Walnut tacos?

It's been a long time and all of that. I don't know about anyone else, but I just don't enjoy those long, chatty intros when what I want is the recipe, so I'm going to get down to it.

I keep seeing recipes for tacos with walnuts as the basis for the protein "meat" main topping. It sounded well, weird, but I got more and more curious. So I read an few and then tweaked and changed here and there. Here's what I came up with:

Walnut taco meat:
1 cup raw walnuts
1/2 cup sun dried tomatoes, soaked
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp dried chipotle powder OR 1/2 of 1 canned chipotle
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 T oil (I used a canola/olive blend)
4 oz fresh white mushrooms, sliced or diced

Soak the sun dried tomatoes in some very hot water for 20 minutes.

While those are soaking, put the oil in a small frying pan and heat it a bit over medium heat. Add the mushrooms to the pan with a pinch of salt and fry for 3 minutes, stirring once. Turn off the heat.

Drain the sun dried tomatoes and discard the soaking water. (Or keep it for soup if you're making some soon, it's yummy) Put the sun dried tomatoes, the walnuts, the spices, the salt, and all the mushrooms in the food processor. Run for 3 seconds with a regular blade, then check the texture. We're aiming for a texture similar to ground beef. I usually have to scrape the sides down and run it one more time for 3-5 seconds.

And that's it. We served this up on tortillas with tomatoes, green onions, minced cilantro, hot sauce, and I added some plain unsweetened yogurt to mine (I like it just as well as sour cream and don't keep that stuff in the house, so yogurt it was.) We thought these might need refried beans on them as well but it was totally unnecessary, these were delicious as is! It's so nice when something so good for you turns out so tasty. Mike and I give this two thumbs way up, plus it was easy so we'll actually put this one into work day rotation. Next time I'll just start the tomatoes soaking in tap water in the morning and let them soak until I'm ready to make dinner, which will make this even faster, maybe 20 minutes tops to pull together. This is enough filling for 8-10 small tacos.

The walnut meat after processing. 

The delicious end result!