Next, it was time to turn to the Mexican food. The guys had already made some really awesome homemade salsa, we mixed up some pretty good guacamole pretty easily, and before I knew it I was elbow deep (Ok, really just wrist deep) kneading tortilla dough.
The dough itself was easy enough to make, but when it came to flattening the tortillas we realized that we certainly didn’t have a tortilla press so it wasn’t going to be easy flattening the dough to an edible size. Eventually we ended up putting balls of dough in a plastic sack with plenty of corn flour, then pressing it between the countertop and a wooden cutting board. Problem (mostly) solved. Next we needed to cook the tortillas. Too bad we didn’t have a griddle. The easiest thing we could find was the broiler drip pan, the thing on the bottom shelf of the oven. We balanced that on top of the stove next to the pressure cooker –oh, wait! I haven’t mentioned the pressure cooker yet, have I?
Improv Tortilla Press
Well, of course if you’re going to have a real Mexican meal it’s going to have frijoles, right? So, a pressure cooker full of beans and water was whistling away the entire time on the stovetop, teetering precariously occasionally and reminding us of a story Felipe had told us at the very beginning of our cooking adventure. What kind of a story, you wonder? Well, a story about a pressure cooker explosion in his sister’s kitchen that resulted in beans EVERYWHERE and an actual cavity, the result of this bomb-like explosion- on the stovetop. It didn’t make anyone feel better that it was rather old and untrustworthy looking, just like all of the other cooking tools in the kitchen, but we needed to use something so we just made do, and took to referring to it as “the bomb.”
But back to the tortillas. The style with which we cooked them ended up being more like flapjacks than tortillas, because it was very hard to tell if they were done yet and the smoke which was starting to fill the small kitchen was clearly indicative of something burning. This meant that I was constantly flipping them over (much to the chagrin of my Mexican instructor) in an effort to combat the smoke accumulating in the kitchen. Everyone's eyes were burning and we all had to periodically excuse ourselves to wipe tears from our eyes, but we were able to locate a fan and opened the two large windows over the oven to create some air circulation. Curiously enough, the smoke persisted even though we really hadn't burnt that many tortillas.
Jenna Emerson, Master Tortilla Maker
We continued to make progress on our little project, which was taking quite a while since we seemed to have produced quite an abundance of dough. Occasionally, someone would ask how much time remained on the cake, but it needed to cook for an hour and we didn't want to be constantly closing and opening the oven, so quite a while went by before we actually did open the oven door.
Instantaneously the source of the smoke was obvious. A thick, dark cloud poured out of the oven, and it took a minute for our poor, tired tear ducts to produce enough moisture for us to see what was inside. Quite clearly our completely imprecise and arbitrary method of choosing the temperature for the oven had gone wrong. Our Jewish Apple (Birthday) Cake looked rather Jewish, alright, but in a sense that only Adolf Hitler would appreciate. (Don't be offended--it's the perfect description!) We hadn't figured it out sooner because the tortilla project on the stovetop was serving as the perfect front for the source of the smoke.
We removed the cake immediately from the oven and set to work salvaging what we could, which ultimately meant scraping the guts out of both cake pans and serving them on a platter. We were planning on making bread pudding all along, duh!
KellyAnne, Pastry Chef Extrodinaire
Our Masterpiece
Now, the cake was out of the oven, the smoke was disappating, and we were nearly finished making tortillas. We'd all kind of forgotten about the beans, since we'd mostly been occupied with searching for patches of fresh air to breath previously. Someone decided it was about time to check on them, only to discover that the pressure cooker didn't seem to have worked at all. Instead of the soupy brown mixture one would expect to find, all we had was a pot of warm, uncooked beans in water. Bummer. We ended up just heating them up enough to get them soft and calling it good.
In the end, the food tasted awesome. Well, that is, it tasted awesome to everyone except Felipe, who has absolutely no ability to withstand spicy food, and was nearly in tears with his first bite of guacamole. This was rather hilarious to me, since I have almost no tolerance for spicty food and I hardly even noticed any bite to this particular dish, but he was truly and honestly suffering. He even went on and on about it later, admitting without shame that he was unable to enjoy the meal because he was so concentrated on trying to quench the fire raging in his mouth. All of this while me, a spicy food lightweight, was piling on the homemade salsa which was WAY spicier and he hadn't even tried!! With a name like ''Chile,'' you'd think they could handle it! (I'm not trying to say he's a wimp or anything, it's just interesting to see the differences in what people are accustomed to. Clearly it's an acquired taste in this example!)
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