Really delicious smoky beef tacos

I'm back on the food blogging, people. Today I made a pretty involved meal, though tacos tend to be easy. Travis and I found a picture that looked really good in the Martha Stewart Everyday Food magazine, and I decided to try to make it.

Enter smoky beef tacos with two special toppings - crema cilantro plus tomato and corn salsa. I also made cumin rice (eh) and a spicy pineapple salad (which was really good). I made the beef by taking a boneless beef chuck roast, and putting it in a Dutch oven with chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, tomato sauce, vinegar, garlic and salt. The beef takes about two hours to cook, so while that was roasting away in the oven, I started working on the other pieces of the meal.

Rather than make our typical tacos with ground beef and the basic toppings, this version really kicks it up a notch.

The spicy pineapple salad is essentially lightly browned pineapples plus thinly sliced jalapenos and pepper. It was surprisingly tasty - it is served warm, and the heat from the jalapenos really tastes good with the sweet pineapple.

Crema cilantro sauce is just sour cream with lime juice and lots of cilantro. Travis liked it on the tacos, but said that it wouldn't be very good on its own. That makes sense. The tomato and corn salsa clearly includes both tomatoes and corn (I quartered grape tomatoes and rinsed canned corn), and also includes some sliced jalapenos and red wine vinegar. It tastes really good on the tacos.

I toasted the soft corn tortillas, and then our meal was set! From start to finish (including grocery shopping and cleanup), the meal took about 3 hours, so it's definitely a weekend thing. However, now I have some chipotle beef leftovers, so we will have enough to make fajitas later this week. Yum!

Sorry, no pictures :(

-SKH