Nachos

You can't go wrong with these nachos!! My family and I used to eat at this tiny little Mexican restaurant on the corner, we started going right when they opened, they served everything on paper plates and had plastic silverware, but the food.... oh my! I've never been able to find anything like it again.

Before they closed down, my mom begged the owner to tell her how to make the shredded beef he used in his Nachos, Chimichangas, and Burritos. He laughed and told her, "just throw it in a slow cooker with some salsa and jalapeños all day, it'll fall apart!"

And so she did. And now I do too! And soon, I bet you will as well.

So here is what you need:

A nice big roast (I use the long kind opposed to the seriously fat and short kind, it has way less fat on it and falls apart much easier - I know my technical jargon here is astounding!) some salsa, some jalapeños and your Crock Pot.

My roast is frozen solid here, and normally that would be fine - but it wouldn't fit in my pot, so I had to microwave it a bit to get it to bend in there. Frozen is fine though! I used to always sear the beef first, but I stopped, and I can't tell the difference, it makes my life easier.

Go ahead and plop your roast in, dump the salsa on top, I used the rest of what I had which was about 2/3 of a jar, and throw in as many jalapeños with their lovely flavorful juices as you can handle. If you can't handle them, throw just a few in anyway, the roast will love you for it!

Go ahead and turn your Crock Pot on, this really should cook allllllll day long on low, I didn't get this on til about 10 because I am a bum and we were out of coffee, so I cooked it on high for the first few hours, then turned it down to low after lunch. All in all, I cooked this around 7 hours and it turned out beautifully. Of course this doesn't look so beautiful:

But THIS does:

And so does this:

YUM! Wait, it gets better! I shred my beef my breaking this big ole piece of meat into chunks and letting them cool:

And then scrubbing my hands and peeling it all up into nice beautiful shreds like this:

I dare you to do this without taking a few bites. I took around 9 bites. My tenth bite went to my baby:

Yeah, she loves me.

Here it is all shredded, and you can see on the plate, very little fat on this!

Now that you've got that done, you'll need to get all the other goodies for the Nachos ready. Here's what we use:

Refried beans (fat free!), salsa, cheese, chips, tomatoes, lettuce (I had to show you my lettuce knife, I'm sure this isn't new, but I just picked it up not too long ago and it really does keep the lettuce from getting brown when you cut it!) and some sour cream.

To make the beans a little easier to dollop onto the chips, I throw them in a bowl with some salsa and cheese:

Mix it all up and nuke it for around a minute.

Now to make this easy to clean up, I roll out tinfoil for each persons nachos, that way when it comes out of the oven, I just grab the tinfoil and throw it on the table, real high class, but super easy clean up at the end of the night, just roll it up and throw it away! Plus no pans to clean up unless you are messy like me and sprinkle cheese like a madwoman.

To assemble, just lay out however many chips, plop a decent amount of beans down, and scatter the beef all over top:

Then add cheese:

You can add onions and more jalapeños if you are feeling dangerous too!

Bake them for about 10 minutes at 350. My cheese didn't melt really well because it was low fat:

And then serve them up with all those delicious toppings!!

Here is my stepsons, he doesn't like sour cream (I can't eat it without loads of it!):

And hubby was in the mood for something a little lighter so he had a couple of tacos:

You can also fry up some chimichangas, or add some BBQ sauce to the meat and make sandwiches (the boys use Korean BBQ sauce - little too spicy, even for me!). I love making a taco salad with this, using a ranch/sour cream mixture with salsa and tons of beef! Anyway you eat it, it's delicious! Just ask my baby girl:

She says, "PLEASE can I have more???" And I, of course, said yes.

If you want to see some other great ideas for using your slow cooker, check out Slow Cooking Thursday!

Here is a printable version without all my mumbo jumbo! Let me know how it turns out!!

Love and Luck to you,

The Packet Queen