I have always lived on the West Coast (the right coast). I spent several formative years in Southern California, and where I consider home has a high percentage of Hispanic population, therefore, I consider myself fairly knowledgeable regarding Mexican food. Right or wrong, but I do. Tamales might just be my favorite food item. Okay, so the point here is that I like Mexican food and I have a decent knowledge of cooking Mexican food. I may not cook like an authentic Mexican cook, but I have things that I make decently, and I have things that I make like a gringo cooking Mexican food.
Fast forward to now. Ireland. Great place and I love being here. But we are in a Mexican food desert. I see that there is a Mexican restaurant in Killarney and we are going there this weekend, but I am afraid to try it. This is why:
We decided one day that we would have chicken taco salad for dinner. This is normally a very simple endeavor. This time it proved to not be so simple. The taco seasoning available (I chose to go with a packet rather than having to buy all of the spices required to make home made) was strangely sweet and odd tasting. I grew up on Lawry’s taco seasoning and it is still the one that tastes “right” to me. The option currently available to me was no where near right. I like refried beans on my salad and I was pleased to see that Tesco had some under their label. Ugh. They tasted rather like taking baked beans and mashing them up. Thus far I have not found pinto beans (or black beans) to make my own refried beans. Making pico de gallo went all right until I tried to find a jalapeno. I knew I had seen some fresh ones at some point, but none were in the stores now. I did find fresh cilantro (coriander here) though! All in all it was a failed experiment.
There are a couple of bright points: produce here is wonderful. Especially when the produce stand sets up on Thursday mornings and is available through Saturday. Cheap and yummy. Also, Irish chicken (or beef, or pork) is crazy good. The labels tell you exactly what farm the meat came from!
The taco seasoning issue will be solved when the daughter arrives in early July. She’s bringing Lawry’s packets with her 🤩
Oops, you mean I’m not supposed to use those packets for my own tacos? Guess you’ll have to suffer a little longer 😉