How about a Recipe Rewind to some amazing Tortillas and Tacos!

See the list of all Jason Murphy’s recipes at www.mysaline.com/jason-murphy.

Jason says make these Tortillas & Taco Meat using addition by subtraction!

I’ve dedicated many articles to expound upon all the beneficial nutrients and disease fighting properties in natural foods cooking. Your eyes have surely crossed at all the lists of omega 3 this and anti-inflammatory that and compounds yada yada yada. The problem is that people are conditioned to equate any healthy term with a food as bad tasting. All it’s missing is a famous equation like Einstein’s E+mc2 to sum it up. T=hyk2 (Taste equals health times yuck squared), perhaps.

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I can implore you until my fingers bleed that cooking from scratch with non-processed ingredients and small farm sourced grass fed meats/dairy actually tastes light-years (see what I did there?) better, but deep down, your Micky D’s and Hostess Cupcakes loving souls probably don’t believe me. I know because I was a member of the mindless zombie food horde for so long myself. I thought eating healthy meant sacrificing foods I enjoyed, when in reality my taste buds were so overloaded with sugar, fat, oils, and salt that I had lost the ability to taste real foods.

I never could figure out why I could eat some huge super sized burger meal-deal with a gallon of soda, feel absolutely terrible for an hour, and then start craving it again like I hadn’t eaten at all. Now I know, it’s simply because those foods were designed and engineered to hit every pleasure center in your brain with chemicals and outrageous amounts of sweet and salty. They completely override the message your body tries to send you after force feeding it like a poor goose condemned to making liver pate.

I remember a passage from the Stephen King book “The Drawing of the Three” where the main character is drawn from a world much different from ours and he is completely overwhelmed when drinking a soda due the overload of sweetness. He wonders why anyone would be fighting over things like cocaine and heroin when so much sweetness is everywhere. I never quite got that myself until I removed it from my life. Now I can’t get one taste of soda down without wanting to spit it out like gasoline, when in the past I could drain a 2 liter in an afternoon without a thought. Now when eating a fresh strawberry or blueberry, it’s like I can taste the sunshine in it. Before, I would have thought man, that needs some sugar.

Which brings me to my point. If I can’t convince people to eat because of what’s in healthy foods, maybe I can convince them because of what’s not in them. Trust is a big ticket item in life, and it shouldn’t be handed out like flyers to a fair rodeo. Actually, you should hand out trust as rare as a golden ticket to some weird guy’s chocolate factory, and whatever trust you have passed over to mass produced foodstuffs and the companies that make them should be rescinded post-haste.

When chip companies brag that you can’t eat just one, it’s not someone talking out of school, they spend years and millions of research dollars to engineer that mother-f’er just for that purpose. In their eyes, you are the trained lab rat with money, and all they have to do is crinkle a bag and you will ring the bell and run the maze any time they say go.

It can be as simple as perfecting the fat and salt ratio, to adding things that just do not need to be there, to truly scary stuff that has to be causing untold serious health problems. In Europe, most of the crazy chemical additives are banned from foods, but here in the states, the good ol’ FDA has never met a chemical that it can’t be bought off to look the other way, no matter how dangerous it might be.

Take Titanium Dioxide. It’s a genotoxin, meaning it can damage genetic information (DNA) – which anyone that has ever watched Jurassic Park knows is a very bad idea. You probably think that’s a terrible item that you would never feed your kids… as you hand over a bag of Skittles filled with it. Not to worry, the FDA says, it’s a safe level! Trust us! The kids need bright colors, who cares what’s in it! Now quit asking questions and eat it!

Many popular soda brands have a chemical in it that is used as a flame retardant on industrial fire fighting gear. Chemicals refined from petroleum and natural gas are in energy drinks… it’s all good, according to the FDA. Sure, it is. It can be something as simple as taco seasoning. Your standard packet contains soybean oil, silicon dioxide, and a healthy dose of salt and sugar. Why? I made tacos tonight. After browning the ground turkey, if you just take some chili powder, cumin, pepper, onion and garlic powder with a small amount of sea salt, your tacos will come out fantastic without the preservatives. It’s not like you are trying to mason jar your taco meat to store until winter like a crazy person. I’m betting you would like to consume them on a short term basis, say maybe the night you make them.

And if you make a batch of my healthy tortillas instead of using store bought, you are going to save on even more unnecessary things like Palm oil shortening with trans fats, Glycerin. Mono and diglycerides, sodium aluminum phosphate and other words that you do not know what they mean. It sounds more like they are trying to build a device to help E.T. phone home instead of making a tortilla. Blend up an avocado with some salsa verde and grass fed plain yogurt, dice up your own pico and grass fed cheese, and you have yourself a healthy taco night that will actually leave you able to run for the border should the need arise.

And for a side, baked cauliflower with cumin and chili powder with a little melted cheese and black bean chips for crunch will fool even the most stubborn eater, as long as you don’t tell them what it is. And why should you? They are already eating a 55 lb drum of chemicals without knowing or caring, so be as sneaky as the FDA and just keep it on the down-low. It’s all at “safe” levels. Trust us. We have your best interests at heart.

If you want to make the tortillas or taco meat, just search the past articles or google recipes, there are a million of them out there to try. Or keep eating the big corporation mass produced stuff, but maybe keep a pair of scissors handy to cut an extra neck hole in your shirts when that extra head pops out.