Tortillas, take two

Day three of being at home. Somewhere around noon, we decided to defrost something for dinner. We still have meat from our Riverview CSA in 2009. Josh located a pork butt so we defrosted that. I followed the "wet" recipe from Rick Bayless.

Before try two of corn tortilla making, I read about how you should use more pressure with aluminum tortilla presses (that's what we have) and how you should turn it 180 degrees before press number two. I also talking to Lauren about adding a bit of lard to the mixture and then adding a little lard to the very hot cast iron skillet.

I also found a fresher bag of masa in the closet. So I used that and mixed up my masa. Then I added a little lard, mixed it all together, and shaped it into little balls. The pressing was much easier.

So I let each tortilla go until the next was flattened (twice) and then flipped til brown and flipped again. Some of them even puffed up the way they were supposed to!

Here are my tortillas all cooked happily and in the tortilla warmer. They look pretty good!

So, I took my pork butt and cut it into smallish sized pieces and covered it in salt. Then I added water to the pan, covered it with foil, and here it went!

In the back, you can see that I used some hatch chiles (gifted by Tim) to make a sauce. It was a bit on the acidic side (I added too much champagne vinegar) and had to keep adding chicken stock to balance it out.

About the time I planned to make carnitas, I put a pot of pinto beans on the stove with some water, white onion, and lard. Let simmer two hours. Then I drained em, sauteed onion and garlic in lard, and added the beans. The resulting mixture tasted lightly porky and complex, though wasn't quite to the "mashed potato" consistency that I read about. Guess I'll have to try again.

All said and done, dinner turned out well, though it seemed inbalanced. We found some cotija in the fridge and I chopped up some raw onions to go with it all. Taaty but still missing something...