The Taco Fiasco: Breakfast Tacos... and then some

A whole lotta some.

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Prologue:

Yesterday evening I was able to try out another recipe from the 10 minute cooking school (where I learned how to cook the puerco pibil) - the "Sin City Breakfast Tacos." Very fitting during those times when it's too late to have a big meal but it's too early for breakfast, these tacos will definitely leave you wanting more. Not to mention leaving more of a mess than the previous dish. This one consists of homemade flour tortillas and an option of 2 fillings for the tacos; one is potato and egg while the other is a mixture of corn tortillas, jalapeno peppers, tomatoes, onions, and egg.

Preparation took more time than the puerco pibil. It was our first time trying this dish out and while the list of ingredients wasn't too many or too unusual, it definitely took a lot more time after acquisition of said ingredients to actually prepare and cook the dish. As before we had 6 able-bodied workers, well.. maybe except for one.. (just kidding dude) cranking out and working on different parts of the dish. Anyway, for your cooking pleasure I traded in a kidney and many hours of my day to transcribe the recipe (btw, here's the video).

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The Recipe: (what's supposed to happen)

Homemade flour tortillas - you certainly don't have to make homemade ones though they certainly are better (if you do it right, that is):

2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup butter or lard (or half of each)
3/4 cup warm water (or hot if you used lard)

Knead the mixture in either a stand mixer, electric mixer, or just your hands, making sure to crumble the fat (either butter or lard or both) into the flour. Partition the resulting clump into 8-10 golf ball sized pieces and set aside covered with a cloth dampened with warm water. Let rest for 20 minutes.

Potato and Egg:

corn oil
2 potatoes
3 eggs
milk
salt and pepper

Peel, cut, and dice the potatoes into medium-to-small cubes. Fry them in a pan using corn oil in medium to medium-high heat. Season with some salt and pepper while cooking . We'll come back to the eggs and whatnot later.

Meanwhile, preheat a teflon pan at medium high heat. If 20 minutes have passed, take the flour tortillas balls, flatten them, then roll out into discs using a baking pin. In the first pan, take out the potatoes, season with salt and pepper, then set aside.

Vegetable and Egg variation:

corn tortillas
jalapeno
tomato
onion
3 eggs
milk
salt and pepper

Dice the corn tortillas and fry them in the oil from the potatoes until they're crispy but not burnt. When those are done, take them out, and drain the pan, then put in the diced jalapeno, tomato, and onion. Cook them down for a few minutes.

Now back to the teflon pan. Roll the flour tortilla balls one more time then plop them onto the pan. Let sit on that side for about 8 seconds then flip over. If the pan is hot enough, there should be some coloration. Leave on new side for about 1-1 1/2 minutes. If bubbles start to form... let them. It just means that the baking powder is working (and that you didn't accidentally put baking soda).

After a minute or so, flip the flour tortilla discs over. Prepare a towel or a tortilla holder with a towel inside to... hold the tortillas and keep them warm. Remove the variation mixture from the other pan and add some butter. Remember all those eggs? Now we can come back to 'em.

In one bowl, crack open 3 eggs, add in a splash of milk (just a normal splash, not my sorta splash), and beat. Pour into the pan then add the potatoes you cooked earlier - let settle for a while, then mix. It should come out to look like scrambled eggs with potatoes. Season then set aside.

Break open the eggs, add another splash of milk, then beat. In another pan (or the same pan if you're a patient person), add some butter, the egg mixture, the variation mixture you fried earlier, then the diced and fried corn tortillas. Let sit for a while then mix. The outcome should look the same as the potato and egg mixture (but without the potatoes, obviously). Season then set aside.

Now take that flour tortilla you made ("yay!" if it came out well, "@#$%" if not) and stuff it with your chosen mixture.

Enjoy!

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Or not.

Our Version: (what actually happened...)

Well, we did enjoy making it but, as it was our first time making such a complicated (I'm just trying to make myself feel better, it's actually quite easy) dish, we messed up a couple of times along the way. We didn't really do any other sort of research aside from watching the video a few times to get the basic order of the recipe and also the ingredients, so, while it's pretty accurate, it's also a bit vague in other areas - number of potatoes, the vegetables, number of people it serves, etc.

First off, due to our excellent planning, we ended up being hours late. Not that that was a big deal since the meal can be eaten at any time of the day, but still. All we had to go by was the most basic list derived from the video and we didn't know where anything was in the kitchen - ingredients we had, ingredients we needed, tools, pans, etc.

Three of us set off to make an inventory of things we had so we could derive the things we needed. Turns out we were missing a whole bunch of things, from equipment to actual food and ingredients. So after that, while the original three went off into the wild to forage for stuff, the remaining three went to look for some sort of big flat skillet with which to cook them tortillas on.

