It is interesting to see how different cuisines achieve getting a variety of experiences from a similar set of ingredients, and I have been fooling around with the tortillas from Mexican cuisine to see what I could come up with. This recipe for anglo-quesadillas was the result of some that fooling around. We found them to be very tasty, but I do apologise to anybody out there who knows how to cook the real thing!
To start off with I made one recipe of tortilla dough, this made four quesadillas, which was more than enough for the two of us, one and a half quesadillas per person being about right, unless you are really hungry.
The full discussion on tortilla manufacture is available here, but if you don’t have time to hit the link, here is an abbreviated version –
Organic Wholemeal flour 1 cup
Organic Bakers flour 1 cup
Salt ¾ TSP
Olive oil 3 Tbsp
Water (warmed) 2/3 cup
To make:
Mix the flours, oil and salt in a bowl and then slowly add the water while mixing it in with your fingers. Keep adding the water and mixing until it comes together into a dough, turn out and knead for a couple of minutes. Put back into the bowl and let the dough rest for 20 minutes. Cut the dough into 8 equal wedges and then form into balls. Roll out each ball of tortilla dough to a round, about 150mm – 200mm in diameter and cook in a hot saucepan for a couple of minutes each side.
With your tortillas ready to go, prepare the other ingredients. You can use other stuff for toppings such as corn, sliced mushrooms or diced cabbage, but this is what we used, and it worked out pretty well for us -
1 medium onion thinly sliced,
1 medium red and green capsicum Cut the centre out of the capsicums, remove any seeds and membranes left and slice thinly.
½ jar, diced tomatoes
1 knob butter
1 – 2 teaspoons Mexican spice mix
Grated cheese (we used mozzarella, but whatever works for you!)
Melt the butter in a saucepan, add in the onion and capsicum and cook for 2 – 3 minutes, add in about half a 375ml jar of diced tomatoes and cook for a couple more minutes and then spoon on one or two (depending on taste) teaspoons of Mexican spice mix, add salt and pepper to taste, mix well and remove from the heat.
Set up four of the small tortillas as bases, cover each base with grated cheese, top with the cooked veggies, then the remaining tortillas to make quesadillas.
Cook the quesadillas in a hot pan, two minutes on each side, ensuring the cheese is melted. Cut into quarters and serve with sour cream and (for extra naughtiness) sweet chilli sauce, and enjoy!
Homemade/grown ingredients are best where you can manage it and in our case that was –
- the onions and the green capsicum were home grown
- the bottled tomatoes were home grown and bottled at home (more here)
- The organic wholemeal flour was ground by us.
- the Mexican spice mix was made by us from bought in and home grown ingredients. (more here)
We found them to be well worth the work to throw together, and if you roped the family in to help out it could be even more fun! (for the cook at least).
