taco torte

the taco torte

I have forever seen recipes on TV and around the web for something called Mexican Lasagna, a giant layered casserole that contains pretty much everything we love and cannot get enough of — tortillas, beans, salsa, cheese and then some — but couldn’t bring myself to make one because I make bad decisions based on trivial things, such as the name, which made me cringe (must we blame the people of Naples or Mexico for the unholy ways we Frankenstein their cuisine?) and the fact that I hadn’t exactly run out of excuses to eat tortillas, beans, salsa and cheese yet and thus didn’t need to enlist another one. Don’t worry, Deb is going to see the error of her ways in the next paragraph.

prepped out
two-tone beans

Sometime in the hazy weeks after bringing this bunny home from the hospital, I spied a version of the dish in Katie Workman’s Mom 100 Cookbook that stopped me in my tracks for all the reasons any recipe ever does: I was so hungry, and it was so pretty. Regardless, I then looked for excuses not to make it, first arguing to no one in particular that there was no way was it nutritional enough to pass off as dinner, only to realize it contains nearly 4 cups of beans and 6 of vegetables. I then decided that there’s no way you could fit all that in one little cake and did that charming thing I do when I cook but I’m too tired to cook where I point out all the ways it couldn’t possibly work and was definitely going to flop and instead, what went into the oven was an exactly perfect-as-written and what came out looked exactly like the photo and tasted even better than I could have dreamed.

corn and spinach

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