Today’s post is from Susan.  She calls herself a wimpy vegetarian, but I can assure you she is not.  She’s an award winning cook!

She and I have so much in common – a first career in marketing, an education in cooking, a love of vegetables and gardens.

Today, she’s sharing a great recipe for homemade tortillas.  I love homemade tortillas – they are soft and chewy and so fun to make.  {I have to admit, I envy her tortilla press}.

Thank you, Susan, for sharing this great recipe!   And for more not-scary vegetarian and plant-based meals, head on over to The Wimpy Vegetarian.

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I’m an only child. I didn’t have any of my own children, and didn’t even get around to marriage until after what my mom would call an unbelievable long singlehood. Instead, I chose a line of work that moved me around the country to cities I’d only read about, and involved travel to exciting places and some not-so-much. In short, I was drawn to the horizon of life and new possibilities that beckoned, and never really felt comfortable putting down roots for long, nor yearned for the family life. So when I finally settled down, I came to my marriage somewhat empty handed in terms of exes and kids. My husband, on the other hand, brought a close relationship with two step-children from an earlier marriage. They were all grown up, married, working, and managing their lives very well. I liked them very much, and always looked forward to getting together with them.

And then they started to have kids of their own.

First there was one, soon there were two more, and now we have five grandchildren ranging from 8 to 5-years-old with another couple of boys, ages 2 and 5, in the wings. But that’s another story. This not only required some major adjusting for me, it began to change my life in ways I would never have predicted as they each found a home with me in my life and my heart. As they’ve grown older, much to my surprise, spending time with them in my kitchen is becoming one of my favorite things to do. So these days I’m always on the lookout for something we can make together in the kitchen, and my next thing to test-drive with them is making homemade tortillas.

Tortillas are really just a simple un-yeasted bread, and have been around for hundreds of years. Tortillas are typically made with masa harina, ground cornmeal from dried corn kernels cooked and soaked in limewater, or wheat-based flour. I wanted to make flour ones, and wanted them a little thicker than the flour tortillas you buy in the store, as I decided to have the tortillas on the side as bread at dinner. Oh, and I wanted to use a tortilla press, since I know the kids would have a lot of fun pressing out tortillas, and I’m not sure how they’d all do with rolling them out. This is was where I ran into trouble.

If you research making tortillas and tortilla presses, everything you read will say to only use a tortilla press with corn tortillas; flour tortillas must be rolled out. I can speak from personal, frustrating, experience as to why. The flour tortillas will stick to any and all surfaces. I tried both wax paper and foil. I floured the wax paper. I floured the dough before pressing. All with the same gooey, sad result. I persevered on, and finally tried pressing them between wax paper and then freezing for one hour. At that point, they were hard enough to easily peel the wax paper off and toss on a lightly oiled griddle. The result is a terrific tortilla that’s perfect for kids to make in the kitchen – I can’t wait to do this with them on their next visit!

 

 

{Susan}

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About Susan Pridmore, the Wimpy Vegetarian:  I live with my husband just outside San Francisco, along with a struggling vegetable garden, several shelves of cookbooks I haven’t even begun to cook through, and thousands of clippings of food ideas and recipes. I left a busy work-life to go to culinary school a few years ago, and started moving towards cooking and eating mostly vegetarian almost two years ago. I teach occasional classes on cooking mostly vegetarian, have done a little catering for a local Agricultural Land Trust to raise money to save local farmland, and have won a number of recipe development contests on the Food52 site.  But my biggest passion is the blog I started last September, The Wimpy Vegetarian, that shares mostly vegetarian dishes as I continue to move away from a meat/fish-centric diet. And now that my grandchildren are old enough to be interested in helping me in the kitchen, I’m newly focused on making dishes they can help me with.