Years ago when I was visiting my sister-in-law, she made taco soup for dinner one night. I’m a very picky eater so I usually don’t eat new stuff, but I tried it. And I loved it! So I asked her for the recipe, which is SO quick and easy, and I’ve made it all the time ever since. It has been kind of rainy and cool here for a while, so I wanted to make some familiar comfort food. On our last grocery order I tried to find the ingredients to make my taco soup.

It was not easy. First, here’s the recipe for M’s taco soup:

• 2 cans Rotel tomatoes

• 1 can red beans

• 1 can chili beans

• 1 can shoepeg corn

• 1 can Mexicorn (they’ve changed the name of this recently and I can’t remember it!)

• 1 pkg taco mix

• 1 lb ground beef

You simply open the cans/pkgs, dump them in a large pot, brown the ground beef and add that in. Add some water (I usually do about 1 cup). When it’s hot enough, it’s ready. You can fill your bowl up with Fritos, put the soup over the top, sprinkle some grated cheese on, and it’s wonderful. I’m pretty sure that M’s original recipe called for 3 cans of Rotel tomatoes (but I adjusted it) and a package of Ranch dressing mix (which I omitted bc I’m picky).

Of course, now that I made some warm comfort food/soup, it’s been sunny and pretty here today. Oh well, you can’t win them all, and you definitely can’t predict the weather in Zürich. When I took the photos, I had already put the red beans in the pot along with the first can of diced tomatoes. Turns out the diced tomatoes were more like tomato sauce, so I stopped by the grocery store on my walk and picked up some fresh tomatoes to dice up and throw in instead of adding the second can. The can in the back is some kind of white bean in a tomato sauce, which is the closest thing I could find to chili beans. The chili sauce on the right is to add for the chili part of the chili beans. And there’s no shoepeg or Mexi corn here, so I just got regular sweet. corn. I ordered 1 unit of fresh chili peppers, and I got that whole bunch - and I’m not even sure I’m going to put them in there. But they look pretty in the photo!

So far, it seems to be a close approximation. Now if I can find some enchilada sauce somewhere, I can make L’s taco meat recipe (but without the homemade tortillas). Guten Apetit!