The Frito Salad

So, I found it. The Frito Salad.

It is really just a taco salad, but with Fritos. And it took me FOREVER to find it because it isn’t actually CALLED “The Frito Salad”. After a deep scour of Mom’s salad cookbook, I found that it’s the “Guacamole Salad”, calling for two cups of broken Fritos. Fine by me, but I do think it should have higher billing on the recipe card.

What got me excited as a kid was having REAL snack food at dinner. We weren’t allowed to eat “real” snacks, ever, and it was the most depriving thing in the world other than not being allowed to watch Saturday morning cartoons.

We were the kids with no fun food at their house.

Starving after school? Have some carrots. An apple would be fine,. Some celery with peanut butter would stick to our ribs, and well, you know, celery has snack-crunch.

“There’s some cheese or yogurt in the fridge,” Mom would say, her back to us, washing lettuce for our dinner salad, chopping carrots for steaming, seasoning a chicken to go in the oven, washing the pots and pans from her meal prep.

After school Chips? No. Cheetos? NO WAY. Cookies? Nope. Those things never even made it into the basket on Thursday marketing day.

“HAVE SOME FRUIT.”

Frito salad night though - boy, it was hard to eat around the garden vegetables and lettuce, but that extra salty snacky crunch in our dinner made it mostly worth it.

I made it tonight for dinner. I added ground beef and forgot the Tobasco, but otherwise, it tasted like Frito Salad Night!

Many thanks to Fritos for their contribution to our snack dinners in the 80s.