Homemade Tortillas

It has been a minute since the last time I posted, however two new recipes have been photographed and are in the works, so more deliciousness to come. This one doesn't have a guestmouth, but it does feature cute old people; making it the first installment in my two part series on cute old people and flat breads.

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Wheat tortillas are simple, require no special or hard-to-find ingredients, and are cheap as hell even if you use really high quality flour. I used chemical treated crap, but the tortillas still came out decently tasty.

So the recipe is highly scalable but the ratio is about:

1 cup of flour to

2/3 tsp baking powder

1/3 tsp salt

1/3-1/2 cups water; more of a guideline, just add enough so you can make a soft dough

2 Tbs oil (high heat oil like rape seed, olive not reccomended)

It works best with multiples of three, but as long as you get your flour : oil : water balance right, and mix carefully you can do no wrong.

Mix the dry ingredients together fully, then add your oil. I used grapeseed, which tastes a little odd by itself and comes from Argentina and Portugal (I don't understand how exactly that works), but again it was just what I had on hand. When school rolls around we'll make more sustainable food choices.

Your flour mix should get kinda crumbly, kind of like cornmeal. Its ok to really mix it in there; don't worry about the gluten getting over developed because its just fat.

Add your water in small additions and mix carefully.

If you add all the water your dough may well be too sticky, so treat it as a guideline. When you've got a good dough going, knead it for about ten minutes. I made this recipe with 9 cups of flour, so kneading was a serious workout; but hopefully it will help me fend off that carpal tunnel syndrome.

Your dough should be so soft that you can make it into a baby.

Cover your baby in a clean, wet towel (or a clean, wet teeshirt if no one has done laudry for your kitchen cloths all summer) and let it rest for a good 15 minutes. This will let your gluten relax, and will make the dough more manageable when you're rolling it out.

Knead your dough baby for another minute, then lovingly cut it to small pieces. You want them to be a little larger than a golf ball, but much smaller than a tennis ball.

Roll them into nice even balls, then watch this cute little old lady show you how to roll them:

This is what the internet is for.

At about 29 seconds in you can observe her technique:

1. she rolls it out one direction

2. she flips in and rotates about 45 degrees

3. she repeats this process.

The key wisdom from grama is to not roll from the center, or rotate your pin mid-roll, but press ever onward, and flip the tortilla around when it needs new direction.

Then heat 'em up. We have well seasoned cast iron so we didn't really need to oil our pan. Don't let them get as brown as the picture, or they'll crack when you try to roll them.

Eat them with whatever you like, but nothing beats beans, greens, and rice in my book. The collards were straight from the garden and almost sweet, I sautéed 'em with some onions and garlic, and I threw in some beans from a food box that had been laying around for over a year. I made the rice with a little salt, lemon pepper, and nutritional yeast in the water from the start. It was delicious.

Like grama said, you can also shallow fry these to make some killer fry bread. I added a little cinnamon sugar, and I ate almost 4 to myself. Dangerously tasty.

Lasagna

Vegan Lasagna. Easily one of my favorite foods, but making it is a bit of a time commitment (so. fucking. worth it.) , so be sure that you've budgeted a good couple of hours, or make your tofu ricotta, and saucey vegetables ahead of time.

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You will need:

• Sacucy Goodness any jar of tomato sauce will do, and I made a vegan bechamel once that worked great for this
• ~2 16oz packages of tofu (buy local, Surata is awesome)
• Nutritional yeast
• Garlic
• Apple cider vinegar
• Seasonal vegetables (I used sweet peppers, zucchini, and rainbow chard)
• Mushrooms!

First, you chop your veggies:

The easiest way to stem in and seed your peppers, in my experience, is to halve them, then yank out their placenta with your bear hands. Its easier to use your fingers for this, I promise; your hands are the best tools you've got.

I like to halve my halves, halve those, then halve them once more. I like to use the verb halve, but this means cut them into sixteenth-strips if you find multiple fractions challenging.

Dice 'em up. I do them small so I can throw them in with the greens, if you overcook them they get bitter.

Decapitate your zucchini.

Halve them and cut them into little half moons; I do them thin so they cook fast.

Mushrooms take forever, so I like to dice 'em up real fine.

Run your knife down the sides of the chard stem to remove the leafy bits, which you'll chop seperately 'cuz they cook fast. Cut off the skinny tops of the stem, then cut the thick bits in half so you have spears of about the same width.

Dice up your stems kinda small, and halve your chard leaves and cut them into quarter inch by half leaf-width strips.

Sautee your mushrooms in a little olive oil over about medium heat, if you're using onion, add it here. Just sautee until they get a good brown, then add salt.

Throw in your zucchini moons, and your chard stems and let them get kinda soft (we're gonna bake 'em too, so don't make 'em mush just yet).

Toss in your chard and your peppers and bring them to temperature. This takes less than a minute.

Add in your saucy goodness until it just starts to get hot, then kill the heat.

Now press about 8 cloves of garlic in there; there's no such thing as too much.

Mash your tofu together, but don't use a spatula, it doesn't work. if you have a potato macher they work pretty well.

Season up your tofu with a little vinegar, nutritional yeast, salt, pepper, and if you have any, a little bit of miso makes it taste really good.

This is after we gave up on mashing with a spatula, and just blended it in the food processor; it was ok, but the texture was almost too smooth.

We were in a hurry so we added some water to the sauce and didn't boil the noodles. I reccomend at least soaking the noodles in warm water first. I put down a layer of noodles, spread on my tofu mix...

Add saucy veggies add more noodles and repeat.

On the top layer, just stop at the tofu mix step; we were running kinda low on noodles at this point.

Sprinkle some nutritional yeast on that.

And its ready to go into the oven. About an hour at 350. If your not boiling or saoking your noodles, I reccomend covering it with a lid or some foil.

It is important at this point that you dance to appease the lasagna goddesses. Neila is an athiest, but she was willing to indulge in the tradition for anthropological purposes.

Let it get all brown and awesome on top, like so.

Cut into cute little squares and eat quickly, or it will disappear.

UPDATE: Sean(Davenport) is the guestmouth for this blog and did a bunch of the footwork and was generally indespensible in the lasagna process, but I'm not linking to his blog because he was so snarky about it :-P. You're welcome.