Lettuce Tacos

A few weeks ago, Ty and I went out to dinner at P.F. Chang's with a gift card we'd gotten and had their famous lettuce wraps. Ty commented that we could probably make these at home to which I replied with a smile and a "mhmm" - inside I was thinking he should really know better by now.

Over Easter weekend we were trying to decide what to make for dinner Sunday for my parents since we'd just started our "cleanse" and were adjusting to eating vegetables (cause we just didn't do that much before). Ty said he was craving tacos, I somehow thought of lettuce wraps and a new (to us) invention was born: lettuce tacos.

I started by chopping up some red and orange bell peppers to saute up - Ty is obsessed with sauteed peppers lately! And then I got ready to brown and season the meat. That is when I realized we were out of taco seasoning. What I thought was a packet of taco seasoning was actually a packet of teriyaki mix...which could've worked for lettuce wraps but it wasn't what I was looking for. I'm usually a big fan of prepackaged seasoning mixes so I was really nervous to go at seasoning the meat on my own, but I did it.

I ended up using ground cumin, ground paprika, Garlic Gold nuggets, seasoning salt and pepper. Since I was nervous about the seasoning on the meat I wanted to add something else with a little flavor.

Does anyone else get annoyed cooking ground meat? I wish it already came broken up or something, I get bored tired standing there breaking it up as it cooks.

I tasted the meat and guess what....it was GOOD. I was so surprised I yelled for Ty to come down immediately to taste it and make sure it didn't just taste good to me because I really really wanted it to. He agreed, and even said he liked it better than the packet mix!

This did get me thinking though, because I noticed my taco meat was not the almost biohazard orange color that comes when you use a seasoning mix. Anyone know what makes it that color? I was thinking maybe it was the paprika but that didn't seem to add much to the color of mine?

Next step was preparing the "taco" which was so easy:

Yeah that's it.

Assembling the lettuce tacos was easy too, I went with meat first, then rice, topped with sauteed peppers. Then of course my favorite Louisiana hot sauce

The Verdict: Good and easy! We can change this up so many ways, my first thought is adding avacado mmm.  There are tons of options for toppings. At this point we were still trying to eat less cheese and really I didn't even miss it.

Have you ever tried a restaurant inspired recipe?