Homemade Tortillas and Salsa

This has become one of my favourite things to do up for parties mainly because it tends to blow people’s minds that you can make your own tortilla chips.  Now I haven’t gone to the point of grinding corn, but this definitely does take it back a step from cracking open a bag of Tostitos and calling it a day.

Tortillas

• 10 pack of tortilla wraps, any variety
• salt
• deep fryer
• pizza slicer

I normally pick up 2 different types of tortilla wrap, just to mix it up.  They come in all sorts of varieties nowadays, like sundried tomato, multigrain or roasted red pepper, so your options for diversity are pretty wide open.  Turn on your deep fryer to heat up, then begin to slice your wraps into somewhat uniform triangles.  I typically cut 3 wraps at a time with the slicer.  Once the deep fryer is ready, throw your little triangles in and cook until they are crispy and and darken up a bit.  Remove from deep fryer and onto a plate covered with paper towels.  De-oil them as best as possible, then add a little bit of salt.

This was my first go at making a salsa and I was quite pleasantly surprised with the results.  Most of the people I tend to cook for aren’t fond of hot stuff, so I kept this one tame, though I plan on experimenting a bit later.

Salsa

• 2 red tomatoes
• 1 sweet red pepper
• 1 sweet green pepper
• 1 sweet yellow pepper
• 1 whole bulb of garlic
• 1 lime
• 1 lemon
• 1/2 cup of red wine
• 3 tbsp Cumin
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• 2 tbsp Oregano
• 3 tbsp chili powder

Chop up the tomatoes, peppers(de-seed those) and garlic and chop them up using a food processor or chopper.  If you like chunky salsa, leave the pieces large, if you like smoother salsa, pulverize at will.  Once you’re done you’ll want to toss them into a pot.  Squeeze the juice from the lemon and lime and add the rest of the ingredients into the pot as well.  Cook on medium for about 10 minutes until things start bubbling, then reduce to low and let it simmer for about an hour, stirring periodically.

Every blog’s gotta start somewhere, and I guess this is where this one starts.  I’m James, you might know me from my other blog, modsuperstar dot ca.  I’ve started this blog with the intent of posting pretty much exclusively about food.  I’ve long found that even though I can blog about food if I want to, it never quite had a proper place on modsuperstar.  I really like to cook and over time I think I’ve become reasonably good at it, to the point I feel I actually have enough recipes and insight that it might be worthwhile to share with the rest of the world.  I can’t make any guarantees of how prolific this blog will be given it is my secondary blog, but I’ll see how it goes.

I was quite happy that I was able to score this domain name, as it was about the 3rd thing I searched for, so honestly I’m amazed it was even available.

I blogged a couple months ago about a yet to open restaurant in Cambridge called Pho Shizzle, at that point declaring it the best thai restaurant ever. Well I can now say that the food lives up to the awesome name. Corina and I went there for dinner and I can definitely say I was impressed. The decor was very chiq and modern, the service was excellent and pretty much everything we ordered was fantastic. I ordered the chicken wings with chili salt and pork balls, shredded pork and spring roll with vermicelli. Corina got the spring rolls and grilled chicken and rice. For dessert we ordered a deep fried banana with ice cream. All of it was delicious. I can say now that they are my favourite viet thai restaurant now. Here are some sketchy cell phone pictures I took of the meal.

Pork balls, shredded pork, spring roll and vermicelli

As I was mentioning the other day we made homemade chinese food. We took some pictures so you could see how everything turned out.

Here’s the Soo-Guy being fried, then me cutting it after it was done.

Corina is here preparing the chicken fried rice. On the right is the Soo-Guy sauce.

And here’s the finished product we came up with. It was definitely a learning experience. The next time I’ll probably throw some more baking soda into the chicken balls, as they didn’t really fluff out the way I would have liked. I was pretty amazed that the chicken balls and Soo-Guy seemed to be in the ballpark of the taste we were looking for. We also learned that we could probably manage with 1 chicken breast between the 2 of us, as one each proved to be quite a lot of food. Either way, it turned out awesome, though not quite cost effective. Probably all told it cost $25, but that included sauces that we can use again. Dee-lish!

