{"id":640,"date":"2013-12-03T22:55:43","date_gmt":"2013-12-04T06:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/?p=640"},"modified":"2013-12-03T22:55:43","modified_gmt":"2013-12-04T06:55:43","slug":"smitten-kitchen-cookbook-adventures-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/03\/smitten-kitchen-cookbook-adventures-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"Smitten Kitchen cookbook adventures: redux"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(It&#8217;s been a while since I posted, though I&#8217;ve kept cooking, delightedly, out of the SK cookbook. But these I couldn&#8217;t resist.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Spaghetti squash and black bean tacos with queso fresco<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Y&#8217;all, if squash tacos are wrong, I don&#8217;t want to be right.<\/p>\n<p>I used to be a taco purist. I was raised in New Mexico, which like most US-Mexico border states has its own sub-type of Mexican cuisine, and things other than meat or maybe beans, and some sort of melty cheese, don&#8217;t enter into the taco equation. Fish tacos? No. That is crazy talk. California crazy talk.<\/p>\n<p>Even when I started cooking vegetarian tacos, I wanted a mixture that at least looked as much like beef as possible, which is why I like using <a href=\"http:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/food\/recipes\/lentil-tacos\/\">black lentils in my lentil tacos<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t until I moved to San Francisco and then Portland that I <del>became corrupted<\/del> had my horizons expanded and started eating crazy things like tofu tacos and soy curl tacos. Still, these things attempt to appear like meat. They&#8217;re seasoned. They&#8217;re meat substitutes. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.yelp.com\/biz\/robo-taco-portland\">Robo Taco<\/a> even calls theirs a vegan al pastor, and al pastor is pretty much the most non-vegetarian thing there is.<\/p>\n<p>But then I had potato tacos. Potato? In a taco? And then I went to Austin, where breakfast tacos are a thing (a thing I was and am slightly obsessed with, although for some strange reason I did a terrible job of documenting this obsession), and I had awesome, weird tacos of various sorts.<\/p>\n<p>And then I saw this recipe, and I was hungry for something with squash, and I love squash with black beans (okay, so I have made squash empanadas before, but those aren&#8217;t tacos! really they aren&#8217;t!) it looked super duper easy to make for lunch tomorrow. And it is. And then I couldn&#8217;t resist trying one and I ate it right up without bothering with a plate.<\/p>\n<p>So I might be wrong. But I&#8217;m happy there, in Wrong Land. Please don&#8217;t come and get me.<\/p>\n<p>In all seriousness, this is an easy recipe and SO GOOD. I skipped out on the cilantro garnish (it&#8217;s the middle of winter, there&#8217;s no good-looking cilantro around) and chose scallions instead (it&#8217;s a double dose of onion, but it works). I used taco seasoning I had on hand instead of adding cumin and coriander to chile powder. I did use canned beans, but this recipe would, I am 99% certain, be about ten times more awesome if only I had access to leftover SK <a href=\"http:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/2012\/11\/25\/smitten-kitchen-cookbook-adventures-4\/\">black bean ragout<\/a>. So you should do that. And I got feta, which is a suggested substitution. No queso fresco at Whole Foods, not a huge surprise. It takes these even a bit farther from the taco classic, but we&#8217;re already out here in Wrong Land, so don&#8217;t worry, buy some feta. Or goat cheese. Something crumbly and white. And then put some Aardvark on it, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.portlandmercury.com\/portland\/spice-world\/Content?oid=11108486\">like you do<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(It&#8217;s been a while since I posted, though I&#8217;ve kept cooking, delightedly, out of the SK cookbook. But these I couldn&#8217;t resist.) Spaghetti squash and black bean tacos with queso fresco Y&#8217;all, if squash tacos are wrong, I don&#8217;t want to be right. I used to be a taco purist. I was raised in New [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":641,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions\/641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}