Easy dinner recipes: Spicy beef nachos

This late in the summer, many of us are squeezing in last-minute family vacations or weekend adventures before the start of the school year. We’re also fully into the dog days of the season. It’s not a time for leaving the oven on any longer than necessary.

Both of these realities mean it’s a perfect time of year for a snack dinner. What’s that, you ask? Like breakfast for dinner, a snack dinner is a gentle way to break the rules, and it’s also sort of like late-night college study food. It’s easy, (usually) cheesy, and pretty much always eaten with your hands. It’s not necessarily healthy, but we can return to vegetables and salads next week.

Nachos make a perfect snack dinner. They’re quick, easily adaptable, and, as there aren’t too many variables, even easier to perfect. Below, you’ll find nachos topped with subtly orange colby jack cheese (Are they even nachos without orange cheese?) and spicy ground beef, but you can easily adapt this recipe to the ground meat of your choice. You can even substitute a few cans of drained black or pinto beans if you’d prefer your snack dinner to be vegetarian.

Any way you build the nachos, the technique is essentially the same. Brown the beef with taco seasoning and let that seasoning form a flavorful fond (the drippings and bits of food left in the skillet) with the rendered fat. Use brine from a jar of pickled jalapenos to deglaze (simmer and scrape up the browned bits) the pan and add piquant acidity. Sandwich this meat mixture between layers of chips and cheese on a large rimmed baking sheet to maximize both topping coverage and ready-to-crisp surface area. Pop the baking sheet under the broiler for just a few minutes to melt the cheese — that’s all the oven time you need. Finish with pickled jalapenos and any other toppings you’ve got around, such as salsa, sour cream, cilantro and avocado.

Serve the nachos straight from the sheet pan with plenty of napkins. Now is also not the time of year to spend an hour cleaning the kitchen after dinner.