Pork Tacos

Tacos for those that don't eat tacos

My daughter doesn’t like tacos. But she will always request this recipe, which is why it appears in the blue book top 5 recipes.

The original recipe came from a random internet recipe for making Kalua pork. It is a Hawaiian dish, traditionally slow-roasted in an underground pit called an imu for hours. The result is smoky, salty, deeply porky. My kids call this pork tacos because I serve this as shredded pork on tortillas. Definitely not authentic, but this is the way that we roll.

There are five ingredients, so every one of them has to count. The bacon brings the smoke, but you never actually eat the bacon. The garlic brings savoriness, but you don’t really taste it. And I once tried skipping the pink Himalayan salt because it felt like a ridiculous thing to keep buying for one recipe. The dish tasted completely different without it.

Most taco places don’t do veggie sides the way I do. I aim for at least one.

Depending on the week:

Option 1, cabbage slaw: Slice cabbage thin, add salt and lime juice, and massage it in with your hands. You need to massage the cabbage to break it down. Add scallions. Taste and adjust with salt or lime. This is the easiest option, and adds the perfect contrast to the fatty pork.

Option 2, corn salsa: Heat a pan on medium-high, add a tablespoon of oil, sauté a bag of frozen corn on medium until it takes on some color, then add 1–2 tsp of minced garlic and salt. Adding the garlic at the end is a completely different flavor from adding it to the oil at the beginning. My family loves raw garlic. If I have cilantro, I will throw it in. You do you.

Option 3, fajita peppers: Medium-high heat, 2 tablespoons of oil, 2 sliced bell peppers and a sliced onion, salt, 1/2 tsp of oregano. I want some crunch left. The rest of my family wants them cooked to death. This is a household dispute I have stopped trying to win.

Option 4, sautéed zucchini: Grate at least 3 zucchinis on a box grater. Heat a pan on medium-high heat, then add 2 tablespoons of oil, add the zucchini and keep it moving — it will release water and stick if you ignore it. Three minutes, then salt at the end. Salt too early and you get a watery mess.

Now here’s the real extra thing to do. Make your own tortilla. It seems really extra, but worth it.

My daughter has since moved out, which means my son now sets the menu. The pork tacos have evolved from this plain version to real tacos with whole dried chiles and long braises. One weekend while I was away, he made birria tacos entirely on his own. That is a weekend project. This is not.

If you need weekday tacos with zero hands-on time, make these. Bury them in veggie sides if you want. Or eat them with jarred salsa and sour cream. Make your own tortillas, or go buy some. The dish that earns a permanent slot in your rotation is rarely the most interesting one. It’s the one that adapts to your life.