Crispy Baked Chicken Tacos

Plus 5 Dinners in Real Life

Hi, and happy September!

This seems to be the week when everyone is getting swept up into back-to-school season. Nobody’s on “vacation” anymore, we’re all changing our schedules and mindsets and diving fully into school mode.

Even though my kids started school in mid August, those first few weeks always feel a little bit like a rehearsal for the “real” school year. In August we’re still doing summer activities and eating summer food and going to bed just a little bit too late for a school night. After Labor Day, though, when the calendar flips to September, something changes. Even though the weather is hotter this week than it’s been all summer, my mind is moving into fall mode. I’m ready to get organized.

This past spring, when we moved our bedroom downstairs and the kids moved into bedrooms of their own, we did a lot of decluttering and organizing. I’m feeling pretty good about our home organization. It’s far from perfect but I’ve accepted that it’s about as good as it’s going to get. Our home is organized in a comfortable, lived-in sort of way.

What I want to focus on this fall is mental decluttering. I’m tired of having a million things buzzing around in my head at once. I’m also tired of having a million things on my to-do list that I never seem to finish. I want to feel more focused on what matters and less distracted by what doesn’t.

Yesterday, after dropping the kids off at school, I started with a very small step in that direction: deleting podcasts on my phone that I rarely listen and/or don’t find very interesting anymore. I still love podcasts; I just want to be more selective about what I listen to. I think it would be good to have more silence and less distracting chatter in my ear so often.

Next, I want to focus on writing a realistic to-do list for the month of September, not an aspirational one. I’m a sucker for an aspirational to-do list that’s so long it can be broken down into sub-headings and categories. It feels good to dump every possible task that I can think of onto one list. But it sucks to look back at the month and only cross off one or two things I’ve actually accomplished. There are certain tasks and goals that I’ve carried over from one do-list to the next for almost a year. It’s time to either do these things or stop pretending that I’m going to do them (like organizing digital photos and printing some for photo albums. Gahh! )

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Recipe of the Week: Crispy Baked Chicken Tacos

You might ask why, when it’s still so dang hot outside, am I asking you to turn on your oven? It’s because these ground chicken tacos are a great back-to-school recipe, not only because of the old-school hard taco shells but also because this cooking method almost turns taco night into a one-pan meal situation.

I say '“almost” because you still have to prep some toppings, like shredded lettuce or cabbage, chopped cilantro, green onion and grated cheese. BUT the tacos cook together in the oven at the same time and come out with a crispy, crunchy shell and a warm middle filled with melty cheese, seasoned meat and salsa. It’s kind of like eating hand-held nachos, which is 100% pleasure.

Here’s how you do it: (for detailed instructions and ingredient amounts, you can find the full recipe HERE)

Step 1: Cook ground chicken with seasonings. Add salsa for flavor.

Step 2: Spread refried beans across the bottom of two 9x9 square baking pans.* The hard taco shells will stick into the beans and sit up straight, making it easy to arrange and fill the shells. Put the pans in the oven and bake the shells for 5 minutes.

*Using two 9x9 pans instead of one 9x13 pan fits more taco shells so you can bake more tacos at once

Step 1 and Step 2

Step 3: Sprinkle about 2 tablespoons of grated cheese into the bottom of each shell. Spoon the chicken taco meat over the cheese. Scatter the remaining grated cheese over the meat in each taco shell and over the refried beans in the pan.

Step 4: Bake for 10 minutes until the cheese is completely melted and the taco shells are warm, crispy and chewy.

Step 5: Add toppings like shredded cabbage, green onion and cilantro. Serve!

Step 3, 4 and 5

You don’t really need a side dish with these tacos BUT it’s worth considering this summer corn salad I found in my archives. Just toss together corn shaved off the cob, bell pepper, green onion, cilantro and a VERY generous squeeze of lime + a pinch of salt. So good!

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5 Dinners in Real Life

I’m always curious about what other families are eating. Aren’t you? I hope that my week of real life dinners will provide helpful recipes & cooking ideas for your family. Here’s what my crew ate last week:

Monday: It was 5PM and I was still out running errands after a busy day. I knew that by the time I got home everyone was going to be starving (including me). I made a quick stop at the grocery store for chips and dip, cheese and crackers, smoked salmon and grapes and threw together a very quick appetizer platter. We noshed on our appetizer dinner in the backyard and it was perfect. This is your friendly reminder that snacks for dinner is never a bad idea!

Tuesday: I’ve been working on a fish chowder recipe for paid subscribers so I tested a version made with coconut milk instead of cream. I also made a batch of homemade drop biscuits, assuming that one of my kids wouldn’t eat much chowder and would instead fill up by eating three biscuits (I was correct).

Wednesday: Three of us ate tofu tacos and one of us ate a bean and cheese quesadilla. We all devoured guacamole and chips.

Thursday: I made linguine with salami and chickpeas, a recipe that will be coming to paid subscribers sometime this fall. It’s salty and garlicky and a nice change from pasta with red sauce.

Friday: One of my kids didn’t have school (why?) so we hung out together and ran errands in the afternoon. I was standing in Target at 4:45pm when my husband called to ask what we were having for dinner and my answer was, “ummm, not sure!” I picked up a rotisserie chicken on the way home and he cooked potatoes that he found in the pantry and made a salad.

tofu tacos + fish chowder with coconut milk + chickpea & salami pasta

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Cookbooks

Everywhere I looked last week (on Substack, in Real Simple magazine, at the book store, on podcasts) I was seeing and hearing about Caroline Chambers’ new cookbook, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking. If one of your goals this fall is to bring a few new meals into your dinner rotation, this cookbook is a must.

This is a dinner-focused cookbook for busy parents (that’s us!) Each recipe is a complete meal made with as few ingredients as possible, dirtying as few dishes as possible and taking as little energy as possible. You can also check out Caroline’s wildly successful Substack newsletter that features the same type of simple, flavor-bomb recipes you’ll find in her cookbook.

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Well, that’s it for this week! I’m trying to sound cheerful with that exclamation point! but if you know me well, you know that there’s nothing that makes me crankier than 103°weather in September. Also, one kiddo and myself have the sniffles and are sneezing our way through the hot week. Wonderful!

Here’s hoping that the weekend brings some relief and relaxation for all of us. If your kids just started school this week, take it easy! The first week back can be a doozy.

xo

Jenny