Desperation Tacos
When Your Ground Beef Goes Bad…
There’s nothing worse in the field of cooking than the feeling you get when you assemble your ingredients for a dish, only to discover that the main ingredient has spoiled.
In this case, it was the ground beef that had gone bad. Tacos were the menu item for the day and I had a roll of ground beef in the fridge. I also had a boxed taco kit just to provide the soft tacos and the taco/cheese seasoning packs. The beef was only about two days old and I didn’t think much of it until I made my first cut into the package. Once I’d sliced it open, I was left in very little doubt about the state of the meat. It smelled horrible. There really is no adequate way to describe rotting meat. It’s one of the most putrid smells on the planet.
The taco kit I bought for the occasion.
Disappointed, I pitched the bad meat and went to the freezer instead. I knew there was a pack of ground turkey in there and I figured I’d use that instead. It was a solid block of ice when I pulled it out, so into the microwave it went to defrost. But after about three minutes of defrosting I knew something was terribly wrong with that too. The ground turkey was slowly turning into a slimy gray goo. I’m still not sure if it was freezer burn or something else, but it did not look or feel appetizing at all.
So in desperation, I pitched the turkey and looked around for something else to use for the protein filling for our tacos, and I came upon two different items in the fridge: a half-pack of imitation crabmeat and a full pack of tempeh. For those who don’t know what tempeh is, it’s basically soybeans that are cooked and then compressed into a loaf that you can cut up and fry. It may sound a little weird but it is really good when done right.
Crabmeat on left, chopped tempeh on the right. When cooked, it turns a glorious golden brown.
Willing to try anything at this point, I got both out. It would be an experiment, but hey, sometimes you just have to trust in an experiment. I chopped the tempeh first and started it cooking with olive oil in a cast iron skillet because tempeh is so dense that it takes a while to cook. Then I diced the crabmeat and added it once the tempeh had cooked for about 10-15 minutes.
After crabmeat and tempeh had cooked together for another 5 minutes or so, I added a small chopped white onion. Once the onion had caramelized a bit, I mixed the taco seasoning with water per the directions and poured it into the skillet. I let the whole thing come to a simmer/boil before turning the heat down and letting the seasoning/water mix cook down a bit. In retrospect, the amount of protein I was cooking was a bit too much for the one bag of taco seasoning I had on hand, but this was an experiment and I was making do with what I had.
The completed taco filling. More taco seasoning would have been nice, but I had only one bag.
The finished mixture tasted surprisingly good. The tempeh gave it a nutty flavor, and the crabmeat added some fleshiness to the taste. We put the mix on soft taco shells and added shredded cheddar cheese and sour cream on top. Overall, I think it was a win.
