East-West Tacos

Seems like you, dear readers, will have to let me know when you have seen enough iterations of Food Rolled Up in Tortillas. My Beloved and I never seem to get tired of them.

Remember that okay-but-uninspired Pad Thai I wrote about last time, the one that was so boring that it didn't even rate a single comment?  Well, I looked at the mess of it that we had left over (did you know that rice noodles clump together the next day like mats in a cat's fur?) and was tempted to pitch the whole thing out. There is little so unappealing as congealed, cold rice noodles and limp scallions.

My cheapskate side, however, couldn't bear to throw away expensive shrimp, so I fished around in the nest of noodles, extracted all the shrimp, and repurposed them into lunch. Our shrimp tacos had fresh corn, thinly sliced onion, lettuce, our own ripe tomatoes (yes, the volunteer plant is still producing! Huzzah!), cilantro, and Cholula hot sauce. Three or four shrimp down the middle of our favorite tortillas makes a sumptuous lunch and, when they have previously been bathed in fish sauce and tamarind paste, they have a special extra tang that shifts the geography from Del Norte America to the Far East at first bite.

The moral of the story: You can use up anything (and love doing it) if you have tortillas on hand.