Pucker Up!

Several years ago my lovely wife introduced me to a new spice blend.  I love spice!  I'm always adding peppers, our homemade tabasco sauce, and salsa to everything.  This spice blend was new to me.  As the colors on the label might suggest, it is from Mexico.

It is called "Tajin," pronounced "ta HEEN"  As the color might suggest, it has pepper in it, but I don't think you can really call it HOT.  Tangy is the better adjective as the lime in it steals the show.  It makes you pucker up, kind of like a big juicy dill pickle does.  This stuff is delicious.  Something a little different is what this spice is used on.  The label calls it "fruit seasoning." The only seasoning I've ever eaten on fruit was to put salt on my watermelon.  You have to trust me on this.  Tajin is great on apples, pears, watermelon, mango, and citrus.  It is also great on non-fruit items like cucumbers.

The other day I was having a craving for it and so we decided to just make some ourselves.  The label ingredients are: salt, chili powder, dehydrated lime juice and silicon dioxide.  Easy enough.  We assembled our ingredients:

I cut up some pears and then got some kosher salt, lime and chili powder.  There are numerous types of chili powders and the label doesn't specify which one, so Tricia mixed it up and used half regular chili powder and half Ancho chili powder.  To make it simply use equal parts of salt and chili powder.  In our case, we used 1 Tablespoon of each.

Then, simply sprinkle on top of the fruit and cut your lime into quarters and squeeze one of the lime quarters over the top of the sprinkled fruit.

Now, we're ready to snack!  Here is the money shot before Tricia and I make them disappear!

I'm not embarrassed to say I licked the plate clean.