Chicken and Steak Tacos with Sour Cream Salsa

The tried and true traditional beef tacos are always a great weeknight meal and an old standby we like to fall back on every few weeks for dinner.

Of course it goes without saying, we've found plenty of ways to jazz up that old fashioned classic, from making double-deckers (a softshell taco placed inside a hardshell taco and held together with a layer of beans or sour cream) to our fantastic pulled pork tacos for Cinco De Mayo.

This week we had some ground chicken in the freezer that needed to be used, and I didn't feel like burgers or a loaf, so we decided to try out a new twist on tacos. Besides 1 pound of thawed ground chicken, here are our primary ingredients:

That's about half each of a red onion, green bell pepper, and both poblano and anaheim peppers. If you want it spicier you could do jalapeno or serrano instead, but we didn't need to, because we'll also be making a delicious sauce to go on top.

First the onions and peppers are sauteed in a few teaspoons of oil, and then we add in the chicken to brown (or in this case more accurately "whiten").

Here the chicken is getting its proper coloration and cooking through on the sides, so it's almost time to throw in our seasonings.

Here we're using a combination of store-bought chicken taco seasoning, fresh lime, and about a cup of homemade stock. We put the cover on and let it simmer for 15 minutes or so until it reduces down.

Remember that sauce I mentioned? Well that's actually the real star of this show. This consists of two chopped roma tomatoes, half a diced red onion, a whole diced serrano pepper, two or three handfuls of roughly chopped fresh cilantro, the juice of one freshly squeezed lime, and about half a tub of sour cream.

The end result was good, but I wasn't satisfied with the texture and wanted something more along the lines of salsa, so I threw it in the blender! It came out perfect - not too spicy or too calm, and every bite gets you all the flavors of the veggies and lime.

Our tacos are nearly ready, but of course we need a few more additions first. To match our unique tacos we decided to ditch the traditional iceberg lettuce and go with freshly shredded cabbage instead. We're using colby jack cheese, but pepper jack or any others would be great as well.

Now that the filling is cooked through, we plop some down on a few warmed up tortillas.

Next up we add on some shredded cheese and cabbage.

Now it's time for the sour cream salsa!

Here are two delicious finished chicken tacos. These turned out great, and are less like a Wednesday night dinner and more like a Mexican restaurant meal.

We had lots of sour cream sauce and cabbage left, so we needed to have a second meal to use them with. We decided to go for a double helping of tacos, but this time using steak instead of ground chicken! We marinated thin steak medallions in a mixture of lime, oil, water, and mexican seasonings for a few hours, then sliced the meat into small strips.

Like the night before, we're first cooking peppers and onions, then throwing in the meat to sear on each side.

Instead of using stock and taco seasonings, this time we used our marinade to flavor the filling. Remember to cover and turn up the heat when adding more marinade at the end to make sure you kill any bacteria, since it's been in contact with raw meat for hours.

Here are our finished steak tacos with sour cream sauce, ready to be eaten!