Fresh Tortillas

A certain cousin of mine lives dangerously close to the Italian Market in Philadelphia. Fortunately for me, and you, the "Italian" market has grown to encompass plenty of Mexican restaurants and shops, including a TORTILLARIA. Yes.

The shop was nothing but a man with a big smile and a giant cooler. "Corn tortillas?" I asked, looking around. The man reached into the plastic cooler and pulled out a paper-wrapped stack of warm, soft full moons of pure, unadulterated joy.

Excuse the sentimentality, but there is just nothing like a fresh, warm, thick, chewy, tortilla, especially as compared to the dried out, chemically preserved store-bought kind.

At any local bodega you should be able to find masa flour from which you can easily make your own tortillas. By "easily" what I mean is that the recipe is not intellectually challenging, as it involves only the purchased flour and the subsequent addition of water.

The recipe should be printed on the side of the bag and will instruct you to roll up little balls of the dough and press it with a tortilla press. Obviously I do not own a tortilla press (though maybe I should?) so when I made these last summer with a different enterprising cousin of mine, we simply rolled the ball, wrapped it with saran wrap, put it in a pan, put another pan on top of it, and stepped in the pan. Foot tortillas. Gross? Only theoretically.

They were pretty thick (I'd recommend a rolling pin, which I think we discovered, after the Irish step dance we did all over them) and a little dry, but, more delicious than store-bought, always, and to the dryness I say: smother them with cheese and beans!