Most of last week and this one (and I think part of next also) I've been working on assembling a recruiting presentation for my daughters Civil Air Patrol Squadron. She shet up the outline, focus and we collected together a bunch of movie clips and stills, and the text. I got to assemble it all together so that it made sense and had flow.

Anyhow this brings to point, my point, you need to have something to eat on busy weeks that does not take hours to make, and tastes good. We love tacos and burritos. You can quickly heat up shells or steam wraps. Dispatching a tomato or slicing some lettuce, quick. So where is the time, well good meat filling. Yea, yea, taco packet and brown some meat, but that misses the point of great south of the border food. You have some fresh ingredients, tomato, lettuce and maybe some avocado. You have a simple starch product like shells or four wraps. So what carries the taste? The meat! So here is my recipe for making Taco Meat. Yep it also works for burritos, tostadas, etc. but you got to call it something.

How does this relate to a busy week? Well when I make this up I do so 4-5 pounds at a time. Then I freeze it up in sour cream containers. Then on a night when we need a quick meal, out of the freezer, into the microwave, minutes later its taco time!

The other day I was st airing forlornly at a small package of chicken thighs in the fridge. There were far too few to just cook as chicken, and feed the whole family (or freeze), yet they would not last much longer in the fridge. So what to do?

Looking around we had a good deal of shredded cheddar cheese, and some unused cilantro, that was trying to decide if it would turn brown or just rot. I always keep a variety of canned bean products, was there an idea here? Bowl of refried beans with chunks of chicken? No...

Lucky for me the wife was still up in the Binghamton area so a quick call later and I had some canned enchilada sauce (did not have the time to make it) and wraps on the way.

The idea here was that chicken plus cheese, refried beans, and wraps equal enough food to cover the main course. We also had a small amount of unused mozzarella cheese (from French bread pizzas) and I felt that plus the cheddar would yield a much more creamy texture, and leave one less small package of stuff in the fridge.

Turned out great! I guess I lucked out on the sauce, that could of ruined the enchiladas, but one could always make it from scratch if you can't get canned. So here is the recipe:Chicken and Black Bean Enchiladas