Homemade flour tortillas are delicious, and they are the first food I learned to make as a child, but when you replace over half the flour with mashed potatoes and eliminate the shortening, you have the hearty, delicious, more nutritious, pliable base for anything you want to roll up inside. This time for us it was chicken verde. Tattie scones in Scotland are larger and thicker than ours, cut into wedges, and may or may not have a topping. Our version replaces a flour tortilla, and shall, henceforth, be known as the tatertilla.
Maybe the shorter days of fall have brought on my current cooking lull. I don’t want to have to think or work too hard to make a meal. (Ben has been calling any break a siesta, so I guess according to him, I am having a slight cooking siesta.) Ambition has been replaced with cozy socks. Recipes have been replaced by instinct. Tortillas have been replaced by tatertillas.
The main work associated with making tatertillas is peeling potatoes, and Ben has become an expert at that, allowing me to take a little siesta! The potato to flour ratio can vary wildly, but if it is possible to mess these up, we have not yet found the way. I’ll leave the best record I can of what we did, but given my current recipe rebellion, this is more of a guess than a recipe. It is also what you should probably make for dinner.
Tatertillas
3 potatoes
1 cup flour or more
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
- Peel the potatoes, slice into ½ inch disks, and place in a pot. Cover by one inch with cold water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook for 12-15 minutes until very soft when pierced with a fork. Drain.*
- Place cooked potatoes into a food processor and pulse or process until very smooth. Add salt, baking powder and ½ cup flour. Process until four is incorporated. Add flour as needed until you have a soft dough that is not too sticky to roll.
- Divide into eight pieces. On a lightly floured surface, roll or pat each piece into a thin or thick round disk of whatever size you’d like.
- In a dry pan, over medium to medium-high heat, cook the tatertilla on each side until slight brown spots just begin to appear. Remove to a clean dish towel and cover to retain heat as you cook the rest.
*This is an excellent way to reinvent leftover mashed potatoes from a previous meal if you are so inclined. In my experience, cold mashed potatoes may “take in” less flour.
What do you cook when inspiration runs low? What can you make without a recipe? Don’t be surprised if baked mac and cheese, lazy lasagna, or crustless quiche show up here in the weeks ahead. My repertoire for flying without a net is a little thin. Or maybe Ben will wake me from my little cooking siesta to try something new.