Sometimes the weirdest-sounding combinations turn out to be much better than expected. I once had a pizza topped with cilantro pesto, apples, pecans, and smoked mozzarella, which I thought would be totally weird, but was actually very very good. The other day I happened to have corn tortillas, cheese, and cilantro in the fridge, an apple in the fruit bowl, and pecans in the baking cupboard, and I figured that a quesadilla is sort of like a Mexican pizza, right?…
Ancho Chicken Quesadillas with Homemade Flour Tortillas and Roasted Red Pepper Sauce
Last Thursday I had the day off work, so I decided to cross something off my “things to make” list: homemade flour tortillas. I’ve had a hankering for quesadillas ever since I read a post on the Frugal Flambé about chicken quesadillas with roasted red pepper sauce, so I figured this would be a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and make tortillas for quesadillas.
Apparently there are two main camps when it comes to flour tortillas: thicker, chewy, smaller Texas-style, or thin, crispy, larger Sonoran (Mexican)-style. After reading a post about the difficulties of trying to make the Sonoran-style, I opted for the Texas tortillas, using a recipe from the Homesick Texan blog. I also found a recipe there for Ancho-Chili Shrimp Quesadillas, which sounded so delicious that I ended up using the marinade for the chicken in my quesadillas.
Making these tortillas filled me with the same sense of accomplishment that I get when I make homemade scones – that feeling of having made something out of nothing. When the cupboards are bare of ready-to-eat foods, it’s great to be able to take basic, staple ingredients – flour, baking powder, fat or oil – and make something delicious out of them, rather than just saying that there’s no food in the house :D…