Taco Rice Tortilla Pizza {Leftover} Pizza Night!

A easy and fast pizza for a family Pizza Night--combining leftover taco meat with vegetables and grains on a tortilla pizza covered with cheese. Simple. Frugal. Tasty.

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Let's change the way your family perceives leftovers.

While I am fortunate to have a family who not only eats leftovers but fights over them [perhaps that's just sibling rivalry?] I understand we're not necessarily the norm.

[warning, rant ahead--and not about corporate cranberries this time]

Why should you eat your leftovers? For starters, you paid for that food--why throw your money away? [Unless you like to throw money away, in which case I'll finally install that DONATE button the spam commenters are always telling me to install--not that giving me money via the blog would be throwing it away--in fact it would result in an improved recipe index].

Even if you buy every morsel of your food at a big box store, someone worked--hard--to grow/harvest/process** that food, and throwing it away devalues that work.  If you're throwing away edible animal products then the life of that animal is also devalued.

**Processed food:  to me, most of the food I eat has been processed.  Wheat is ground into flour, milk is cultured into cheese and yogurt, and of course my burgers didn't walk out of the field, into town, and hop up onto my grill [they didn't call the class Meat Processing for nothing].  People worked to alter the food before I chose it.

Not to get even more preachy, but unless you're composting all of your food waste, the decision not to use your leftovers is bad for our planet.  I know the raccoons enjoy anything edible in my trash, but it's not a sustainable long term solution.

To me, if the initial food tasted good then the leftovers of that food should also be good [something like french fries, nachos, Banh Mi or Po' boy sandwiches, or tempura would be among the exceptions to this rule]. By this reasoning, since you're starting with good food you just need to change up the accessories a bit.

Good grief I am not giving fashion advice!  I buy my clothes at the thrift shop where I work. I'm just referencing The Uniform Project where a gal wore the same Little Black Dress every day for a year, changing up the accessories each day, to raise money for kids to go to school. You can find the year-in-video here--check it out, it's pretty awesome.

I've had good success with this accessories concept, and here's one way I'd like to share:  taco meat.  When I make a batch of taco meat, my recipe is here, my family of four (two teens) doesn't eat it all.  I'll take that leftover meat and combine it with a grain (such as farro or rice) and additional vegetables, and make a meal out of that (my recipe is here).

But we don't eat all of the next meal--there are leftovers of the leftovers.  So for a Friday Night {Leftover} Pizza Night may I present an easy, fast, simple Taco Rice Tortilla Pizza. After the complicated "pick violets, make wild syrup and wild violet sugar, then make muffins" from earlier this week it's time to kick back, enjoy a Cheater Margarita Smoothie, and have a fast easy dinner.


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Cheater Margarita Smoothies

DIY restaurant style fruit margaritas at home--simply blend your fruit with a prepared margarita mix and ice. And for the kids--blend limeade with fruit and ice for a nonalcoholic smoothie

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Recipe testing for this post has been so. much. fun!  It's my first beverage post, and I started off with a bang, seeing as this is also an alcoholic beverage as well as two recipes in one post.  I'm not going to start any cocktail post trends--Friday pizza and Monday muffins are enough for me--though I do have a lovely winter chai apple blend to share when the weather warrants it, and perhaps a summer ice tea concoction . . . but first--the Cheater Margarita Smoothie. It's too easy and too tasty not to share, and if you've got any lingering fruit in your freezer this will make quick work of it, enabling me you to empty and defrost the freezer before the new Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share season begins.

I was wondering why it is that I just don't mix cocktails at home, and I've come to the conclusion that it's because I have spent a good portion of my adulthood in states that don't sell hard liquor everywhere.  In Virginia, for example, you need to go to ABC stores (run by the state Department of Alcohol Beverage Control) in order to purchase anything stronger than beer or wine.  [In Hawaii the ABC store is where you get sunscreen and a can of macadamia nuts before heading to the beach.]  Ditto living on a military base, but it's called a Class Six store.  [I have no idea what classes one through five are.]

Since I'm not used to having bottles of spirits around and mixing and measuring, I gravitate to the premixed bottle of margarita stuff.  I can't enter into a debate about the merits of this or that tequila because I just don't know enough about them.  I just know I like the frozen slushy fruit margaritas at restaurants.

During the winter I spent some time in Florida watching my son march with his high school marching band in Disney and sharing HashtagOrangeWeek here.  Our last night there, my daughter and I were too pooped to venture past the TGIFridays in the hotel lobby for our dinner.  Conveniently, it was Ladies Night, and when I ordered the strawberry margarita the server brought two!  Score! Finally I slept well in a hotel room!

with an Easy Cheesy Vegetable Enchilada bake

The recipe I'm sharing is terrific for a family Cinco de Mayo celebration.  Start by making a pitcher of limeade-based fruit smoothies for the kids, then make a pitcher of margarita-based fruit smoothies for the grown ups.  Everyone gets a fruity drink which makes them happy.


I've made this with blueberries, with blueberries and raspberries, with strawberries, with bananas, blueberries and raspberries, and with peaches.  [Told you recipe testing was fun.] So far my favorite is the mixed fruit with banana--the addition of banana adds a nice creaminess to the base much like it, or yogurt, can do for a standard smoothie.

One note--Kate over at Diethood asks the hard questions to find out what we all wanted to know: 

how do you get the margarita salt to stick on the rim of the glass? The answer will surprise you.

Creamy Avocado, Bell Pepper and Hatch Chile Enchiladas

A rich vegetarian dish, these avocado, bell pepper, and caramelized onion enchiladas are spiced with roasted Hatch chiles and covered in plenty of cheese.

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My New Years Resolution to add more avocados to my life continues.  [Ya think, since I've posted 2 avocado appetizers in the past month or so?] Since we like enchiladas I wondered about using avocado as the filling for a vegetarian dish.  Low fat or skinny this is not--it is rich!  Instead of a tomato-based enchilada sauce like I've used most recently in Confetti Turkey Enchiladas, or a tomatillo-based salsa verde, like in my Fish Taco Enchiladas, I made a spicy white sauce with Hatch chiles. 

Simon and I walked down to fetch freshly roasted Hatch chiles last summer.

In this dish I used bell peppers from my Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share plus roasted Hatch chiles from my local grocery store.  Both of these peppers can be frozen when they are harvested and thawed for using in baked dishes like I've shown here.  It's another way I feed my family local foods all year long. The caramelized onions are also freezer-friendly flavor boosters. I use both Dorothy's Slow Cooker Method or Alanna's Flavorful Slow Cooker Onions.

This is an involved dish, with multiple steps, so I'll skip any further chitchat and get to the chopper recipe.

Wait--one note--next week I'll share my recipe for the Cheater Margarita Smoothies shown in several of the photos. I rarely suggest wine pairings with my recipes, but I can say with confidence that a Cheater Margarita Smoothie--or two--goes well with these enchiladas.

Another note--if you want to boost the structure of these enchiladas, feel free to add 1 or 2 cups of cooked grains (rice, faro, quinoa, etc) to the vegetable filling. We ate ours with rice on the side.

For more enchilada ideas, vegetarian or with fish, chicken, or pork--hey, no beef, yet, huh--please enjoy my newest Clickable Collage of Recipe Suggestions below.  As always, Anyonita taught me this party trick via this tutorial.

Click on the top 6 photos to be taken to the recipe, the bottom row are "coming soon"!