouthwatering taco.



Inspired by Kogi's mashup of Korean BBQ and Mexican Tacos, I came up with the Loxaco, that combines Jewish and Mexican cuisines.

A Loxaco is comprised of homemade lox (cured salmon) in a fast food crunchy taco shell topped with cream cheese and thin sliced red onion. I introduced this preposterous concoction at a book signing in Libros Schmibros, a lending library in East Los Angeles. How did it go over with book lovers? The following video is a twofer, you get a recipe plus a literary happening scene.


After a double feature at my fave art house cinematheque like the Egyptian or New Beverly Theater, on the way home I swing by Leo's Taco for a few al pastor pork tacos. They just cost a $1.25, and the line can be long, now that the word is out.

This is porcine perfection on a paper plate. It's tender and flavorful grilled marinated pork, that's cooked in front of a gas grill called a trompo. A cook manning the grill slices off thin slivers, finishing the taco with flare: a flying slice of pineapple. Check out the yummy action below.



I've followed the Two Hot Tamales from the beginning, when the Border Grill was in a storefront with half a dozen tables on Melrose Avenue. Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken are fixtures on the L.A. dining scene who jumped on the taco truck train, bringing their neuvo take on Mexican cuisine to four wheels. They primarily park their taco truck in the environs of Silicon Valley West Coast, Santa Monica.



My Tacos El Primo video review has gone viral. That means this YouTube video gets thousands of views per month - right now it is pushing half a million. Why? I'm not sure. Let's see... in this video I review Buche and Tripas tacos, or tacos made from slow-cooked stomach and intestine. Gross right? One thing I noticed is half my visitors are from Mexico, so maybe half my audience is curious how gringos react to offal.

That doesn't seem interesting enough really, but hey, what do I know, I'll take it. I did the taco review because Tacos El Primo was a midnight munchies stop on my return home from various Hollywood treks.

When you have a neighborhood food stop, you eventually dive deeper and try eats you would not normally taste.

Tripas (intestine) Taco

Well, join the multitudes and check out my Cheap$kate video review of Tacos El Primo.



Deep fried Fish Tacos are one of L.A.'s great culinary contributions. These battered depth charges of crunchy perfection are based on the street food of Baja Mexico and other coastal communities. If you like British Fish & Chips, you will love Fried Fish Tacos.

Fish Taco

The battered fillets of fish are typically served on corn tortillas and topped with a white crema and chopped cabbage. I have my own recipe for Fish Tacos you can see by clicking on the recipe name.

And this is the best taco deal in town: Today (Wednesdays) is $1 Fish Taco day at Tacos Baja! Yeah, that's what you heard - don't believe me? Just watch the video below and see it for yourself.



Celebrate National Taco Day with me today. Hey, celebrate it any day now that I've shown you a slew of taco recipes you can make easily and cheaply.

And I'll end with a queasy taco review, from of all places, Jack In The Box's 2 for 99 cent tacos...ugh, watch it with a barf bag.

Chicken Tinga - Mexican Chicken Stew

It's taco patio party time with my latest South of the Border recipe, Chicken Tinga. And it's here, just in time for summer. You'll want to bookmark this recipe. And, my Chicken Tinga recipe is wife approved!

The ingredient list is short, so it's easy to make -- just saute some chicken pieces, onion and garlic, add dried oregano, cumin, salt and pepper. Then simmer it all with canned tomato sauce and chipotle peppers. You do have to shred the cooked chicken at the end, but it's now tender and simple to separate.

This braised poultry dish is perfect on a warm corn tortilla or wrapped in a flour tortilla, with a little fresh chopped onion, cilantro, a slice of avocado, and topped with some shredded or crumbled cheese.

My Chicken Tinga recipe makes enough to feed the whole family, and more. It's easy to keep warm on the stove top for a taco party, too. Just lay out a tray of toppings and go to town chowing-down on all the deliciousness. Let your guest do the work, I mean, have all the fun, building their own tacos.

This Mexican-style stew is even better the next day, when all the spicy flavors have merged and mellowed - so, you can do all the cooking ahead of time. Chicken Tinga freezes well to pack it later for a few work lunches.

For my Chicken Tinga recipe I use a cheap 7.5 ounce can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. A warning though, this small can packs a lot of spicy heat, just dip your finger in the sauce and taste it for yourself. But, it's the kind of heat that lessens once you've eaten a couple of Chicken Tinga tacos and downed a frosty, salt-rimmed margarita.

Notice it's spelled "Chilpotle" on the can, but "chipotle" is commonly used.

You can cool down the heat by using half the sauce and chili peppers. And, if you think that's still too spicy, then leave out the can of chipotle peppers and adobo sauce, and use a small (14.5 ounce) can of plain enchilada or red chile sauce (similar flavors, with very little heat.) And go to the Hindsight section at the end of this post for all my mild versions.

Interestingly, most recipes I explored online call for boiling chicken breast separately,  then adding it to the tomato/chipotle sauce. Why not just add the raw chicken to the sauce and cook it; that way you retain the savory chicken stock. And, if you brown the chicken skin - why that's double the flavor. Well, that's the way I'm doing it. Just keeping it simply scrumptious.

