Some things are better left to the experts

Surgery, pouring foundations for skyscrapers, making tortillas… all things that are better left to the experts.

I tried out my sister-in-law’s recipe for pulled pork today, since I had five hours to kill. I recall her serving these with soft taco fixings, with the end result being a tasty culinary treat worthy of gorge-status.

Since I didn’t have tortillas on hand, I thought I would play Martha and make my own to impress my husband with my culinary genius. We are insanely lucky to live in the same city (nearly) as Bob’s Red Mill. I love me some Bob’s. If you haven’t discovered Bob’s or don’t live in Portland, it’s a local mill (check out the website here) that produces everything from healthy flours of every variety to soup mix to hot cereals, dried fruit, yada yada. Some stores carry a few of their items. Whenever I need a gift for Dad, I head to Bob’s and load up. It’s a guaranteed winner.

Back from that side trip… On my last venture to Bob’s, I bought some Masa Harina. According to the package, "Masa Harina Flour is used to make authentic Mexican tortillas." According to my taste buds, what I made was most certainly not authentic Mexican tortillas.

Here’s what I envisioned making.

Here’s what I made.

Beautiful, no? And how should I describe for full impact... They were like dry, rubbery vaguely disk shaped blobs of cooked toddler glue (ie, flour and water mixed together). I followed the directions – two cups masa to one cup water. Apparently not adding salt and butter/lard makes it healthy? But uh, not so high on the tasty scale.

I tried out the end product on the toddler – he loves tortillas. He looked at it, smiled and said “tillas!” Put a bite in his mouth, and then made a sad forlorn face and said, “Why Mother? Why would you feed me this tasteless Frisbee? Am I really that bad of a boy?” Okay, he didn’t say that. He spit it out into my hand and said “icky” and walked away.

Luckily the pork turned out great, and Rob (in a bit of frantic fridge foraging) found a half package of who knows how old tortillas languishing in the bottom of the fridge, so we were able to avoid "enjoying" my creations. I want to try again on the tortilla front, but I’ll be doing a little recipe research first.