bowl food

bowl food, noun.  1. a meal most entirely eaten from a bowl or bowls 2. second only to basket food on the "Lukas list of great dinner foods"

When we have hamburgers I'm always at a loss with what to do with the extra hamburger meat.  Since there's just two of us and one package of meat usually makes 4 patties either we have leftovers or ...  

Then came the brilliant idea of taco salad.  I thought about how this was going to work for several days - worried that it would be too dry, the lettuce would get all wilt-y.  Just in the end I just jumped in and did it.  They turned out so yummy and it was so simple.

First I got the rice cooking.  For the rice, I heated it in a bit of olive oil just till it got a bit toasty.  Then added water (2 cups to 1 cup rice), about 4 cloves chopped garlic, and roughly 3 tsp. Caldo de Tomate.  {I use a teaspoon to add the Caldo de Tomate, but I am totally imprecise with my measurements.}  This cooks for about 20min covered, turned down to simmer the water away.  

While this is going, I chopped up half an onion and threw it in a skillet with a bit of cooking spray just to keep it from sticking.  Next I added the hamburger meat and just let this cook really good.  I've been using home-made taco seasoning lately - cheaper and no yucky preservatives.  Plus, I can use however much I want and am not left with half open packets.  {I didn't quite have all the ingredients this recipe calls for, but I didn't stress that small issue.}  Once the meat was mostly cooked I added the seasoning - to taste.  

To build the best taco salad... I chopped up Romaine lettuce by this "fancy" method.  {ps. it works really well!}  I added everything in layers from bottom to top - rice, taco meat, lettuce, and tomatoes.  I must recommend fore going the fork and eating this with a tortilla chip.  Simple, yummy - a great weekday meal!

{Please ignore the fact that the picture shows the taco salad on a plate.  Bowl food does not photograph well so I did this up on a plate.  It's just for the picture though so please, eat this in a bowl!}