Trying for Tortillas Flat and Round

Perhaps you read my post about how we’ve decided not to buy veggie stock/broth anymore, but instead have resolved to make our own.

Today was a new experiment.

We’ve been buying Buena Vida tortillas for about five years. And we’ve been very loyal customers, since we haven’t cared for the organic brands we tried (except for the spelt ones, which were simply too pricey for regular consumption), and the other non-organic brands all seemed to have trans fats.

And just incidentally, here are the ingredients of Buena Vida brand tortillas: bleached enriched flour, water, modified potato starch, glycerine, wheat gluten, salt, baking powder, potassium sorbate, cellulose gum, monoglycerides, fumeric acid.

Now I’m sure that most of those things have some sort of packaging purpose, but yeah—I’ll think I’d rather have my tortillas sans glycerine, or anything sorbate, gum or acid.

If you think about it, tortillas are simple to make, right? Flour and water and a little salt? All over the Spanish-speaking world, people make their own tortillas, so why not us?

I confess that this is yet another foray into making something that I probably would have been acquainted with long ago, if I hadn’t been raised in a family where dinner came in various types of boxes and plastic bags from the freezer.

So, no. I’ve never made tortillas in my life. Nor have I witnessed them being made by someone else.

I started by checking out Laurel’s Kitchen, which is a necessary text for learning about nutrition, being a vegetarian and basic cooking techniques that you can then modify for a more adventurous palate. (They tend toward a rather 70s hippie blandness that many find a little … overly crunchy.)

I skipped the recipe for corn tortillas, finding that at the end she points to the basics of chapati manufacture as a good way to make regular flour tortillas.

Simple:
Electric skillet on high
3 cups of flour (I used multi-purpose white, bought in bulk)
1 cup water
1 teaspoon of salt
2 tablespoons of oil

Mix then knead until smooth. Then pinch off balls of dough; spread with fingers from the center and then roll out until thin and round. Throw into the skillet until lightly browned in spots. Flip over until done.

The first few I made were definitely nowhere near round, and had too-thin spots or holes in the center. Then some were too thick. But I quickly got better at it. Here are the results:

Ta-da!

Ate one with leftover cajun black bean stew that has passed for an adequate burrito stuffer, topped with freegan salsa and vegan sour cream. Not bad at all.

Sorry Buena Vida. I think we’ll be making our own from now on.

Soup Night

We’ve been having “soup night” for a few years now. Every Tuesday, while Mr. Meadowhawk goes for our weekly grocery trip, I make some kind of soup that will be palatable to our youthful household members: tomato, carrot, potato, veggie, squash, corn chowder, split pea… you name it.

In this house, waste is a serious taboo, and soup is, of course, one of the best ways to use up vegetables that are about to go irretrievably bad. If the spinach is getting slimy, then it’s got to be one of the ingredients. Likewise if the carrots are starting to go soft or the potatoes are starting to grow. Leftovers that have been sitting in the fridge for a few days get added as needed. Being “in the mood” for some dish takes a back seat to making sure that not a scrap of food is sacrificed to the rot-demons.

the motley crew

Tonight, it’s about using up seriously damaged cans of tomato paste and purée that I picked up at the SuperOne yesterday on their tiny little discount shelf when I was there to get cat food on a coupon. I’m a little nervous about some nagging memory of how one can get botulism from dinged cans, but I’m pretty sure that was if they’re expanding from the inside. These were obviously crushed in transit. I hope we don’t die. 😉

Other ingredients that needed to be used right away: a garden onion that was starting to rot on the outer layers, and a scrap of onion and the leftover white rice from last night.

Soup is also one of the cheapest meals aside from rice and beans that can be made for family consumption. And I’m a huge fan. I could eat it every day. (Mr. Meadowhawk makes fun of my enthusiasm sometimes: I pronounce it with emphasis on the P… souPah.)

