Today we're doing a different take on our charcuterie board series—a taco board! Tacos are always on the meal-plan rotation in Katrina’s household. They’re kid-friendly, customizable, and who doesn’t love tacos?

Our taco board is essentially a deconstructed taco, or a condensed taco bar, however you choose to look at it. It’s a fun and festive way to serve your family, and feels elevated enough to serve when guests pop-in last minute around dinner time.

The Best Ingredients for a Taco Board

The best thing about charcuterie boards is that the ingredients are entirely up to you! With an ordinary dish or recipe, you’re bound by a specific ingredient list and have to be a bit more careful about what foods and flavors go well together. With a taco board, your guests are in control of the flavor, so you can give them as many traditional and unique options as you’d like!

Of course, there are a few basics that every taco board should have, such as:

• Hard taco shells

• Soft taco shells

• Tortilla chips

These different options will allow you guests to construct a more traditional-style taco, an easier hand-held taco, or even a taco salad.

From there, the possibilities are nearly endless. Some of our favorite taco board ingredients are:

• Taco seasoning

• Spicy and mild salsa

• Guacamole

• Fresh, diced avocado

• Limes

• Cilantro

• Diced tomatoes

• Diced onion

• Cotija cheese

• Corn kernels

• Diced jalapenos or serranos (with and without seeds for options!)

• Ground beef

• Shredded chicken

• Seared pork

• Sauteed mushrooms (for our vegan and vegetarian friends)

But the ingredients don’t have to stop there! Do you have a friend who puts hot sauce on everything? Serve up a little bowl of the spicy stuff. Have some pickled red onions in the fridge? They’d be delicious as a taco topping! Feel free to get as creative as you’d like, and use what you have on hand.

The Best Way to Serve a Taco Board

It’s so fun to get creative with plating and serving a charcuterie board, and a taco board is no different! Start with the board of your choice—go as big or as small as your ingredients require, or even split them into two boards if you’re serving a larger crowd.

Next, you’ll want to find the right mix of bowls, dishes, and serving utensils to make it easy for guests to pick their favorite ingredients to assemble their meal. Here are a few of our favorites:

To begin assembling your taco board, lay out all of your ingredients, boards, bowls, and serving items on the counter in front of you so you can get a feel for everything’s size, shape, and height. The key to a beautiful board is layering and taking advantage of the variations in height, so it’s helpful to take inventory of everything you’ll be assembling before you begin.

For our board, we filled small dishes with our favorite salsa and guacamole, and used the chip dish for the tortilla chips. To save space, we nestled the salsa bowl into the middle of the tortilla chips—this not only created different height structures, but it allowed guests to quickly grab a chip and dip as they were passing by.

“Limes are your best friend in a taco board, because lime is always a good garnishment. If you are using store bought salsa or guac, a fresh squeeze of lime will give it a nice, fresh taste.”— Katrina

You can take your taco shells and lay them out on the board. The key is to be very casual and have everybody just grab their own. Next, add your proteins to different bowls with a spoon set inside of the bowl for easy transfer