fftf: how to make intuitive, healthy-ish NACHOS ?

Greetings! Today I have a story for you!

It's about nachos, and about making delicious, healthy-ish food even when you don’t think you have much to work with. This is a real-life example from my cooking a few weeks ago, and it illustrates three intuitive cooking concepts that can help you make amazing food in a pinch:

using an "anchor" ingredient to inspire a meal
contrasting textures = a structure for delicious food
mixing and matching spices within "flavor families" for effortless variety

Before I leave to go on a trip, I always work hard to use up all the food that needs to get eaten before I go - this includes fridge AND pantry food. But how do I decide what to make?! A simple trick is to let one ingredient be the "anchor" that inspires everything else.

The anchor does not need to be exciting. In fact, sometimes it is incredibly mundane! In this case, my anchor was half a bag of slightly stale tortilla chips. I REALLY wanted to use these up somehow. At first glance, they were really NOT inspiring. They weren't quite crunchy enough to be used as dippers, which I how I usually eat tortilla chips. To re-crisp the stale chips, I knew I could bake them a bit in the oven… which is what gave me the grand idea to make NACHOS!

OMG... NACHOS! Honestly, I had never made nachos at home before. They are not on the list of things I eat regularly. But... I did have a vivid memory of some special nachos we used to get as an appetizer at a favorite restaurant at the beach we went to when I was growing up. And boy did I love those nachos!

All of a sudden, using up a stale bag of tortilla chips had become not only a trip down memory lane, but a fun cooking challenge to see how I could create something super tasty, inspired by an old favorite dish.

Only problem was… I had almost NO FOOD in my fridge. And I definitely did not have any normal nacho ingredients. But I wasn't going to let that stop me!!

So... what makes great nachos?! This is where intuitive cooking lesson #2 comes in... as I was thinking about the "elements" of great nachos, I realized they are a perfect example of one of my key concepts in intuitive cooking: contrasting textures is a structure you can use to inspire delicious food.

Let's break this down for nachos: After a base of chips, the next element I imagined was melted cheese - something creamy, melty, and/or gooey on top that gets all messy and is what makes the nachos fun to eat! Then I thought about something "substantial" in between the chip-base and the gooey topping (I was imagining black beans)... and then ideally something fresh/refreshing/juicy on top like tomatoes, fresh jalapeños, or cilantro to balance it all out.

Here's my contrasting texture "structure" I used to shape my nachos:

crunchy chips (base)
creamy topping (cheese, sour cream, sauce, etc)
fresh/juicy topping (fresh peppers, tomatoes)
chewy/substantial middle parts - ?!?!?!

Only little problem... I did not have ANY melting cheese or sour cream OR any black beans either...

At this point I also realized I had enough chips for about two meals worth of nachos… so I wanted to space out my ingredients just so to use everything up AND make two rounds of slightly different but equally tasty nachos.

Here’s what I had to work with:

a tiny bit of goat cheese
one avocado
2 eggs
1 red onion
2 packs of pumpkin seed tofu (so random)
2 small tomatoes
cilantro
1 small head of cauliflower
1 daikon radish

For nachos round one, I was dead set on cheese, so I decided to use up the goat cheese and half the avocado as my main creamy toppings.

What to do for the "substance" though…?! My base ingredients were decidedly NOT normal nacho materials, so I had to get some Tex-Mex flavors up in here! I decided to saute the tofu and red onion together with a bunch of chile powder and chipotle. I chopped everything up and sauteed it real quick. It came out well, with a nice kick. The tofu added some good chewiness and as a neutral base, it absorbed the flavors well.

I spread out my chips, topped it with the onion/tofu, did a few sprinkles of goat cheese, and popped it in the oven to heat up the chips and melt the goat cheese a bit. Meanwhile I chopped half the cilantro, diced one tomato and prepped half the avocado to add to the top.

The chips came out, I added my fresh toppings, and proceeded to devour the nachos. The tofu/onion saute was actually so good that I added more of it to the chips mid-way through devouring! My only criticism of NACHOS ROUND 1 was... I wanted more creaminess on top, more messiness, because that is what makes the nachos really fun to eat.

Encouraged by the tasty results of my first round of unconventional nachos, the next day it was time for version 2! Now I was REALLY in use-it-up mode, as this was my 2nd to last meal before departure!

The goat cheese is gone, but I’m really excited to put two fried eggs on top of this round of nachos. I put those in the "creamy" category, and I still had half an avocado for the top too.

This time my challenge was the cauliflower and daikon... Again, not normal nacho ingredients, but I will not be stopped!

Daikon is a large white radish, usually used in Asian cooking but... whatever, I gotta use it up! It's a somewhat neutral flavor, so no biggie here. This time I cut up the daikon, cauliflower, and remaining pack of tofu. I tossed them all with some cumin and cinnamon (one of my fav spice combos that I mention all the time), plus salt/pepper/oil and roast them in the oven for about 35 minutes.

Here's intuitive cooking lesson #3: I could have stuck with the same chile powder/chipotle, but instead I chose a different spice mix (within the same Mexican-inspired flavor family, and one I know I always love) for more variety.

This time, in the oven, the tofu got a little crisper on the outsides during roasting, which was a nice slight change from my saute from the previous day.

Now for the toppings! As I baked my chips with the cauli/tofu/daikon mixture on top, I also prepped the remaining cilantro, small tomato, and half an avocado to go on top, as well as my two fried eggs.

At this point I noticed some garlic tahini sauce in the fridge that needed to get used. Hmm... it didn’t really fit with the Tex-Mex theme, but I often eat it with cumin/cinnamon roasted veggies, so I decide to throw it on too. (You know me - I firmly believe that a good sauce makes everything better!)

This second round of nachos is even weirder than the first, but ultimately, even more delicious!!

In conclusion, don't forget these three intuitive cooking tips to help guide your cooking:

Sometimes you only need ONE ingredient to inspire multiple delicious, creative meals - pick one thing as an "anchor," run through dishes that use that ingredient in your head, and go from there!
When cooking something from "nothing," think about breaking the dish into different "elements" and/or textures to give you a guiding structure in which to be creative! (I picked out these elements of nachos: chip base, creamy topping, juicy/fresh topping, something substantial and spicy in the middle)
Mix and match spices from different "flavor families" to take base ingredients in different directions. (This is a key lesson from my cooking course, Intuitive Cooking 101... more on this in the future!)

Happy cooking!

Jess

PS. I hope you enjoyed this little story! I love to hear your feedback, so if you did (or didn't), reply back and let me know! Also here's a pic of my Round 2 Nachos, DEVOURED:

Hi, I'm Jess! I help health-conscious, busy people transform their cooking from "chore" to "whippin it up!" through intuitive cooking, which I teach through online classes, free content, coaching and more. This is my newsletter, Food for Thought Fridays, where I share highly actionable tips and inspiration to help you cook more intuitively (which makes cooking feel easier and SO much more fun!). Once a month, I share a recipe that's really worth making, and I only share those with my email subscribers.

I currently work + live on land that is the unceded territory of the Ramaytush Ohlone. And I can't wait to eat at Cafe Ohlone when they reopen someday! Check out this article about them.