I should say here that if I can consider myself a cook at this point, it’s truly something new. I only taught myself to cook in the last five years, and I’m over 40. I didn’t grow up in a household where people cooked from scratch, and I’ve spent most of my adult life as a single or semi-single woman who often lived with others who did nearly all the cooking. I just never took the time to really pay attention to cookbooks and how things are done. (I did accumulate a whole lot of very interesting cookbooks, however. So it’s about time I break into their pages.)

Tonight’s recipe for tomato soup is adapted from a Hebrew cookbook I picked up used about ten years ago. (Soups of Hakafri Restaurant: The Kosher Edition, by Rena Franklin.)

olive oil
about 2 cups of chopped onion (from the garden)
about four cloves of garlic, minced (also from the garden)
(dumped into the hot oil—but not too hot! I have a tendency to brown my garlic on accident. Sautée until oil is translucent.)

then dump in:
a cup or two of veggie broth (see previous post)
1 can of tomato purée
1 small can of tomato sauce
2 small cans of tomato paste

(I fill the cans a few times with water to get as much of the tomato as possible and dump that in too.)

a five finger pinch of basil (about a teaspoon)
a big pinch of thyme (maybe 1/2 teaspoon)
salt
black pepper
a cup or two of leftover white rice (cooked)

Bring all this to a boil and then turn it down to simmer.

Then after about a half hour or 45 minutes add:
a little maple syrup to taste
some soy cream

Serve with home-baked wheat bread.

I also ended up making raspberry-apple crisp for dessert, out of a bunch of elderly apples from Mr. Meadowhawk’s parents’ trees, and frozen raspberries from their garden. (I used the recipe from Sarah Kramer’s La Dolce Vegan.)

Yes, we really do have candlelit dinners regularly in our house. Its cozy elegance makes up for the mismatched silverware, placemats and dishes. We listen to classical music during dinner too. 🙂

Zen and the Art of Broth-Making

One of the things we’ve been attempting to do in our household is look at the things we buy that we could probably make ourselves. We have the time now, so it’s really just a matter of making the effort.

We buy just about everything we can in bulk: raisins, nuts, flour, sugar, granola, beans, rice, oatmeal, spices, tea. It’s all organic, and worth every penny to us—food being the one thing we aren’t willing to compromise on in a way that leads us to less healthful options. We’d rather cut out all out-of-the-house entertainment so we can have good, organic food. Besides, if you shop in bulk and cook just about everything you eat from scratch, you’re still saving a whole lot of money.

Until recently, one of the things we bought in bulk was veggie broth powder. As vegans, we use it in lots of stuff—flavoring rice dishes, or for soup. We haven’t figured out how to make faux chicken broth yet, but it’s easy to make your own flavorful veggie stock. In fact, we’ve found it’s way better than the powder.

We are lucky enough to share the bounty from a large garden grown by my partner’s father. His mother cans, and we eat all kinds of delicious produce from it, both canned and frozen: green peppers, the sweetest onions, succulent raspberries, mouth-watering sweet corn, tasty tomatoes, green beans, and jellies/jams. All year round! Other produce lasts well into winter (and sometimes even spring)—onions, leeks, potatoes, dill, carrots, apples, and squash. The produce section of the co-op is our supplement supply.

It is, of course, silly to waste all the peels and produce waste by throwing it directly into the compost. It can go there after you’ve made yourself some wonderful stock.

All week, I’ll collect every peel, rind, and end cut and store it in the freezer in a bag or two. Apple cores or whole apples that have started to go bad also add a lovely flavor.

Then when I’ve got a few hours in the kitchen (like if I’m baking bread, or Mr. Meadowhawk will be about), I just take the tallest pot we’ve got, dump in all the veggie scraps, and fill it full of water. Boil on high uncovered for a couple hours until it’s reduced to less than half its former volume. Let it cool until you won’t burn yourself with the steam. (This is a perennial problem for me.) Then use a colander over another pot to strain out the veggie scraps, and pour the broth into sealed containers to store in the fridge (or freeze if you’re not going to use it within a week).

Voilá—an excellent stock for all your broth needs. And you’re getting triple the use out of your produce: First to eat, then to get stock, and then for compost. Super frugal!