The other tortilla...and a quick digression to Puerto Rico

Because "tortillas" are so prevalent in our society, as well as in a bunch of other societies (with Mexico leading the pack), the "tortilla Española" is a little confusing to Americans. This dish has nothing to do with flour, corn, or tacos. It is actually more like a potato and egg omelet.

I still don't know very much about tortilla Española, though my awareness of it has slowly increased in recent years...it seems to keep coming up here and there. I first heard of it in about 2003, when Intermezzo (my main employer) almost ran a recipe for it but ended up cutting the article. Epicurious.com has only two recipes for TE*, the earliest dating back to 2000. (Epicurious is the website of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines, and has thousands of recipes in its database.) I think the TE is an ordinary, everyday food eaten throughout Spain in many variations; I don't remember eating it when I was there, though I think many bars offered little portions of it as tapas.

But finally, I did eat it...in Puerto Rico. Scott and I went to San Juan and the British Virgin Islands last fall. In San Juan we stayed at this tiny, fabulous, really inexpensive guesthouse called Andalucia. It was in a great location with many amazing restaurants nearby. The neighborhood (Ocean Park) was not built up and touristy and just sketchy enough to be charming but not dangerous.

Across the street from Andalucia is a hugely popular bakery/restaurant/deli called Kasalta. We ate there every day for breakfast, most days for lunch, and after dinner each night we'd stop by on the way back to the guesthouse for baked goods to eat in bed while watching bad TV. The best thing we had there was a sandwich called the "Elena Ruth." This was a baguette with roasted turkey (like from a real roast turkey, not cold cuts), cranberry sauce, Swiss cheese and mayo, served toasted and warm. To many people who know me as a vegetarian and mayonnaise hater, it is no doubt very strange to hear me praising this sandwich. I could do a whole separate blog on the vegetarian thing, but the super-short version is, I sometimes eat meat when I'm traveling. And the Elena Ruth is amazing! We would take them to the beach with cans of Coke and a cookie for dessert. Sandy perfection.

But breakfast at Kasalta was also pretty awesome. This is where we first had the tortilla. I knew what it was by sight and by name: a thick, golden, firm cake cut into wedges (links to pics below). Served cold right out of the display case, the tortilla was a dense layer of egg and potato...mild yet nourishing, rich with olive oil, and just excellent with a cup of coffee.

Back to the present. I'd been thinking that potatoes were an ideal choice for a package-free carb, and a lot easier than rolling out pasta. The only problem is, I don't LOVE potatoes. I mean, they are fine, but...never my first choice.

But when I got my eggs from Mr. Milagro, it suddenly struck me that tortilla Española was kind of a perfect food. And with the inevitable addition of roasted hatch chiles--they are in everything I eat this month--it was sounding better and better.

I used a combination of a recipe in my big yellow Gourmet cookbook (probably the same one they have online) and the step-by-step instructions I found in this About.com article. The first thing to do, in either case, was "poach" the potatoes (Yukon golds) in a huge amount of olive oil. How "poaching" in oil is different from deep frying, I'm not quite sure. But I did it. I sliced the potatoes (About.com method, and what I remembered from Kasalta) rather than dicing (Gourmet), heated up a huge amount of olive oil (which I'd recently bought in bulk from Wheatsville Coop) and added minced onion and the potato slices. Immediately I knew what I had done wrong--added too much stuff at once and lowered the temperature of the oil. So I removed half, and kept on poaching.



Apologies for this stupid picture. I was trying to reduce the resolution, and cropped out one corner instead.

When they were tender enough to eat, I transferred them with a slotted spoon to a strainer set over a bowl, added salt, and let them drain. Then I did the other half, strained them, etc. Then, though this put me at risk for third-degree burns, I strained the oil through a strainer and into a jar to reuse. The potatoes didn't seem to have absorbed that much.

Then I tossed up the potatoes with like, 4 or 5 eggs, a good amount of previously roasted and chopped hatch chiles, salt, and pepper. The mixture went back into the pot to cook.

Once again, I immediately sensed a mistake. I just KNEW that they were going to stick and that I would not be able to do the "flip" so beautifully illustrated in About.com. I needed seasoned cast iron without the high walls, and I didn't have it. Can you believe I don't have a cast iron pan? Ridiculous.

So I tried to flip it, spilled egg everywhere, swore creatively, and shoveled it as best I could back into the pan to finish cooking. Then, I "transferred" (scooped) the whole thing onto a plate for serving. It doesn't look like the About pictures, does it?

