I guess what finally put me on the road to Slow-Carbing it was the fact that I had finally gotten my hands on the library’s copy of Tim Ferriss’ Four-Hour Body, and was looking at the “Chipotle method” he advocated for the non-cooking bachelor. I mean, number one, who doesn’t love Chipotle? But more importantly is number two: dude, I can make a taco salad myself that will rival any Tex-Mex bowl o’ goodies.

Thus, I present to you the Low-Carb Taco* Salad!

LOW-CARB TACO* SALAD

Ingredients:

• 1 lb ground beef (preferably organic, though shoestring budgets may dictate otherwise)
• 1 shallot, minced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• ground cumin, chili powder, salt and cayenne pepper (to taste; see our taco recipe for approximate amounts)
• romaine lettuce
• salsa (we used a combination of Herdez Salsa Verde and Salsa Casera, plus Texas-Texas Fresh Roma Roasted)
• white cheddar cheese, shredded
• sour cream or crème fraîche
• guacamole (1/2 an avocado, a sprinkle of salt and juice of 1/2 a lime all mashed together; keep it simple!)

Directions:

1. Salt and pepper your ground beef, then brown in a skillet over medium heat.
2. Drain off excess grease, if necessary (we used an 80/20 mixture, so there was quite a lot), return to pan, and add shallot, garlic, cumin and chili powder plus about 1 cup of water to create a sauce.
3. Simmer sauce down until water has mostly evaporated, about 10 to 15 minutes.
4. Arrange leaves of romaine lettuce in the bottom of your bowls. You can either use the leaves whole for a nice presentation or chop them up into bite-sized pieces for edible convenience.
5. Place ground beef on top of lettuce.
6. Sprinkle cheese on top of beef.
7. Add salsa, guacamole and sour cream on top as desired. We also tossed in a few pickled banana peppers for good measure.
8. Consume and enjoy!

* Tacos need not apply

1. Get good beef. What does this mean? Don’t buy the non-specified mystery meat; if they don’t tell you it’s ground round or ground chuck, you’re getting lips & assholes. Buy the good stuff: Angus beef (at least here in Texas) doesn’t cost that much more, and it’s so worth it.
2. Baby your beef. Don’t handle the meat too much when you’re actually forming the burgers into patties. Pat it into a roughly rounded shape, but don’t try to make it perfect. The more you handle the meat, the more moisture you press out of it, and the more dry your burger will be.
3. Searing-hot pan. Make sure your pan is hot and ready to go before you put your patties in. It should be hot enough that when you put in a pat of butter, the butter will melt but not turn brown before you put in the beef. (And yes, you are using butter to grease your pan. None of this Pam or margarine or olive oil horseshit. BUTTER!)
4. Set it and forget it. Put in your patties and leave them be. Do not slide them around, press down on them, or otherwise meddle with the beef once it is in the pan. Let them brown for between 4 and 5 minutes before you flip them over. Do not mash them down once you’ve flipped them! Just let them do their thing. This is the secret to moist, delicious burgers.
5. Use a thermometer. You’ll know your burgers are ready based on their inner temperature. Insert a meat thermometer and take your burgers off the heat when they’re around 130 degrees F. (Don’t worry; although most recipes will tell you to cook ground beef to 165 degrees, we’ve been eating these regularly with no ill effects, mostly since they’ll eventually get that hot even without the help of the stove. You may want to abstain, however, if you’re knocked-up—just to be on the safe side.)
6. Cheese and cover. Put your bleu cheese on top of the burgers, which are still resting comfortably in the pan, and then cover the pan with a lid. Let the burgers sit, cheese slowly melting, for at least 5 minutes before plating them up. Use a good quality bleu cheese; we like the Salemville Amish Blue Cheese (available at Randall’s), which has been aged for 60 days. Delish!

Those are the basic steps to great burgers, even if you’re not big on the bleu cheese idea. But if you are, let us also recommend additional toppings (which you really MUST do) of bacon strips (easy to make in the microwave!), some romaine lettuce, and a bit of mashed avocado. Pure decadence, pure bliss.

Wine pairing: a delicious ($5) Chilean wine, the Frontera Carmenere, tastes fabulous with this bleu cheeseburger. Yum!

There should obviously be a tasty and succulent photo of our burgers here, but we were salivating too much to take pictures and gobbled them up before a photo shoot could be arranged! We’ll try to get one eventually, but no guarantees.

