Weekend Cooking: Taco Chronicles (Netflix Documentary)

How has your week gone? We've been holding up quite well, and I'm enjoying the challenge of making nutritious and delicious meals from the pantry and freezer, while being conscious of the need to use my food wisely.

This last week's dinners were lentil soup with spinach, chicken grain bowls, pork stir-fry, and broccoli mac and cheese. Our freezer is full of vegetables, fruits, and meats as well as homemade sauces I made last summer. Our pantry contains flour, beans, rice, dried fruit, oatmeal, and a variety of oils and vinegars.

Even if we work our way through the fresh food in the refrigerator, we'll still have plenty to keep the wolf from the door.

As many of you are, I'm sure, we're watching a ton of news. Last night, though, I needed a break and found Taco Chronicles on Netflix. This is a six-part documentary about different styles of tacos found throughout Mexico. The Netflix original series is in Spanish, but there are English subtitles.

Each episode is only about a half hour and focuses on one region of Mexico and one style of taco. I watched the first two -- "Pastor" and "Carnitas" -- and here are my thoughts.

From a viewer's perspective: Taco Chronicles will absolutely make you crave tacos and perhaps a trip to Mexico. We meet restaurant and food stand owners and see them dishing up delicious-looking tacos to their customers. We also learn a little bit about the history of each type of taco and get a peek at how they are made.

We're not, however, given recipes or instructions for reproducing the tacos from the featured cooks. Note too that, though we visit a number of taco stands and restaurants in each episode, Taco Chronicles doesn't provide many details for planning your next vacation. The episodes I watched were enjoyable, and I definitely learned something, but I wasn't tempted to immediately binge-watch the rest of the series.

From a filming perspective: To my unprofessional eyes, Taco Chronicles was well edited and nicely filmed. The food shots are lovely, and the people we meet are definitely passionate about their tacos.

Recommendation: If you have some time to kill and a Netflix subscription, give Taco Chronicles a shot. Just go in with the idea that the series is more a celebration of all things taco than it is travel guide, restaurant review, or cooking show.

Here's the trailer. Note that Netflix provides English subtitles but I was unable to find an embeddable trailer that included those subtitles.

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