Beef Tacos

Living here among the cattle ranchers every now and then we are lucky enough to be gifted a choice cut in exchange for a friendly favor or honestly for no reason at all. That's how I came to have a couple pounds of beef cheeks in the freezer. Usually I would go right to a long cooking stew or braise but I felt like something a little different.
Trolling around the internet I came across famous fusion taco chef Roy Choi's recipe for beef cheek tacos and thought I give it a try. Choi marinates the cleaned beef overnight in a brine of 2 TB Kosher salt, juice of 1/2 lemon and 1/2 orange and 1 lime, 1/2 cup sugar. 3 peeled and smashed cloves of garlic, 1/2 cup red wine vinegar, 1 1/2 whole dried guajillo chiles, 1/2 cup whole chiles de arbol, 1 cup rough chopped cilantro and 2 quarts of water all brought to a boil to dissolve the salt and sugar and left to cool before adding the beef. I didn't have the chiles Choi specified so I used what dried chiles I had along with a fresh jalapeño cut in half. I left the meat in the brine uncovered overnight in the fridge and in the morning brought the whole mixture up to a boil and then allowed the pot to simmer for about an hour.
 I removed the meat from the brine (discard the brine) and let it cool before storing it in the fridge to wait for dinner.
Choi makes a piquant salsa verde to chop his tacos but it's hardly time time of year to easily find tomatillos and honestly James isn't that big on salsa so I improvised with a creamy guacamole and a crisp Latin style curtido, a quick pickled marinated salad of cabbage, carrots, jalapeños, and onions.
For my version I thinly sliced 1/2 cabbage, 2 carrots, 1/2 a white onion and minced a jalapeño. I tossed the vegetable together and poured over a hot brine of 3 TB cider vinegar, 2 tsp sugar, and 1 tsp kosher salt (brought to a boil and poured over the cut vegetables). After an hour covered in the fridge the crunchy salad was the perfect topper for crisply fried meat on gently warm corn tortillas.
Not exactly Christmassy but a fine winter treat none the less.