Poached chicken breasts, highly seasoned, shredded and stuffed into warmed soft tortillas and dressed with red onion, pico de gallo, cilantro and avocado, or your favorite classic toppings, finished with a squeeze of lime.

Shredded Chicken Soft Tacos - Tacos de Pollo

My husband, aka The Cajun, is pretty set in his taco consumption and not very willing to branch out.

Seasoned ground beef on crunchy taco shells and dressed with a little bit of tomato and lettuce and lots of cheese. That's it.

Me, I'm open to pretty much any variation out there. Shredded beef. Ground turkey. Ground chicken. Shredded chicken. Shrimp. Fish. Steak. Pork. Even potatoes and eggs. I love them all!

American-style tacos made with slow braised, seasoned ground beef or turkey.

Tex-Mex American-Style Taco Meat

I love American style Mexican food, and I'm certainly not opposed at all to using seasoning packets to season them.

They are 100% convenient and I usually keep a few on hand, but sometimes I also like to change up the ingredient amounts for different kinds of dishes.

I've tried a few different ones, including generics, and the brand that I like the most personally is Taco Bell Original (#affiliate) because it seems to have the best combination of flavors for me, but hey... I also enjoy their tacos on occasion when I'm hungry and I just want a quick snack!

Known as Mulitas in Mexican culture, highly seasoned chicken is sandwiched between homemade corn tortillas with shredded cheese and finished with guacamole or avocado, sour cream, pico de gallo or salsa, or whatever your favorite toppings are.

Chicken Tortilla Sandwiches (Mulitas)

I don't remember where I first heard about mulitas, and, in fact, when I first did, I mistakenly assumed it was just another name for a quesadilla!

The reason for that is that I usually make my quesadillas the same way as these mulitas.

Although both can have very similar fillings, some of the differences I've seen between quesadillas and mulitas include:

Highly seasoned grilled shrimp served on grilled fresh corn tortillas with salsa fresca, onion, cilantro and fresh lime.

Tex-Mex Grilled Shrimp Tacos

I love any kind of Mexican or Tex-Mex food, though outside of the usual standards of tacos, burritos and quesadillas - we pretty much go out more often than making it at home. The main reason is I have an adventurous palate and almost never order the same thing.

The Cajun, well he's the total opposite and almost never steers away from the crunchy beef tacos. It's kinda funny really, because he'll study the menu for awhile, but then when the server arrives, it's always crunchy tacos!

Corn tortillas, stuffed with a seasoned, cooked shredded chicken or beef, rolled, fried to crisp and garnished with lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream and fresh cilantro.

Mexican-Style Rolled Chicken Tacos

Depending on who you're talking to, these are sometimes known as taquitos, Spanish for small tacos, flautas, which is Spanish for flute, or simply rolled tacos.

I have read that taquitos are generally smaller than flautas and usually made with corn tortillas, and flautas are longer and usually made with flour tortillas, though both are prepared much the same and sometimes one or the other of them are made with the other kind of tortilla!

Mexican Shredded Beef

 

Tacos made with a shredded, well-seasoned Mexican style beef roast.

Mexican Shredded Beef for Tacos

Until I started reading up on them, I never knew that authentic Mexican tacos were made using shredded beef, rather than the Americanized version of Tex-Mex style ground beef tacos we are all accustomed to in the United States, and yes, even in our Mexican restaurants.

The other day I was at the grocery store and it happened to be one of the days that they reduce meat, because I noticed lots of yellow stickers from across the aisle in the meat case. So, I wandered over to see what they had and found a great chuck roast for just a couple bucks.