The Taco - The Perfect Food

The taco is the perfect food. All nutritionist will tell you to eat a well balanced variety of foods and use the food pyramid as a guide. Even the United States Government agrees with that.


To refresh your memory, the food pyramid starts wide at the bottom with grains, then next is nearly equal parts of veggies and fruit, then meat and dairy and at the pointed top, a sparing amount of oil and sweets.

The taco is all of these.
-The shell is coarse ground corn taking care of your body’s need for grain products. Better still, it’s “whole grain”.
-Tomatoes are really a fruit and lettuce is the vegetable, and a good source of "ruffage" which everyone will tell you to have in your diet.
-Of course meat is meat and cheese is obviously dairy. Even if it's goat cheese.
-Tasty ground meat will always have a little fat or oil. With properly drained meat, a little fat is what you should get.


There you go, the perfect food. Except for the sweet, so you can complete your meal with a Mexican praline or one of those little green and white mints.

Next time you munching down a taco, feel good about yourself. You're living healthy!

The Taco Shack

Tacos:

Salsa:

Price:

The Taco Shack
4412 Medical Parkway
Austin Texas

One of six family owned restaurants,
the Taco Shack, wedged into a corner on Medical Parkway with one picnic table outside, is truly a to-go only place. Six adults inside and the place is packed, but what tacos! Wrapped in foil to keep them warm and with two little containers of salsa, these are some of the best little tacos you’ll find. Not heavy on the veggies, they were stuffed with finely grated cheddar and Monterey Jack and well drained meat. By the time I got to my second taco, it was a little soggy. Being wrapped in foil, it was due to a little fat sweating out of the meat. Still good. No beer, that’s expected for a to-go place (TABC rules and all), but the service was friendly and my tacos were out in under two minutes. The stars say it all.

Texican - To go!

Tacos:

Salsa:

Price:

Texican at Lakeline
11066 Pecan Park Blvd.
Cedar Park, TX 78613

The Texican at Lakeline was my first blog, but with this experience, I had to write another. I've been cooking a lot at home lately, so the other night my daughter surprised me with my favorite meal…..two tacos. She stopped by the Texican and picked up a take-out order. What a surprise and what a thoughtful daughter. The meal came neatly packed in the typical Styrofoam take-out container and unassembled! No worries about ending up with soggy tacos by the time you get home; I could put them together any way I liked. There was an abundance of lettuce, tomato, cheese, and beef. Enough that I could actually make three tacos! The convenient to-go bag was topped off with a large bag of their crispy chips and a huge container of Texican’s spicy salsa. A cold Pacifico out of the frig, and I was good-to-go. Texican has brought take-out to a higher plane and it was really a nice experience. Try it.

Santa Rita - Austin Texas

Tacos:

Salsa:

Price:

Santa Rita
1206 W 38th St
Austin, TX 78705

Tucked away in a corner at 29 Doors shopping center, Santa Rita is a friendly enough of a restaurant, but if their tacos don’t get better, they’ll go the way of Tres Amigos, the restaurant they replaced. My usual order came out extremely quickly, unfortunately too quickly. Not much lettuce, I don’t recall any tomato, and I had to search for the cheese. But it was the meat that did it in. The texture was almost too creamy to be ground beef. It was like they ground it down into a flavorless mush. At least the beer was cold and the lime fresh. I heard the owner is a nice guy and does some great catering, but if these are his normal tacos it'll be no more Santa Rita for me. I miss Tres Amigos.