I recently made tacos for dinner. And then I almost regretted it.

It's not that the tacos were bad. In fact, they were probably the best I've ever made, not that I've made them more than a handful of times in my life.

The problem was that it was a Tuesday. Taco Tuesday. I unintentionally made tacos on Taco Tuesday.

I may never live down the ignominy and shame.

I don't even know if Taco Tuesday is a real thing. Do people go out of their way to eat tacos on Tuesdays?

I honestly don't know. I'm asking a serious question. Do people really make their meal choices based on clever alliteration alone?

Taco Tuesday always seemed to me like a marketing concept, along the lines of that old commercial: "As every family in the North End of Boston will tell you, Wednesday is Prince spaghetti day."

I was 9 when that commercial first aired (and it ran for a remarkable 13 years). But even the 9-year-old me doubted that every family in the North End of Boston ate spaghetti on Wednesdays. The 9-year-old me reasoned they were trying to establish the idea of spaghetti being served weekly.

The 9-year-old me was surprisingly savvy.

Incidentally, Prince spaghetti is still being made. But its slogan now is "Every day's a Prince pasta day."

Why limit spaghetti it to Wednesdays? must be the reasoning. And why limit tacos to Tuesdays?

Even though I gave the day of the week no thought before cooking the tacos, I still felt like a sucker who had fallen for crass, manipulative marketing.

I felt like less of a sucker when the tacos turned out to be so good. I was kind of surprised, because the last time I made them, a few years ago, they turned out bland and uninspired.

The difference, I think, was the spice mix. I'm not embarrassed (OK, I'm a little embarrassed) to admit that the recipe I used was published online by the Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond, though it was created by staff writer Sommer Collier.

The spices were robust and full-flavored, but also well balanced. That is key to taco perfection.

I used ground turkey, because that is what I had in the fridge, and I think it made a difference. Beef is the usual choice, of course, but beef has a certain something — let's call it "flavor" — that can compete with the spices. Ground turkey, which largely lacks a discernible flavor of its own, allows the spices to shine.

Instead of cooking it all with a large splash of water, I used a large splash of chicken stock, which added a little more of that flavor thing. And we didn't have any cheddar cheese on hand (no, nor Swiss either), so I sliced up some Manchego, a salty Spanish cheese made from sheep's milk.

Manchego, as it turns out, is terrific on tacos.

We chopped some sweet onions and cilantro, shredded lettuce and, most important, cut up fresh tomatoes from the garden. Actually, we could have just eaten the fresh tomatoes and it would have been a wonderful meal by itself.

And then we served it in hard-shell tacos. I am less embarrassed by that fact than that whole Pioneer Woman spice-recipe thing.

I know that soft tacos are popular among people who know food. I know that people say only soft tacos are authentic. I know that Ignacio Sánchez Prado, the Washington University professor who literally wrote the book on tacos, says hard-shell tacos were invented by the decidedly non-Hispanic guy who founded Taco Bell.

I don't care. I like hard-shell tacos. They're what I grew up with. They're the only kind of tacos I had — or even heard of — when I lived in Texas. You know, the "Tex" part of Tex-Mex cuisine. And to be completely honest, I think they taste better than soft-shell tacos.

The tacos, as I have already mentioned, were exceptional. I should make them more often. Any day from Wednesday to Monday will do.

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