However! it was awesome anyway. We ate it for dinner, and I had it cold the next day for breakfast. Just goes to show you can totally screw up and still have a great meal. But I would like to try it again with the right kind of cookware and see if I can get the perfect little cake. Maybe I'll try to make minis in my nonstick omelet pan.

In the meantime, I urge everyone to go to Puerto Rico. It is a pretty cheap destination, the food is amazing, and you don't even need a passport.

*Just realized Epicurious has a few more recipes if you search "Spanish omelet."

Jaime Lee Curtis is not doing commercials for this yogurt.

Yesterday, it was time to make the yogurt. I found an extremely random and sketchy website that told me I could make yogurt in a couple of simple ways without having a yogurt maker. All I needed was milk and yogurt (recall, you need yogurt to make yogurt, defeating the no-packaging quest--but, now that I have some yogurt, I can use it to make more...forever! and its only one glass jar as opposed to a week's worth of plastic cuplettes).

So the first thing I did was heat up four cups of milk (2%) until it was hot but still not too hot to touch. The website said "warm" milk. Then I added three tablespoons of the White Mountain yogurt, stirred and poured it into this glass bowl with a lid I have. This was exactly the kind of vessel called for, and I have this because a few years ago for my birthday Scott baked me a ladybug cake and it needed this shape of thing to bake in! It was so cute, the spots were made of Oreos, and the red was accomplished through Christmas cookie sprinkles...legs were licorice...really great. Anyway.

So to make yogurt, you need to keep your milk/yog mix at a low heat for a few hours, and then chill it. You can use a yogurt making machine, which is essentially a low heat source, or, according to my source, a crock pot, your oven, the back of a wood stove, or...the sun.

Sun is something we have way, way too much of here in Texas, especially this year. I am not ashamed to admit that I regularly use an umbrella as a parasol, yet I am still tanner than I have ever been in my life. This summer has been the worst drought in like over 100 years or something, and its just unrelenting. I am considering vampirism (but who isn't these days).

Might as well harness it for something useful, right? So I carried this bowl of dairy products out into the near 100-degree heat and put it right in a big beam of sun and left it there for five hours.

Was I an idiot brewing up a big pot of e-coli? only time would tell.

After its little sunbath it went in the fridge for several more hours. When cold, I brought it out and stirred it. It looked kind of yogurty...pretty liquidy but in the right family. I stirred it until it was uniformly smooth and tasted it. It tasted...PRETTY much like yogurt. Something was different. I asked Scott to taste it but he refused because it was so liquidy. So I did the old straining trick: line a strainer with a coffee filter (unbleached biodegradable but still waste...I guess you could use cheesecloth if you had some) put it over a cup or bowl, and pour in yogurt. Let it sit a few hours or overnight. You can do this with any plain yogurt to make it thicker and tastier--the longer you leave it, the more whey will drain out. Its like Greek yogurt.

Well, a ton of liquid drained out in the next few hours (I had it in the fridge, btw). Before bed, I checked it. It was pretty normal consistency, and tasted ok. Enough like yogurt to be passable. Scott was upstairs in bed so he would have to wait to try it.

So for his lunch I mixed it up with a chopped peach and a little maple syrup. He too reported that it was..."ok." There's something strange about it, but its definitely yogurt. And we're both still living!

I actually just had my first full serving of it for lunch (for breakfast btw, I had the granola as cereal again). I strained a small portion for me just for like half an hour, and blended it up with two bananas, and some powdered matcha green tea that I got to sample for work. It's "cooking grade" and meant to be used in smoothies and stuff--I also have some for making regular tea. Check it out: http://www.matchasource.com/

Anyway, you might have thought I was pretty clever, making pasta and whatnot, but seriously, I do the dumbest stuff sometimes. I just daydream and mess up the little things. So, as I was blending the smoothie, I took off that round clear plasticy part in the center of the lid to pour in the green tea powder. Somehow, I dropped the thing INTO the blend, and heard it crunch a little before I got the machine off. I thought this was why manhole covers are round--because round lids can't fall into the round holes that they cover!?

Well, I fished it out. It had a few chips in it. But I really wanted my smoothie. So I drank it, slowly, through my recycled iced coffee straw, and chewed every mouthful. I extracted two biggish and six tiny chunks of plastic...and hopefully ingested none. But between that and the redneck yogurt I might be a goner.