Tortillas!
Posted by garth on 31 Mar 2009 at 09:34 am | Tagged as: deliciousness, eating
So we had dinner last weekend at the eminently awesome and equally crowded Carta de Oaxaca restaurant in Ballard. It was, as ever, *really, really* good. And we sat at the bar and watched a woman spend the entire hour or so we were there doing nothing but crank out tortillas. By the end of the meal, we’d determined that we needed a tortilla press and some masa flour.
And then I found a new blog and ran across the following post about growing your own corn and turning it into tortillas. Man, I’m jealous of that climate. Where we live, corn is pretty hit or miss so growing our own isn’t a reliable option.
But in the meantime, I’ve got some beans and a beanpot waiting for that tortilla press to arrive. I love my beanpot. Also tortilla. And beans.
Pot O' Beans.
What does a bean pot do? Is it for the cooking o’ the beans, or the storage o’ the beans?
It’s for the cooking of the beans. You put it in the oven and let it go. When I asked the potter for the piece I told him that I wanted “a bean pot, like the one on the can of B&M baked beans” and this is what he pointed me to.
Slow cooking beans is tremendous. It’s like the total opposite of a pressure cooker. A no-pressure cooker, if you will.
I would love to make my own tortillas as well, but that will likely not happen. I tried corn last year as well, and it failed. This year I hope to head east of the mountains at harvest time and pick a trunk load to bring back and put up for the winter. We did that growing up and it was a blast!
Oh, Sinfonian, we are certainly not making them from our own corn! Yikes. We are just planning to make them fresh by hand, from masa flour from the bulk bins at our enlightened grocery store. We don’t even have a recipe! I am bucking the system and figured we could just take some flour, add water until it looks like dough, and then add some salt.