Mexican food is my “go to” when I need to serve a lot of people.  It can be inexpensive, I can do a lot of prep-work in advance, and is easily customizable to tastes.  With 12 people invited, over the weekend, that’s all very important!

  When I’m planning meals like this I make a meal plan solely devoted to the event and make a special grocery shopping trip.  I also like to customize some of the recipes just to make sure that something that  crosses my mind as a good idea makes it to the final plan.  For example, having 3 different proteins for the tacos.

Here is my menu:

Pacos Soft Tacos – customized for beef, bean, and chicken. I chopped up all the toppings early in the day, put the refried beans in a bowl, seasoned and cooked the ground beef, and marinated the Grilled Chili Lime Chicken.  This way when the chicken was being grilled everything else just needed to be warmed and set out. 

Corn, Black Bean, and Red Pepper Salad.  This is really tasty, but I think it’s even better the next day.   Don’t skip the parsley.  Why do people always skip the parsley?  It’s good for you!

Arroz Con Pollo (minus the pollo ).  This is one of my favorite recipes, but since we already had chicken happening with the tacos I left it out of this recipe.  Vegetarians are pretty happy to have more than just refried beans to give the meal more bulk.  This is made with beer – and just about any beer that you like to drink will work – aside from some of the really dark ones.

Tomato Guacamole.  The avocados at the store just didn’t work for me; they were either rocks, or too soft.  Trader Joe’s makes a great guacamole, so I just added onion and tomato to it.  Sometimes you just have to roll with it!

Round out the meal with watermelon, tortilla chips, salsa, and of course a large pitcher of…

Sangria  - Swirlspice’s clone of the famous (or infamous) Sangria from Dominick's here in Ann Arbor.  I could not find the Crantasia, and used pomegranate vodka instead.  

It was a feast!  But…I had leftovers.  Not a lot of any one thing, but enough of everything so that it needed to be used rather than fed to the dog…   So I waited a day, and then mixed together the rice, chicken, beef, refried beans, some cheese, and some onion.  Then I slathered this mixture about 1/2” thick onto 1/2 of a tortilla, folded, flattened, and fried them.  Oh yes…I fried..just enough to get the tortillas golden brown, then I set them in the toaster oven on the lowest heat to make sure they were warmed through.

Here’s lunch.  Well, the one I managed to get a picture of…  

A little bit of cheese, and some golden brown and delicious gives a boost to leftovers!