"Tex-Mex"

This has been my most delicious week of blog-based cooking so far. I called it Mexican food for shorthand, but some Google searches inform me that most of these dishes originated in the United States as the Americans appropriated Mexican cuisine, so I thought I'd take a stab at being politically correct and call it "Tex-Mex", with quotation marks to cover me in case I go off on my own tangent.

Everything's so warm and full of flavour that I could eat it right through winter. On a side note, most of these seasonings I didn't conjure from scratch; they came in nice Old El Paso or Santa Maria packets, and in my personal opinion tasted just as good (and probably better) than mixing flavours together bit by bit.

Enjoy: go forth and eat.

Chilli

I used dried Tesco mince to replace the meat as well as a can of mixed beans, since, well, I prefer beans over fake meat. Green peppers and diced onion bulk it up, and a can of chopped tomatoes bring it all together. I also gave brown rice another try, and it wasn't too bad. Roasted a cob of corn with it, smothered in FryLite butter spray, because side dishes make food look like meals, I guess. This was my first meal of the week, so I experimented with seasoning it: stock cube, pinch of salt, dash of black pepper, cayenne and chili powder, and some turmeric because it smelt nice.

Tacos

I made these for a friend visiting from Leeds, and they tasted so delicious I didn't want to stop eating them. I used an Old El Paso taco kit (shells, seasoning, salsa) and we got through all ten shells, plus salad -- but with calorie-free dressing, since we're health-conscious like that ... 

Set pinto beans to simmer with red onion chunks and chopped tomatoes, and garnish with a homemade salad of lettuce, cherry tomatoes and white onion. Get messy!

Enchiladas

These look so enticing I want to eat them all over again. Fried up red peppers, mushrooms, white onion, and kidney beans with a Santa Maria seasoning packet and some chopped tomatoes so it wasn't too dry, before wrapping in (wholeweat!) tortillas and covered with passata. I sprinkled the last of the seasoning on top and baked for about half an hour, during which time I chopped up lettuce, cucumber and red onion for a pretty side-salad.

Fajitas

These seemed kind of dry without the chopped tomatoes or passata; maybe next time I'll try breadcrumbs so that the crunch compensates for the dryness, making it a more deliberate texture. Fried yellow pepper, mushroom slices, onion rings, and some spinach in Santa Maria fajita seasoning before wrapping them up, but the real triumph was the home-made chips you see nestled so cutely on the plate. Boiled a potato and sliced it up; then I covered them with the leftover seasoning mix and FryLite spray and popped them in the over, turning and spraying/seasoning after about fifteen minutes. They were lush.

Mexican Spicy Bean Burger and Golden Vegetable Rice

I'm including this not because it's any great culinary achievement, but because the burger was described as "Mexican," it tasted pretty good, and cooking doesn't have to be labour intensive. The burger came from Tesco at a decent price (can't remember how much, but they also had a deal on if you bought two packs with four in each box) and was flung haphazardly into the oven while a packet of rice, pre-flavoured and already packaged with bits of veg, came to the boil and then simmered for a bit. I mean, you don't really even have to know how to cook. 

Mexico City

Named after the most populated city in Mexico, this is one huge bowl of leftovers. There's pepper, sweetcorn, chopped tomatoes, red and white onions, mushrooms, spinach, and passata. And then I had three tortilla wraps left, so they became part of it, too. Plus anything left over from the seasoning packets. It tasted AMAZING.

That was a good week for food, I'm telling you guys. While the Old El Paso kits probably don't work out as good value for money (you can buy tortilla wraps for 50p and seasoning packets for a pound -- supermarkets also do their own salsa) the ready-made flavouring packets are the bomb and you need to have them in your life.