Target

Since it's the weekend when traffic tends to get a little slow I'll finally put up this entry that's been sitting around in Draft mode for a while.

Target? Yes, Target. This is the next in a series of how to put together Mexican meals using only ingredients purchased from one particular supermarket in Orange County. We'll see that it turns out to be a unique experience at each place. Target actually has a fairly wide selection of Mexican food offerings and a lot of it comes from its Archer Foods brand. Some of the following items will be available at just about any Target you go to while some will only be stocked at Targets that have a supermarket in them.

I never would've guessed that Target would have its own brand of mole sauce but they do and it's actually pretty good, with a full, smoky flavor and a chocolaty taste that fades in and out of notice but never overpowers:

Their cilantro lime rice comes from heaven. I tried mimicking Wahoo's cilantro rice on my own one time and it was a disaster. Now, with Target's help (go figure) I can finally make it at home. The guacamole mix is great too. Now every time I make guacamole I want to have a pack of this stuff to add in. Since I'm not much a bean guy I can't really recall how good the beans were.

Archer Farms has numerous kinds of salsa. I had to pick one so I went with the Guajillo Pepper Salsa:

I got these nectars from the Target at Westminster Mall (the first place I've ever seen an escalator for shopping carts):

They also have a couple different kinds of corn chips (though not as many as their salsas). These yellow corn tortilla chips had a full corn flavor and a great shape for scooping up salsa and/or guacamole:

From the frozen section I got some spicy beef tamales:

Here's my guacamole getting made:

The beans cooking:

And the rice cooking:

The guacamole in a little plastic molcajete (I still want to get a real stone molcajete someday):

And a couple shots of the dinner:

The main part of the dinner is chicken breast with the Cocoa Chile Mole sauce on it sprinkled with lots of sesame seeds:

It was pretty good, if I do say so myself . . . with a lot of help from Target and Archer Farms of course. For dessert I had a chocolate lava cake (frozen box of four, and you can heat up as many as you want) with a scoop of Häagen-Dazs Cinnamon Dulce de Leche ice cream:

All the items in this entry were purchased from Target. In the future we'll cover ways to make Mexican meals from items purchased at other markets. If you have a suggestion please leave a comment.