Sad to say, so far we just haven’t found anything that measures up to that pure garlic kick we love. (Heck, I even emailed Renée’s to ask where I could find ‘em here in Austin, but so far their customer service department hasn’t bothered to reply.) We’ve tried Ken’s Creamy Caesar, Marzetti’s Supreme Caesar (they make a mean Ultimate Blue Cheese dressing that we use as a dip), Marie’s Creamy Caesar, and Safeway Select Fresh Garlic Caesar. The closest we’ve to the Holy Grail of the Renée’s Caesar is a mixture of Ken’s and Safeway’s Caesar dressings, and even that’s only okay.

What we really need to do, though, is whip up some homemade Caesar dressing, complete with anchovies!

Here’s the recipe I’ve got from Mark Bittman (the New York Times’ Minimalist) that I want to put to use, one of these days:

This recipe is from Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: The Basics, which is an excellent book (and now an iPhone app!) for anybody on a shoestring budget looking to get away from Kraft Dinner and ramen noodles on a nightly basis. It’ll teach you everything you need to know, and serves as a great Bible in the kitchen, the way some people look to Betty Crocker cookbooks or Julia Child. Since Bittman’s a lifelong minimalist, he’ll teach you how to produce big flavor from just a few good ingredients, and how to get the most of out of even the barest of kitchens (the dude actually cooks brilliant meals in a classically cramped NYC apartment with one of those miniature stoves and refrigerators, so he knows whereof he speaks).

In the meantime, I would suggest spicing up the Caesar with a turkey breast or even pork cutlets, pan-fried to perfection, if you think you’d be into it but don’t have the rotisserie chicken on hand. It’s a surprisingly versatile salad, and impresses people when you present it with real, hand-grated Parmesan cheese. I think that’s probably the key to looking good in the kitchen, in general, as a friend of mine once confided that her husband swore she was a brilliant chef solely based on her ability to buy the “good” Parmesan and grate it herself.

Rock on over London, rock on Chicago. Caesar salad in the hizzouse!

So welcome to a new year, a new decade, and a shiny new Shoestring Austin space! This seems like a great time to talk about another new guy in town, at least up in my neck o’ the woods: Sprouts. This “farmers market” styled grocery store opened the doors of their new location at 10225 Research Boulevard (Suite 1000) on January 8, and started off strong with free drinks, food, and even a little music. My Dining Companion (DC) and I went to check it all out and were pleasantly surprised by their prices, which were even lower than those at the nearby HEB and Randalls—and for organic groceries, no less!

Muir Glen organic diced tomatoes, va MuirGlen.com

Month-long specials at the new store include:

• -Muir Glen organic canned tomatoes at 2 for $5 (these are normally about $5 each!)
• -Frontera salsa at 2 for $7
• -Sprouts brand organic salad dressings are all 2 for $5
• -Seeds of Change Indian-style simmer sauces are $3.29 each
• -Brown Cow yogurt is 4 for $3
• -15% off all Good Earth teas

You can also pick up a variety of discounted dog treats for all your furry friends. Plus many of their vitamin brands are between 20 and 25% off for the month of January, so now is a great time to stock up on all your Vitamin C, zinc, echinacea, etc. for cold and flu season.

Weekly deals, through 1/12/2010, via Sprouts.com

If you hurry, you can still score some of these specials (only until Tuesday, January 12):

• -4 for $1 Russet potatoes
• -$3.99/lb for smoked Cheddar cheese (sliced)
• -$2.99/16-oz. bag of Torn & Glasser dried cranberries
• -$2.99 each for Canadian petite lobster tails!!!

Obviously, you can tell which one of those specials is exciting me the most!

There were lots of great surprises in the store, like their mix-and-match 3-for-$10 wine selections, which DC and I snapped right up, as well as their brown eggs at 2 for $4 and a gallon of organic whole milk for only $3.99. Their prices on ground beef and chicken were the lowest we’ve seen in Austin, outside of Walmart, and their veggies were gorgeous, organic and über cheap (99-cent romaine and 39-cent avocados, w00t!). Since the new store is really close to our house, we’ll undoubtedly be shopping here frequently and loving the savings.

As an added bonus, I think the neighborhood HEB and Randalls may have lowered some of their prices, in response to Sprout’s unbelievable deals, as we popped in today to grab some butter at HEB and got 4 sticks for only $1.99. Even the cashier was double-checking the receipt, scratching her head over that one!

Oh, and if you go into the store on Wednesdays, you’ll score double deals—how sweet is that?

All in all, Sprouts really impressed DC and I, both because of their competitive prices and their “all-in-one” approach to nutrition. You can pick up quality vitamins and dietary supplements while you’re grabbing the basics like milk, cheese, meat and veggies, for one-stop shopping. Their vitamins were also competitively priced with the Vitamin Shoppe next door, which may mean some price wars between the two, and extra savings for consumers. Hooray! If you’re in the Great Hills area, definitely check out Sprouts for all your organic grocery items.