Mom's Taco Salad - A Cherished Family Heirloom

If my memory serves me right, this dish has now been savored in various forms in our family for two decades. When Mama Noodle unveiled this classic on New Year's Day of 1990 or 1991, we had never seen its equal. No one quite knew what to do. Many years later, when I was living 2,000 miles from Mama Noodle, my wife Yankee Noodle Candy was sweet enough to prepare me a taste of home. Her first couple attempts were abject failures for various reasons (make sure you rinse the beans!). But in October of 2006, she aced it, and since then life in our dining room has never quite been the same. I'm told that Hot Dry Noodlin' and Canoodlin' also create variants of this dish. It's quite possible that this is my all time favorite.

The recipe will not be unveiled. As I said, it's a cherished family heirloom. But this blog is about eating, and there's plenty to write about the process.

These days, the first step for me is to hold my head over the pot of chili and just sniff it.

The first step in preparation is to grab some iceberg lettuce and scatter it around the plate. Be careful! If someone (perhaps a wife or a mother) is in charge of how much you eat, you don't want to stack the lettuce too high, because the finished product will appear unreasonably monstrous and you'll be blamed for taking too much food, even though you didn't really take all that much. The reason? The lettuce pile artificially inflated the perceived amount of food you're about to eat.

The next step is to lay out the tortilla chips, although some prefer to do this before the lettuce step. We prefer a brand called Santitas that we discovered out West (although it's now available in the Midwest!), an affordable and adequately salty brand that's slow to sog. Again, don't take too many curly chips or you'll get in trouble for taking "too much food" even though it's just empty pockets of air caused by abnormally shaped chips.

Now it gets serious. The chili - the ground beef, the beans, the bell peppers, onions, tomatoes, spices, etc - is truly a work of art. Hopefully you have an inconspicuously flat bed of lettuce and chips so that you can take as much as possible without making a mess or looking like a hog.

The final step is to bury the chili in shredded cheddar cheese. Watching it melt is an event in itself. A common mistake made by the novice eater at this point is to add sour cream. This must be avoided. You don't want to taint a masterpiece.

It's usually at this point that I set my plate down and hope that the height of the glorious food goes unnoticed. I did pretty well tonight. The pile wasn't large enough to create suspicion.

This meal moves in stages. First, you grab any visible chip and gently lift it (together with any food that rests upon it) toward and into your mouth. When the chips have disappeared or only soggy ones remain, it's time to pick up your fork.

Finally we arrive at "The Last Bite." Remember how important it is to nail this!

Upon finishing, the eater is left traumatized that the meal is over.

But wait! Don't forget that this meal is actually even better on the second day!

MAMA NOODLE'S TACO SALAD (YANKEE NOODLE CANDY VARIANT)
YANKEE NOODLE RATING: 44 out of 10 mmmm's.