Food Notes: 2/4

Taco soup, cheese contests, Le Creuset, Endangered pasta and more!

Soup season continues with this deconstructed taco soup. I know what you are thinking: avocados, in this economy?

I needed a dinner concept. My wife had already headed out to pick up our toddler from daycare so the clock was ticking. Desperate, I started doomscrolling through Esquires’s 55 Easy Weeknight Dinners You'll Want to Make Tonight. I was ideating rather than committed to finding a recipe, right up until I came across this Taco Soup recipe. After reading it over, I promptly decided to change it.

The good news was I had a lot of ingredients on hand: half-eaten bag of tortilla chips, check; half a pound of beans cooked up over the weekend, check; half-eaten round of queso fresco, check; opened sour cream, check. The bad news was I still needed to head over to the grocery store.

One ingredient I needed to acquire was the Tajín Classico, a spice mix from Mexico. The flavoring is a combination of chili and lime and salt. I had only ever eaten it before on fruit. Small packets of the spice come attached to the pre-cut melon from the grocery store, although many the street vendors around New York City also offer up the spice. Tajín is a relatively new condiment created in 1985, although the flavor profile is an older one and long part oof Mexican cuisine.

So I cooked up the soup, mostly following the recipe, with just a few notes on the execution. First, I combined 90% and 80% lean beef in roughly 50/50 ratio. With soup, I didn’t want a thick layer of fat floating to the top.

I also swapped out the pinto beans for the Rancho Gordo beans we had used earlier in the week—I’m not sure which ones, but they might have been Rio Zapes. My wife made up a taco seasoning from our spice cabinet instead of using a packet. I used frozen corn rather than canned corn. And finally I swapped the cheddar for the queso fresco.

I also added one Jalapeño, sliced into medallions for extra heat. It probably could have even gotten a bit hotter. I added a bit of Tajín right to the soup, but apparently that was intended as a garnish. Finally, I topped it off with sliced avocado, but only because I was able to find one that was ready to eat.

The Latest

Very Berry Pretty

Le Creuset’s Berry color is returning. The pinkish colored cookware was discontinued in 2019, leaving fans seeking alternative sources. We have mostly traditional French blue known as Marseille on Le Creuset color chart. But we do have a few pieces that are a gray color exclusive to Williams Sonoma. But the many candy colored pieces of cookware have always left me in a bit of a pickle: I kind of want them all. There’s obviously two problems with that. A full set, or even a reasonable well apportioned kitchen, is expensive for even a single set. And second, even if I had an endless money hack to buy up a set of pans in every color, I still would run out of kitchens to cook with them in. That leads me to the final conundrum: is is every okay to mix and match many different colors of Le Creuset?

Indian American Brooklyn Fusion

I reviewed Inday All Day, a Brooklyn flagship restaurant from the Inday fast casual chain. The TLDR version is the food was a great combination of Indian flavor with trendy Brooklyn dishes.

Indian Pizza Is The Latest Pizza Trend

Taste looks at the rise of pizza made with South Asian flavors, and how shops like Pizza Twist, a New Jersey pizza shop is growing the trend on their social media. Even Pizza today pizzerias pair off with an Indian restaurant for a mashup serving Tikki Masala pizza.

The Race To Save A Rare Endangered Pasta

Gastro Obscura looks into efforts to save one of the world’s rarest pasta styles, the “threads of god.” Made for select holidays in rural Sardinia, the technique passed down through a single family line until just three people knew how too make it.

And Just Like That Cosmos Are Back

The Wall Street Journal reports on how the Cosmopolitan cocktail has made a come back. (Apparently so has season 3 of Sex and The City sequel Just Like That). The cosmo is approaching 40 (which is the second food I’m writing this week about that is younger than me!), first appearing in Manhattan in the 1980s. If you’re wondering, like I was, its a combination of vodka, cranberry juice, Cointreau, and lime juice.

2,414 Cheeses

That’s how many cheeses have been entered into the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association 2025 Championship Cheese Contest. The championship kicks off March 5.

Pizza House!

There’s a scene in Mad Men where Peggy Olson is working late at the office. Don calls, but when she answers, she yells “pizza house!” It sort of doesn’t make sense. Pizza House opened in New London Connecticut in the 1950s, the “first” of the New England, “Greek” pizzerias. Since then, Greek pizza has become synonymous with England, which is why there are so many “House Of Pizza” restaurants in Massachusetts that Boston.com decided too investigate.