I have invented (not really) a new type of food that I’m calling sludge with beans.
Yes, that is what it looks like. Yes, I ate it. Yes, it is delicious.
What happened?
I was feeling down, so I wanted to make nachos. Nachos are a good pick-me-up food if you are feeling depressed. They’re not incredibly difficult to make, since it’s just taco meat and some queso.
When I make nachos, I overload them with various ingredients so that my time relaxing later can be justified as “nacho-induced food coma” rather than “rotting-in-bed-style depression”. However, this style of nacho overloading frequently leaves me with leftover nachos that do not taste as great the second time. Reheated tortilla chips either get too soggy or too crispy with no middle ground.
This is where my goblin brain came up with a solution.
What if I mixed all of my nacho ingredients together, sans tortilla chip, to make the ultimate dipping sauce?
Obviously this sounds great. There is actually nothing wrong with this line of thinking. All of the ingredients get mixed up and heated evenly when you make nachos, so pre-mixing the ingredients would just save a step. Right?
Here were the mistakes that I made implementing this idea:
- I didn’t have ground beef to make taco meat with
- So I used a plant-based meat instead
- I bought a pre-seasoned bag of black beans
- (cans of beans cost just as much)
- (I didn’t want to spend a long time cooking black beans)
When you cook plant-based meat alternatives, then add taco seasoning (I am lazy and do not have all of the spices to make a homemade taco seasoning), you get a watery, paste-y, taco-flavored consistency. Even though I had done this before, for some reason my main source of protein for the meal was looking extra sludge-like.
I added in the beans next. Which, honestly, I did with too much haste. I could have strained the beans so they didn’t emerge from the bag in a slimy, black ooze.
But I did not.
I added more sludge to an already sludge-y looking pot.
Trying to salvage this, I let the mixture simmer for a while to thicken the sauces that formed. Perhaps I can get this back to normal… ish, I thought.
That didn’t work.
I had a pot full of thick, viscous, taco-flavored fake meat and beans.
So I made sure the tomatoes I added (think pico-de-gallo) were not wet or sauce-laden. This might have helped. It probably didn’t.
Oh well.
The last ingredient that needed to be added was cheese. Giving up, I went all-in and added a ton of queso dip. As this melted, it became what can only be described as slurry.
The pot was warm and smelled like nachos. I was grossed out by the looks, but man, I was hungry.
I poured some sludge into a bowl. It took more effort and patience than I thought it would.
I used a tortilla chip to scoop a bit of sludge from the bowl to my mouth.
What I cooked had the consistency of refried beans. 3/10.
But it tasted just like my nachos normally do. 9/10.
Not bad!
I ate the whole bowl (I was hungry) and stored the leftover sludge for later (sunk cost fallacy).
I begrudgingly had sludge the next night. It tasted just fine, if not better, after being reheated. The consistency was worse the second time around.
Will I do this again? No. I will actively be trying to avoid this. I will not use pre-seasoned beans and I will stick with ground beef for my homemade nacho recipes.
If I end up with the sludge, I’ll probably eat it anyway. I guess it wasn’t that bad.