Sep. 17: Caliente!

My tip of the day: If you aren’t someone who regularly posts recipes to your blog, don’t enter a blog challenge with a friend whose blog is MOSTLY recipes. You will regret it every time you look at the day’s topic and say to yourself ARE YOU KIDDING ME ANOTHER RECIPE I DON’T MAKE ENOUGH NEW STUFF TO DO THIS IMMA KILL HER.

And the month isn’t over! There’s another recipe day next week. Ugh. Here we go.

Today’s the 17th day of our September Blog Challenge and that means you get another recipe! Aren’t you excited? Yaaaay.

This is the recipe we use for homemade taco/chili seasoning. The packeted stuff is full of preservatives and things with many syllables, and we found that the homemade is tastier, less expensive, and, well, it’s pretty much just spices. That’s good. Of course, I prefer to cook with fresh ingredients when I can—garlic and onion, especially—but this works in a pinch.

Taco/Chili Seasoning

• 1 Tbsp. chili powder
• 1 tsp. sea salt
• 1 tsp. ground cumin
• ½ tsp. garlic powder
• ½ tsp. black pepper
• ½ tsp. dried minced onion
• ¼ tsp. paprika
• ¼ tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
• ¼ tsp. dried oregano

Put all ingredients in a glass jar, make sure the lid is on tight, and give it a good shake. It’ll look something like the photo on the right. If dried spices can be beautiful, they don’t get much more beautiful than this. And the smell? OMG, the delicious aroma of this combination of spices is sooo yummy. It’ll make you want to use it right away. And you better, because you didn’t add any preservatives. (For realsies, if this is kept in an air-tight container, it’ll last as long as any other jar of spices.)

Use 2-3 tablespoons of this spicy goodness per pound of meat. Depending on the fat content of the meat, you may also want to add a little water (I don’t use water if I’m cooking with higher fat ground beef, and about ½ cup for lower fat beef and chicken).

Want to make a big batch? Here’s a similar recipe for two cups of the stuff, in which the math is done for ya.

Interested in how other people make taco/chili seasoning? Here’s a recipe from Alton Brown, one from Whole Foods, and a bunch from Yummly.

---

If you’re a blogger and want to do our blog challenge with us, let me know and I’ll send you our list! Otherwise, tune in here (and on Sherilee’s happy little blog) every day in September.