My Cinco de Mayo debut turned more into a Mother’s Day dinner. I had to travel for work on Sunday. And because of Mother’s Day, we did our trap shooting on Saturday. That didn’t leave a lot of time to honor mom and have a fancy dinner party. Even though I don’t consider tacos fancy, the prep work can be extensive.

The meat I chose for tacos was beef. This was not just any cut, this was a challenge. It is cheek meat. I had a 10 pound block of beef cheeks. These are filleted of the head. You can imaging how many head it takes to make 10 pounds. A lot of those pieces are pretty tough and gristly. To make matters worse, the trimming was mostly done, but there were bits of bone, the inside of cows mouth, globs of blood and membrane still remaining. Sound good yet?

I personally don’t care for the meat. Mostly, I have had it when we prepare the whole beef head. I am not real interested in tough and greasy tacos. I can’t say the same for my wife. The fact of the matter is, this was meat that my father-in-law purchased and he liked it too. When we cleaned out his freezer last year, this was one of the items we packed away in the freezer.

I had plans to put some smoke on it, but I plum ran out of time. I made salsa and guacamole and the ensalada (the fixings) for the tacos. The plan was to pair it with the beer. What did I learn about the keg?

I did quite a bit of farting around with the carbonation. I had visions of simply applying CO2 and it would be ready to go. My first go was flat. Then I switched the inlet and outlet fittings to for the gas down the draw tube at higher pressure. I pressurized the keg four or five different days as it was not holding 20 psi. It is holding something less than that but not the full amount.

So, my fittings are leaking slightly somewhere and I didn’t feel like I got the carbonation that I wanted. Everyone else said that it was good, so maybe it was alright. It just wasn’t quite what I had in mind. That being said, I think it is probably worth pursuing some more experimenting and probably some new o-rings

End Your Programming Routine: Believe it or not, I am somewhat of a risk taker. Throwing a dinner with things that you have never done before is risky, especially if you won’t know the final results until you are serving. The tacos tasted great and the beer was a good compliment. I didn’t have the time to make the sides that I wanted, but we had plenty of taco fodder. I think it came out fine, even though I wanted things to be different. And, I will never quit pushing my limits. I find that motivating, inspiring and exciting.