Necessity - Mother of Invention

Saturday is my normal grocery shopping day. I usually get out close to noon and return home around 4 after my many stops. Yesterday, due to the weather (snow), I chose not to shop. Needless to say that means we are a little on the low side with certain groceries, namely butter and eggs. We don't buy very much convenience foods, so that means cooking from scratch on a lot of dishes. Last night I made a pot of pinto beans and thought this morning, we'll have cornbread to go with the beans.

Wrong! No eggs. Can't wait for my baby chicks to grow up and start producing eggs. This will not be a problem. Well I could make biscuits but alas no butter and who wants to eat biscuits without butter. What to fix, what to fix?

Aha, we'll have a Mexican meal. You don't need butter or eggs to make tortillas. Here are the results. My husband contributed to this meal by marinating the chicken and grilling on our inside electric grill. I lived in the Los Angeles area for several years and had many ladies who contributed to teaching me how to authentically cook Mexican food. It's now my favorite food. I really like homemade fresh tamales but they are alot of work. So I settle for making the simpler things. I hadn't made tortillas in a while because my husband had bought me a tortilla maker that finally bit the dust. I hadn't made them by hand because usually they don't turn out like the store bought ones in a circle. But there is such a difference between homemade tortillas than store-bought. Have you ever had a freshly baked slice of bread - kind of like that in comparison to store bought bread.

The tools - tortilla warmer, bottle for rolling pin (don't know where my children put my regular one), a comal (in Spanish) or griddle (in southern).
Here's a link to the recipe I used for the tortillas.
http://www.texasrollingpins.com/tortillarecipeprint.html.

You can buy the tortilla warmer at most grocery stores. It keeps the tortillas warmer longer than just stacking them on a plate. Roll your tortillas out on a little bit of flour on the countertop and cook just for a minute or two on each side on the comal. Preheat your comal like you would for pancakes. The tortilla will start to bubble up and it's time to flip. You only want a few brown spots on each side.



















Here's a tortilla ready to take off the comal and the final result a soft taco with all the fixings, beans, chicken, salsa (chili) and cheese.
Necessity the mother of inventions - YEAH!!

And the added blessing, I have pinto beans to put in my freezer for the next time we are eating Mexican or whatever dish we need pinto beans. The plastic lids are from old mayonnaise jars. You can purchase plastic lids for canning jars or you can just save the lids from your old mayonnaise jars.