You can make this recipe with more expensive white meat or use cheaper dark meat. Remove the skin if you want a low calorie stew.

Most poultry eaters fall into two camps, dark meat or white meat lovers. I like dark meat because there is more texture and taste variety. Leg meat has a flavorful knob of meat while thigh meat is a big juicy slab. And it's hard to overcook - while white meat is easy to dry out (except in this stew.) Although, I see why white meat is usually preferred for it's consistent texture and being lower in fat. Make my recipe with white or dark meat. Hey, go ahead and use both - can't we all get along?

So gather your family or favorite friends, and get to cooking my Mexican recipe of Chicken Tinga - it's always a fiesta in The 99 Cent Chef's cocina (kitchen.)

Chicken Tinga - VIDEO

Play it here, video runs 4 minutes, 23 seconds.

My YouTube video link for viewing or embedding, just click here.

Ingredients (enough for a party, at least 20-30 small tacos, or about 6 bowls as stew)

• 2-3 chicken leg quarters - That's 4-6 pieces of dark meat. You can use breast white meat, about 2-3 half breasts.
• 7.5 ounce can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce - I used the whole can, but you can remove seeds from chiles and use half of the sauce, for less spicy heat. Okay to substitute with enchilada or red chile sauce from a 14.5 ounce can (it's easy to find, and with no spicy heat.)
• 14.5 ounce can of tomatoes - diced, tomato sauce or even whole tomatoes. Just break up tomatoes as they soften from stewing.
• 1/2 onion - chopped
• 1 teaspoon garlic - chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon of dried oregano - or, one teaspoon of fresh oregano.
• 1/4 teaspoon of ground cumin - optional
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions
For dark meat with skin, saute in a large pan, skin side down, about 5-10 minutes over a medium/high heat. You want to brown the skin and get some charred bits as extra flavor.

Okay to remove skin for a lighter version. Use the same procedure for breast meat. No need to brown both sides of the chicken, or cook it all the way - you will simmer it later, until well done. (Of course, keep semi-raw poultry on a different plate from other ingredients to prevent cross-contamination.) And, if you are in a hurry, you can skip this browning chicken part.

While chicken browns, chop half an onion. When one side of chicken is brown, remove it and add the chopped onion. Stir onion and scrape loose the brown bits on the bottom of pan. Saute onion about 5 minutes until soft.

Add garlic and saute another minute. Now add spices and herbs.

Sprinkle in ground cumin, dried oregano, and salt and pepper to taste.

Pour in a can of chipotle peppers. For a less spicy version, add half of the liquid and peppers.

(To reduce spicy heat, substitute chipotle peppers in adobe sauce with a small 14.5 ounce can of enchilada or red chili sauce.) You can also only use tomato sauce with a tablespoon of dried chili.

Add a can of diced tomatoes or plain tomato sauce. Mix all the ingredients.

Finally add the browned chicken pieces. Bring up liquid to a low simmer. Cover the pot and cook about one hour, until chicken is cooked all the way through.

Click on any photo to see larger.

Remove chicken pieces from sauce and allow to cool for a few minutes. Slice into thickest part of chicken to make sure it's cooked all the way through. (This is a good time to break up tomatoes, if you used large pieces.)

Remove the skin and meat from the bone. You can discard the skin and bones, it was just for flavor and a little chicken fat. Shred chicken pieces and mix the meat into sauce.

While meat heats up get all the taco ingredients ready. Heat up some corn tortillas. I like to top my tacos with fresh chopped onion and cilantro. Other toppings include - tomato, lettuce, avocado, cheese, and a squeeze of lime.

Chicken Tinga also goes with white and brown steamed rice, or your favorite grain or carb. (I have a Mexican Rice recipe here.) You can also make a Chicken Tinga Bowl with pinto beans (recipe here, or used canned) and rice, for extra heft. Make a Chicken Tinga Burrito, with your favorite fillings. Or leave out the carbs and just top a bowl of Chicken Tinga stew with fresh chopped onion, cilantro, a slice of avocado, and a squeeze of lime.

Hindsight
My Chicken Tinga recipe is easy to half. Use the same amount of tomato sauce and chipotle peppers, just add less chicken.  There is more sauce, but that's a good thing.

Use any cheap, tasty poultry parts you like: legs, thighs, or breast. It's all good. Remove skin for a low calorie stew.

I brown the chicken, but you can skip it and go right to cooking the chopped onion.

Substitute spicy chipolte peppers with enchilada sauce for a mild version.

For another simple non-spicy version just use canned tomato sauce and sprinkle on a tablespoon of red Chili Powder. Chili Powder is made from mild dried chilis. So you get the that deep chili flavor without the chipotle heat.

This recipe makes plenty of Chicken Tinga, but it freezes well. Freeze in a couple of batches for later use. I like to pack a few tortillas with chopped onion and cilantro for work lunches. The stew and tortillas heat well in a micowave.