Skip forward several moments to a huge onion (shown with the silhouette of a dog and human, to scale), a 5 lb sack of small potatoes, lard, milk, butter, baking powder, tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, and an electric hand mixer from two stores (we got only the hand mixer at the second store)... and we were ready to cook. We took a while shopping because we only picked the cheapest of the ingredients (including the mixer which was $6.99) with the total spent amounting to about ~USD30. And so with that we headed home, our spirits high and our temperature somewhat low, as it was a bit of a chilly night.

After getting home, we got right down to business - preparation of ingredients and tools, bustin' out stuff (yes, including the hand mixer), delegating tasks... Everybody did their parts - two fiddling with making the flour tortillas, two fiddling with the other ingredients, one peeling the potatoes and cutting them, and lastly, I myself chopping up the vegetables.

The first mix of the flour tortilla dough was either too dry or too wet. After it finally seemed right, too much flour... I repeat, TOO MUCH FLOUR, was used on the board where the dough was rolled out. In frying it, the first batch tasted more like flour with a side of something in a vague shape of a flat circle than an actual tortilla. The incoming batches were quickly rectified but not before I became nauseated just from one or two tortillas (this was after the preliminary batch of the potatoes-and-eggs were cooked). Anyway, check out the amount of flour on these tortillas:

Also, after when time came to roll out the dough... we realized we didn't have a rolling pin.

But, fear not! Ghetto ingenuity prevails! Here you see us using a silver cookie container. I do believe my friend went back to using his hands. He said that it felt weird and it was too hollow to be that efficient.

No, the designs didn't transfer into the dough, unfortunately enough. Might've distracted us from all the freaking flour covering the tortilla. Speaking of which, we didn't immediately find that flat pan for cooking the tortillas (when we found it we ended up cooking/heating around 5 at a time) so we had to make do with a small circular pan. Also, since it wasn't preheated, it took quite a while for the first ever [flour-smothered] tortilla to come out. We already had a plate of the fillings waiting, haha. By the way... now that I think about it, it might've taken longer to cook because it of the thick flour-shield™ protecting it from the flames. One of the tortillas actually had visible colonies of flour still on it after cooking.

Anyway, a... slight miscalculation regarding the potatoes yielded about 2+ full plates of the potato-and-egg mixture. Whoever thought 5 lbs of the tuber would feed 6-8 people was insane. (hint: not me) Sure, we weren't expecting other things to be cooked (like the vegetable-and-egg variation or more food in the latter part of the evening), but still. 5 lbs for 6 people?

The potatoes and egg mixture.

The vegetable yield was enormous as well, with 1 enormous onion diced, 4 medium tomatoes sliced, and a couple jalapenos chopped up equaling about 3 medium bowls of ingredients. Add to that several slices of corn tortillas cut up into small squares and fried and also the eggs and... well, we ended up with a boatload of potatoes and vegetables and not enough egg or tortillas. In the end we totaled about 4 plates - 2 plates each of the potato-and-egg mixture and vegetable-and-egg variation. And about a handful of the homemade flour tortillas. We actually had to resort to heating up the corn tortillas we bought and using those, which wasn't that bad.

The vegetables, corn tortillas, and egg mixture.

Also factoring in the fact that the corn tortillas didn't have any extra FLOUR made it somewhat the better choice over the flour-enriched flour tortillas. As one of my friends said after shoveling potatoes and egg into the flour tortilla and trying it... "all I could taste was the flour!" Hey, at least he was able to comment. I just ended up with a funky feeling in the stomach.

My friends' parents came home in the middle of our struggle and their dad, after his initial outburst regarding the mess we had made, went straight to a cabinet and took out... oh would you look at that... an electric hand mixer! Apparently, in our hasty search earlier, we neglected to check for an already existing electric hand mixer. Neglected? It's more like we were looking for something else (the flat skillet or pan) and it just didn't register in our minds that there was an electric hand mixer already in existence in their household.

Following their dad's second outburst (regarding the mixer), he proceeded to cook a couple of things: deep-fried egg rolls and batches of empanadas (one had some sort of meat while the other had jalapeno and cheese). The empanadas had some sort of divine ability to retain heat and was impossible to eat without having to break open in half and waiting several hours minutes unless you're the type to gargle molten metal or even lava. Here's the total outcome of our endeavor*:

*Notice the ridiculous proportion of the fillings compared to the tortillas?

During our meal, my friend's dad discovered all our leftover ingredients - bushels of potatoes, diced onion, tomatoes, jalapenos, and corn tortillas and through nothing short of a miracle, combined it with their leftovers from the previous day into some new dish. As we looked at the resulting... thing, their mom nonchalantly told us that he was "recycling." The dish actually looked palatable. Unfortunately so, we were stuffed by then and ended up not trying any. I wonder if my friends ate it the next day...

I'm sure they still had some leftovers - the potato and egg mixture and vegetable and egg variation, not to mention a casserole dish full of the Recycled Ingredients dish - to deal with.

- West





Epilogue:
I hate FLOUR!