Seared Scallop

Here on Tee's Taqueria, I welcome all kinds of tacos. From your traditional pork carnitas to "I've never cooked this before, let's see what happens" duck, I'm all about cooking with new and exciting fillings. So when a friend of mine came to visit me in Halifax, she requested something a little East Coast-y. And since I was too afraid to cook a lobster in my tiny apartment (what if he escaped and started living under my bed and using my Netflix subscription?), the obvious choice was fresh Digby scallops.

Now I really don't know how easy or difficult it is to find these guys outside of Nova Scotia. They're a staple of our grocery stores and roadside stands, so my cooking instructions are catered to fresh scallops rather than frozen. But a little Google-fu will surely teach you how to get frozen scallops prepped for this delicious taco treat.

Filipino Chicken Adobo

Things that I have: a job with long hours and a passion for travel. Things that I don't have: the money to make all my wildest travel dreams come true. Pardon my tiny violin, but I just wanted to illustrate how I often use this blog as a means of "traveling" - without all that pesky cost that's associated with real traveling.

I like to make international foods I've never tried before, so when I came across a recipe for Filipino Chicken Adobo I was intrigued. Way back in the day my father worked on a cruise ship and many of his coworkers were Filipino - but I never got the chance to sample their wares. And boy, what a missed opportunity that was. This chicken is flipping delicious - tangy, peppery, loaded with flavour and easy above all! The Philippines is now on my travel radar. 

Pineapple Salsa

This week, I had a bit of a conundrum. I made a crazy delicious, crazy easy taco - but a key component was pineapple salsa. Confession: I'm not a huge fan of the texture of pineapple. It's stringy and crunchy, but also gooey and slippery. It's like, make up your mind pineapple, am I right? As such, I didn't feel like making a salsa with chunks of pineapple in it.

Instead, I created a blended pineapple salsa that turned out pretty great if I do say so myself. So great, in fact, that I felt it deserved its own post. So I must beg your indulgence, all two dear readers - make this salsa now and get it ready to throw on the taco I've got coming your way next week.

Steak Arrachera

On today's episode of Learning By Doing, I'm going to teach you a little bit about how to make a tough steak into a melt in your mouth taco. Now, if you're a real cook who doesn't get their basic food prep instructions from the Food Network you might already know this. But for the rest of us, I've got a few tips to keep in mind when you want to prepare a cut of beef like the flank steak. 

Now, this recipe is pretty basic. It's just a classic technique for preparing a flank or skirt steak for maximum taco enjoyment - I've seen it called Tacos Nortenos (Northern Tacos) but it seems to be more commonly know as Arrachera. 

The key here is to not Charlie Chaplin it and end up eating shoe leather. It's super important to a) tenderize the steak, b) marinate it in something acidic and c) keep it nice and medium rare. Once it's all cooked and chopped, you can serve it with basically anything you want - salsa, cheese, guacamole, a marathon of Breaking Bad. The sky's the limit!

Doro Wat

I'm going to keep my little intro here short and sweet - because this recipe is neither of those things. I had a craving for Ethiopian food, so I set about making the delicious Doro Wat - a kind of curry + stew, + delicious dish. Then I thought - this has all the makings of a taco. So rather than creating giant injera (crepe-like bread that you pull apart to use as a "utensil"), I made smaller taco-size bread and complimented it with some vegetable toppings. So it looks like a taco, tastes like Ethiopian and is literally the tastiest thing I have EVER made. No joke. You gotta make this now, it's worth the time investment.