On Friday, while Hillary was at a halloween costume party, I started a food project that I have wanted to do for a few months. I wanted to make great homemade corn tortillas. Ever since I ate at a Panchero’s restaurant with their “tortillas while-you-wait” I’ve wanted to know how to make this delicious food item.

My firt try wasn’t too successful. We bought a tortilla press from Sur la Table in Richmond a while back, and made a batch of cornflour and water tortillas soon thereafter. They were dreadful. They were stiff, didn’t bend, but most importantly, they tasted wrong. They tasted like badly cooked unleavened bread. Our diner that night was very bad tacos.

Finally, few weeks ago, I found the answer – Nixtamalization. The procedure is to cook the dried corn kernels in slaked lime and water very slowly and then let it sit overnight. The next morning, you rinse the corn and purée it into a dough. I received this kernel of wisdom from my favourite TV personality, the Bill Nye of food, Alton Brown. We made breakfast tacos (small breakfast burritos) for breakfast both yesterday and today and, needless to say, they were delicious. Hillary said that they were on par with my Neapolitan ragù. The dough was easy to work with this morning after being in the fridge for a day.

We will be making this recipe again for sure.

Wow. This is a great idea. You take a lot of cornstarch, make a number of small wells in it, dump in some sweetened vodka, and cap it off with more cornstarch, and you have vodka pills. I’ll have to think of a way to tweak this into a Halloween theme.

I’ve never been very good at making bread. I tried a few times when I lived at the K-house, but I never had any success. Claire would always make the best bread. It looked silky before it went in the oven, and it came out smelling and tasting wonderfuly.

The other day, on a whim, I bought The Panera Bread Cookbook, still dreaming of being able to make good bread. My first attempt goes into the oven in 15 minutes…