One day, Rebecca and I will be ‘retired’ and on a beach in Maui.  We’ll own a small taco restuarant on par with the likes of Maui Tacos and Surf Taco.  We’ll grow our own avocados (uhh I paid 2 bucks for 1 avocado tonight; something is not right!) and continually make fresh guacamole.  We’ll serve all types of tacos, burritos and the like.  Heck, we’ll probably even open up a road side stand on the Hana Highway where we’ll sell fresh banana bread.  One can dream, right?

How do I do that by 30?

We played the “what do you want for dinner? … I don’t know, what do you want? … I don’t care, what are you in the mood for?” game tonight.  We settled with doing some kind of fajitas.  Typically when we’ve previously made vegetable fajitas, the veggies were bland — maybe only a sprinkle of cumin and cayenne pepper.  So we both agreed that these veggies tonight had to have some kind of flavor.  We briefly talked about using the packet fajita seasoning, but we both shrugged it off.  Rebecca had the vegetable fajitas at Jose Tejas the other night and loved them, so she set off to find a recipe.

And sure enough a few seconds later, she found one and emailed me so I could pick up the ingredients.  We settled on some peppers, onions, carrots, mushrooms and broccoli.  These veggies would be cooked in the marinade provided by the Allrecipes.com recipe (btw, how come all recipe sites are horrible?). The marinade was pretty easy.  I just combined the following ingredients.

• 1/4 cup fresh lime juice
• 1/3 cup water
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2 teaspoons soy sauce
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon liquid smoke flavoring
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

I let the veggies soak in the marinade a bit before I cooked them in a wok.  I especially wanted the mushrooms to soak in the marinade knowing they would pick up, and hold, all the good flavors.

The broccoli and carrots were cooked for about 10 minutes first since they were the thickest and would need the most cooking time.

Once cooked, I added the remaining vegetables and cooked for another 10-15 minutes or so in the wok — constantly stirring.

And after spilling a glass of water ALL OVER THE PLACE, we finally sat down to relax and eat our fajitas.  And then Macky started SCREAMING for our attention.  It’s never ending here at our house with our three needy, yet very lovable, cats.  And to think, we almost adopted a little girl today too!

Oh!  And I cannot forget about the fresh guacamole!  3 avocados (at 2 bucks each!  2 bucks!  each!), some diced onion, diced tomato, a squeeze of fresh lime juice, salt+pepper, and some cilantro!  So good!

As usual, we’re linking this up to What I Ate Wednesday at Peas & Crayons!

It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time for our fifth installment of What We Ate Wednesday for Jenn’s link party over at Peas and Crayons! So far we’ve had mushroom risotto stuffed peppers, blackened mahi-mahi, beans & macaroni and homemade pizza. We’ve made a lot of delicious meals since last week, but then we got preoccupied with painting our office stripes and ran out of food. For two days, we’ve been eating Froot Loops (<3) and frozen pizza, thinking this week’s meal wouldn’t happen. But thankfully Mike picked up some basics on his way home from work and we were able to whip up one of our go-to meals just before Wednesday was over!

This one is simple, black bean tacos.

Ingredients:

Can of black beans (we like Goya)

Taco shells (stand n’ stuff will make your life easier!)

Lettuce

Tomatoes

Cheese

Guacamole!

Sour Cream  (which I didn’t take a picture of)

Sometimes we throw in extras like rice, peppers and onions or some fish.

The great thing about this meal? The only cooking required is to heat up the beans and the shells!

I have always loved tacos, Mike not so much, but I really really love black bean tacos and so does he. The beans fill you up, add a lot of flavor and they’re good for you! I don’t miss the greasy orange stuff that always dripped out of the chop meat version you make with the seasoning packets. We originally got this idea after eating at Moe’s shortly after giving up meat and ordering the unanimous decision tacos. If you’ve never been to Moe’s, you must go. Though we have an ongoing debate around here about whether or not Chipotle is better…I will not reveal which side I am on, but I will say that I am in love with both!

I just realized I didn’t take a picture of my assembled taco, but head on over to Jenn’s for some more recipes (complete with pictures! :))