Tonight I decided I was in the mood for something a little different. I had tried some Viet-Thai food awhile back when I went to lunch with some people at work and I was quite pleasantly surprised with the food. I’m a pretty picky eater for the most part, so finding some new food that I really liked was definitely a treat. Since then I’ve had a jonesin’ to try some more Thai food. Corina and I were expecting company, so we opted for the pickup route. I took a look in the phone book and it turned out there was a nice little Thai place not too far away from our house called Mostly Thai. After taking a look at their website I decided to order some fish dumplings and some chicken rolls, while Corina got the Chicken and snowpeas. I have to say, the fish dumplings were fantastic. They came with a nice and spicy dipping sauce that just topped it off for me. I will definitely be doing that again.

I tried one of those new breakfast sandwiches they have at Tim Horton’s and can say unilaterally that they are ass-tastic. These are the new inventions that Tim Horton’s is using as its answer to the McMuffin line of products at McDonalds. Let me be the first to tell you that they aren’t even in the same class. They offer a dry biscuit kinda dealy, with egg, cheese slice and your choice of sausage or bacon. Now me being in total opposition to eating cheese, I asked for my sausage sandwich without. After taking pretty much 5 minutes to assemble the thing because they managed to continually forget whether I in fact wanted a sausage, even though I had just verified this fact verbally to them. So I finally get the thing and eat about half of it only to find the egg is in fact laced with cheese. Now what’s the point of asking for no cheese, yet still ending up with cheese in the egg? You would figure they might actually point out that there is cheese in the egg if I already asked for no cheese slice. So I discarded the egg and ate just the sausage and biscuit, which were pretty boring and left a gross aftertaste. I had a coffee and it didn’t wipe out the taste, so I ate a piece of pear at the farmers market we went to and it got rid of the bad taste, half an hour after the fact.

Now I was told when blogging this, I had to mention that my friend Kitchen in fact enjoyed his breakfast sandwich. I suspect that he might have been on strong hallucinogens at the time, as I can’t really see how this is possible.

As the title might imply, I feel like waxing poetically about ribs. Maybe scratch that poetically bit and it might closer to it. All week I’ve been anticipating Friday evening. It is the return of the best type of festival. A festival devoted to consuming large chunks of what was once a pig(or cow, as the case may be). This festival I speak of is Guelph’s annual Ribfest. Last year was my inauguration to the festival. Corina’s sister had mentioned well earlier in the year about her husband and her attend every year and I was instantly intrigued. A festival devoted entirely to meat. This was a festival for me. Given they were going, I made sure to clear my calendar to attend this hallowed event.

The event last year was awesome. For $20 you get a whole rack of ribs and a side. There were 9 different trailers setup serving their spin on rib delicious-ness. Everyone has a different preferrence. There is even a trailer from Paris called Camp 31. They make badass ribs. But given I can get Camp 31 goodness any day of the week, I didn’t bother with them. I think I got either Billy Bones or Bibbs BBQ ribs last year. I also got some potato side and corn on the cob. We bumped into a group of friends who unbeknownst to us were also checking out the ribliciousness. Corina’s sister had the kids with them, so they packed it in early and we hung out with our friends the rest of the night. We ended up having some drinks and all eating Elephant ears loaded up with ice cream, whip cream and chocolate sauce. It was truly an evening of gorging to remember. This last weekend we went to a party and mentioned how we were going to Ribfest again to the friends who had attended last year and instantly anything that might have been planned for Friday was put on the backburner. Ribfest obviously takes precedence. I definitely like the idea of this being an annual occurance, because Ribfest is just that damn good.

I think my anticipation of Ribfest is almost bordering on the excitement I have in the leadup to Thanksgiving. And I love turkey. Not quite as excited, but up there. But that does remind me that turkey time is rapidly approaching. I think I want to see if I can manage 3 turkey dinners this time around. That would be ace. Gosh darn I’m hungry right now.