Dinner, February 3: I´m so proud

Money spent on groceries today: 4.01 euros, at Lidl (a huge box of ridiculously cheap granola - we´ll have to wait and see if it´s any good!), a bag of Belgian endive, mineral water, milk and a tin of tomatoes.
Dinner tonight was the pork and barley chili I made on Sunday, with guacamole, grated cumin cheese (great way to use up that little end of cheese that´s been lying around in the fridge) and, tada, homemade corn tortillas!

I had a lot of masa left over from my tamale experiments, so I decided to try my hand at making corn tortillas. The recipe, if you could call it that, is extremely simple: just mix warm water into the masa until you have a smooth but not too sticky dough. Roll the dough into balls. Now you have to press them into flat rounds before frying them - there are special tortilla presses for this, but I just put the ball of dough between two layers of heavy plastic (from a ziploc bag), placed a skillet on top, and leaned on it will all my weight.

Now, for the frying. It took me a couple of pale, sickly looking tortillas before I realized that the pan in which you are frying these, should be totally, absolutely, incredibly HOT. Don´t try this with a regular flimsy non-stick skillet - you really need a heavy cast iron pan for this, or another type of frying pan that you can heat till it´s almost about to melt.
Technically I don´t even think we can call this frying, since there is no fat involved. What you do is slide the dough disk into the hot (did I mention the pan needs to be really, really hot?), dry pan, cook for half a minute, flip it over, and cook some more until you have a lightly brown-speckled, soft and pliable tortilla. Keep them warm under a cloth (and keep them wrapped in the cloth even when you sit down to dinner: when they cool, they become dry and brittle very fast).

The chili was delicious (and how I love barley!) but today´s real joy came from making my own tortillas. Hurrah.