One of my New Years resolutions is to cook more often. While I eat and taste food a lot, I realized that I don’t exactly cook that often. Since this was one of my dad’s resolutions as well, we try to pick at least one day out of every week to make a meal for everyone.

Remember how I was telling you in the last post that I had a lot of great food experiences while I was in LA over the holidays? Well, my dad and I got inspiration for our first meal from a new food that we discovered, the Mendocino Farms Taco Salad!

A taco salad is literally the inside of a crunchy taco thrown into a salad with other tasty toppings. I wasn’t so sure about trying it at first, but the Mendocino Farms variant that I ordered in LA was absolutely delicious! Their take on the traditional taco salad had interesting twists such as taco powder on top, a healthy kale mixture, and the amazing impossible meat (vegetarian based meat that still tastes just as good)! There was a perfect ratio of lettuce to toppings, so I felt like I was eating some “taco” in each bite. The Thousand Island dressing pulled everything together, and I cannot think of a better garnish.

So, one Saturday morning when we decided to make lunch, we new exactly what to make. Our idea was to make the basic taco salad and then add some of our favorite toppings. For example, as a replacement for croutons, we used crumbled cool ranch Doritos, which went well with the “taco” theme. We really wanted to try the impossible meat, but Safeway had ran out of it, so ended up cooking ground beef and bison meat (it was actually very good). All in all, the cooking went really well. My dad and I prepared everything pretty quickly, and for the most part we knew what we were doing. It tasted very fresh and homemade. Maybe this is just some random feeling, but for me, food always tastes better when you make it.

In the end, our lunch had good review from everyone (8 people), so that meant good for the start of our 2019 cooking year. At first I thought that cooking a whole meal was going to be either tiring or boring, but it turned out to be very fun, especially when I was taking on the taco salad.