Chipotle Shrimp Tacos and Chile Con Queso

Another taco night! These are just too good to pass up when it comes to having groups over. Everyone gets to customize, no one dislikes tacos, and I get to make hoards of guacamole and eat all of the leftovers. What's not to love? This time, I chose to focus my efforts on shrimp tacos, but I also included the buffalo tacos blogged about previously and the standard sauteed onions and peppers and fresh guacamole.

Make this when you're having a group and prepare anywhere from 1 to 4 fillings to satisfy everyone. Set the tacos up as a buffet and let guests build their own. This way everyone is happy! You can serve chips with salsa and guacamole to start, and also my newly presented Chile Con Queso below. This was my first time trying to make the popular cheese dip but it turned out to be the hit of the night so dig in and enjoy.

Chipotle Shrimp Tacos
None of these items take long to prepare so your best bet is to get all of the prep work of dicing, etc, out of the way for everything and then try to cook it all at once.

Ingredients:
Shrimp
Lime Juice
Chipotle Powder
Salt
Cumin
Sugar
Olive Oil

I started with raw peeled and deveined shrimp with their tail still on. Pull the tails off all of your shrimp and toss them in a bowl with about a tablespoon of lime juice for a pound of shrimp until they are well coated. Mix up sugar (about 3/4 of a teaspoon for a pound of shrimp) with half as much cumin, a sprinkle of salt, and 1/2 a teaspoon of chipotle power. Toss the shrimp in and shake well to get your shrimp coated with the spices.

Heat a small amount of olive oil in a pan over medium to medium high heat. Toss the shrimp in and stir regularly to keep from over-cooking. Flip shrimp and move them around the pan as they cook. They should only take about 4-5 minutes total to be done. Make sure that as soon as they are pink and lose the translucent color you remove them from the heat to avoid cooking them for too long or else they will get rubbery.

Chile Con Queso
And now for the dip! Since this was a new one for me I went straight to my good ol' Cooking Light to ensure that I found a good recipe. And it worked out well on many levels. Not only did my guests absolutely adore the dip, they ate it so eagerly they filled up on Queso and were not able to ever turn their full attention to the fresh guacamole... leaving more leftovers than I probably should have enjoyed!

You can mostly follow along with this recipe. The spice comes from two places - the chili powder and the chiles in one of the cans of tomatoes. I skipped out on the chili powder but still used the tomatoes with chiles. This gave it a mild spice; some bites had a kick if you ate a chile but overall it was not a particularly spicy meal. You could substitute a can of diced tomatoes without chiles instead (so use two total cans of diced tomatoes) for a very mild version of the dip.

I also found it somewhat useless to drain the tomatoes if you were going to simply add the liquid back in at the same time. I skipped that step and simply dumped the can in all at once.

If you have leftovers keep them refrigerated and when heating them scoop out what you want and put it in a bowl before microwaving. This way you avoid continually reheating and cooling the original cheese mixture several times.