Tuesday, February 24, 2009

National Tortilla Chip Day

Did you know that Feb. 24 is National Tortilla Chip Day? It's also National Pancake Day but we had to pick and choose which to celebrate and tortilla chips won out.


What better way to celebrate National Tortilla Chip Day than to build up some super delicious nachos!!!! And we did it the only way we know how - cheap!

We started with the tortilla chips - purchase on sale for $0.89/16 oz. bag at Rancho Market (a local Hispanic market/store with incredible sales prices on stuff like chips and produce)


On top of the chips went the delicious cheesy sauce. We made this by heating up a jar of pasteurized process cheese sauce (we usually use a slab of generic Velveeta-like stuff, but they were out, so the jarred generic stuff it was). We added a can of tomatoes and green chilies (commonly called Ro-Tel, of course we used generic) and some bean flour (dried beans ground up in a wheat grinder), as well as chili powder and cumin for a hearty and flavorful cheese sauce.


Next up was some homemade guacamole, made from avocados that were purchased on sale at Rancho Market for $0.33 each. I mashed three avocados and added some lemon juice, parsley, minced onion, garlic, hot sauce, and salt.


After the guacamole came leaf lettuce, purchased at Ream's for $0.69 per bunch, and tomato - 4 lbs for $0.99 at Rancho.


Lastly came the cheese, $2.50 per pound on sale. Now, I know that somehow, somewhere I can get cheese for cheaper than that, but I'm having trouble finding it. Meanwhile, this was the cheapest we could get, and believe me, it's cheaper than we could get at Wal-Mart.


This fun, delicious meal cost us under $3, plus we have plenty of cheap ingredients left for other great foods later!

Don't forget to enter my giveaway for homemade chocolate truffles here. Giveaway ends Friday evening. :-)

5 comments:

Rachelle S said...

That looks good! I'm jealous, our avocados are on sale for .89 each this week! I miss Mr's. old job where he'd bring bags of them home from people's yard, after he did their tree work.

Meg said...

What fun! I didn't know it was National tortilla chip day!

Anonymous said...

Try buying your cheese at Sam's Club. It's closer to $2 a pound.

American Homemaker said...

I'm not really a fan of velveeta.

I buy the HUGE can of nacho cheese sauce at walmart for like $7 and it's condensed, so you get billions of nachos :) I put it in my crockpot to warm and serve.

You can freeze the cheese you don't use. I do this for potlucks and parties a lot. I pair the $7 cheese with a GIANT bag of tortilla chips from costco ($4) and I have more than enough nachos for a huge crowd :)

Michelle said...

Great, now I am craving nachos....and do I have tortilla chips? NO! Thanks.

:-)