Mexican Tacos Recipe (With Video)

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re going to make tacos which are a very fun dinner to make for friends, for family, however you want to do it.

Basically you start with the base and you can do whatever you want with tacos so I’m gonna give you a few little tips here but go nuts, poke whatever you like on there.

When I was little we use to have tacos and the favorite part for me about eating tacos was watching my brother it them because he would get so much stuff on to his tacos and he would use the crunchy shell ones that he couldn’t even eat it without falling apart so he would get it in this like vice grip like this and he would eat and he wouldn’t even take the taco away from his mouth to chew, he would just be there and eat like juice running down his arms, it’s fantastic!

Now when I was in high school I took Spanish classes and we did an exchange trip to Mexico and that was the first time that I had soft tacos which I found amazing! So that’s what we are going to do tonight and what I use are just sprouted wheat tortillas because I like this one, they’re a little bit bigger than an actual taco shell but I like this brand because they use sprouted grains but do whatever you like and making your own is excellent as well.

So if you like to do that you can try those, now with the starch with the filling I’m using some black beans that I’ve got the mall cooked and ready to go here. You can either cook them yourself, they need to be soaked and then cooked for about an hour and a half or you can buy canned which is fine as well.

So put these into a bowl, what I’m going to do is basically just put some seasonings on these beans and let them sit to marinate because the beans themselves don’t have much flavour so you need to get it right in there.

Alright! So what we’re gonna add here is some paprika and now I like to do the individual spices but if you don’t want to you can just use a chilli powder on these beans rather than all the individual spices that I’m doing here.

Got a little bit of cumin and as always do these spices in whatever proportions you like so if you’re not a big fan of cumin you don’t have to put so much in. I’ve got some dried oregano and whenever you use dried herbs you want to pinch them between your fingers as you put them in there to release their flavors because they do gets kind of stale just sitting dried.

Ok! Some onion powder which tends to get a bit clumpy from where I get it because it’s really fresh and that you don’t need to use, if you can’t find some good onion powder I will probably not use it, I would probably just do some onions or just leave it out.

And a little bit of cayenne pepper, its tacos. We’ll get a little spicy here. Alright! And you do need a little bit of salt because hopefully if you cook the beans yourself there won’t be any salt in them right? Because if you cook with salt the beans will not soften up or their outer skin will be a little bit tough.

And hopefully if you have canned beans, they are not cooked with salt either for the same reason. So stir that around, and what I’m gonna do is add just a touch of olive oil just to give some moisture here, that was like half a teaspoon.

Ok! Once you get that stirred up you can just set it aside, we’ll finish that off in a minute. Now, what were gonna do next is make some mango salsa which I’m very excited about so then you take these guys and you wanna slice but you don’t want to go through the skin, you wanna go just to the skin.

And you can kind of feel it if you have your fingers on the back of the mango so we’re gonna cut it like that and then cross ways to get it diced and then it should pop up like that, isn’t that cool? I love this and then you just cut the little bits of mango off of here.

So mango and onion are in the bowl and what I’m putting in here instead of a tomato which is what you would normally use in a salsa, I’m trying to figure out if I’m allergic to something and tomatoes are actually are a very common allergen which I just learned about.

So I’m putting cucumber in my salsa instead of tomato for those of you who are screaming at me right now salsa actually in Spanish the word means sauce so it doesn’t need to have tomato in it and I kinda like the color, it looks kinda nice.

So stir that up, as always the cucumber is getting on the floor. Now I use sweet onions in this salsa because I don’t like the flavor of raw white or red onion but use whatever you like.

Ok! then I’m going to add some – this is actually flat leaf parsley, cilantro is what’s in the recipe for those of you who can enjoy it, I’ve been doing a lot of cilantro lately and I don’t actually like cilantro so I’m gonna take a break, a little excited there.

As you can see I do make substitution, I rarely follow a recipe even my own so part of the fun of cooking is to get creative so go for it. Do whatever you like so I’m gonna get that parsley in there.

And the zest of this lime, I’m gonna use the lime slices to squeeze over my tacos but I’m going to zest this first because I just love zest and just squeeze the lime over your salsa. Hopefully not in your eye, I just had a rogue squirt go right over that way it happens sometimes, in the eye not so fun. Oh! That was getting close, it went right here!

Oh yes! Squeeze that all out and these really tiny lime they’re usually dense which means they’re really really flavorful but they really need to be squeeze because they’re just really full of juice and not as much water often when you see bigger limes they might be bigger but they’re bigger with a bunch of water so they don’t actually add more flavor they just add more water. They’re a little bit easier to squeeze but that’s about it.

Alright! Stir that up there, sprinkle a bit of salt, stir that through. That will just bring the flavors out of the mango, out of the cucumber, out of the onion, out of the parsley or cilantro, whatever you’re using.

Ok! I think we’re ready to go; now all you need to do is chopped up some toppings. I’m just gonna use some lettuce and some sprouts and get your tortillas ready so what I like to do with this is just put them on the toaster oven for a couple of minutes.

It soften them up but you don’t want to leave them in there too long or else they’re gonna get crispy which maybe you like crunch taco you can do that. I don’t know if you could get some kind of form going, put them in the oven and actually make them crunchy, I don’t know. If you’re really hardcore about your crunchy tacos you can try it.

So when you’re ready to go you’ll just spoon some beans onto your taco shell, some mango salsa, add some lettuce, some sprouts if you like and the final excellent Mexican touch a squirt of lemon, I mean lime. I’m losing my mind!

There we go! You can find the recipe for this at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.