Taco Bowls with Chicken

Tortillas: buy the plain flour kind, not the thick wrap-style ones — those are often reinforced to survive rolling and won't fold into a neat cup, they'll crack at the pleats instead. If you've only got corn tortillas, warm them first (a hot dry pan, a few seconds a side) so they bend rather than split; corn is more brittle than flour and skipping that warming step is the single most common reason a corn-tortilla bowl ends up in three pieces at the bottom of your ovenproof dish.

Chicken breast: diced small and fried hot enough to colour rather than steam — a crowded pan drops the temperature, the meat releases water, and you get grey simmered chicken instead of browned chicken, which matters here because browning is one of the few flavour sources in a dish this quick. If breast feels dry to you generally, thigh works the same way in this recipe and is more forgiving of a slightly overcrowded pan, since the extra fat buys you some margin.

Courgette, grated coarsely: this isn't for flavour, it's for bulk and moisture that cooks into the sauce rather than staying watery on the plate — a way of stretching 400g of chicken across four bowls without anyone noticing it's been stretched. If you don't have one, a grated carrot does the same bulking job, though it brings a sweetness courgette doesn't, so taste before you add all your salt.

Cumin, coriander, smoked paprika: this trio is doing the job a whole rack of Tex-Mex seasoning blends does commercially — warmth, citrus-green lift, and a smoky note standing in for the char you'd get from an actual wood fire or chipotle. Smoked paprika specifically: the "smoked" matters more than the "paprika" here, it's replacing a cooking method you're not using (there's no open flame under this pan), so don't swap it for sweet paprika and expect the same effect — you'll get colour without the thing the colour promised.

Tomato purée and tinned chopped tomatoes together: purée is concentrated, cooked-down tomato paste giving body and a deeper, slightly caramelised tomato note, while the tinned tomatoes bring the liquid volume and acidity. Use only one and you either get a thin, sharp sauce or a thick, one-note paste — they're doing different jobs, not duplicating each other.

Butter for the second batch of sweetcorn, olive oil for everything else: that's a genuine distinction, not a style choice. Butter browns and smells of itself at a lowish heat, which is exactly the point for that last quick fry — you want the corn kernels catching a little colour and carrying that dairy-roasted smell on top of the bowl, a contrast to the olive-oil-cooked base underneath. Any neutral oil with no smell of its own — sunflower, plain vegetable oil — is the right substitute for the olive oil earlier where its own flavour isn't the point; using a strong extra-virgin there is wasted money, you're cooking the character out of it over heat anyway.

Lime at the end, not before: acid added early fights with and dulls other flavours as everything cooks down together; added at the table, squeezed by the person eating it, it cuts fresh across the finished dish instead of blending into it. This is also just patience as an ingredient — the temptation is to throw everything in together and call it done, but the sequence (soften, brown, reduce, then fresh things last) is the only thing separating a stew from a sauce that tastes like it was all tipped in at once, which, if you're honest, is often exactly what it was.