Hey good looking . . .

All right, sorry about the rant yesterday. I'm in a mood -- possibly the same mood that I've been in for a month or so now, or it might be a whole "New & Not Improved Mood!" hard to say for sure.

To make amends, I'm offering a recipe today. Well, more of an idea for a recipe really. You see, there isn't a lot of food creation going on at my house. Defrosting? Yes. Actual production by use of ingredients, pans and spatulas? Not so much.

Anyway, I'll lay out the basic premise here, then maybe a reader with a fully functional kitchen, and/or people to feed could try it out and let me know how it turned out. Someone with kids might be good, since they sometimes like odd dishes. Conversely, if they're picky eaters it won't matter if the recipe turns out badly, because chances were good that their parents were going to waste food, time and money in a failed attempt to feed them anyway.

So here goes. I call the recipe "Taco Lasagna." It's made pretty much the same way you'd make a regular lasagna, although at this point I should say that I've never actually made a lasagna. Seems pretty straight forward though. Just a bunch of noodles, meat and cheese layered into a pan, right?

There might even be a specific pan named for this purpose. A lasagna dish perhaps? Not sure about that, so if you don't have one, or if they don't exist, well, don't worry about it.

Anyway, for this recipe, instead of noodles, you'll be using tortilla shells. Yeah. My idea is to tear them into strips, about the same size as the noodles you'd use to make lasagna. And there are noodles specifically named for that purpose, I've seen them in the store.

Line the bottom of your pan (or dish) with a layer of the tortilla strips. Then, throw some cheese on top of that, and maybe some salsa. Put another layer of tortilla strips on top, and then add beans (either the refried paste stuff, or black beans) and put some more cheese on top of all that.

You'll probably want some meat in this thing, so cook up some ground beef (or turkey) with one of those taco-flavor spice packets.

Or maybe the meat should go second, more like a crust? Hmm, hard to say. You get the basic idea of this though, right? A bunch of the stuff you'd put into a taco, layered into a pan like a lasagna, the order probably doesn't matter.

Not really sure about cooking time . . . Enough to melt the cheese I guess. I think a frozen pizza cooks for 45 minutes in a 450° oven, so less than that, since nothing in the "Taco Lasagna" is frozen.

Serve with lettuce, sour cream and guacamole. Enjoy!

Cooking is obviously an exhausting task, so I'm going home to have a margarita.