Paulchens FoodBlog?!

*sigh* Well my Dears,
You know and I should know by now that I will be in deep deep trouble once I type the words “sounds interesting, I might join you…” into twitter or facebook or well wherever else… ha! Do you think I’ll ever learn?

THAT sentence got me into making these darn macarons (more on that subject in another post, I am also late with again), well that sentence and lovely Jamie and Deeba I might add!
THAT sentence got me join my friend Simone with her Donna Hay Photography Challenge, where I must say I need to apology deeply to her for missing two challenges in a row I guess… :( Sorry Dear!
THAT Sentence got me into joining the Secret Recipe Club, which is a very fun way of getting to know a whole lot of new blogs!
THAT sentence got me to bake with the Bread Baking Babes as a Buddy for quite a long time, and now I am a Babe myself, thankful to have been invited to join this group of gorgeous ladies!
…you get the message, no?

 Don’t get me wrong here, all of the above, and the others I did not mention, really is fun and I love to be part of it, but still this little witty Aquarius sitting on my shoulder from time to time really gets me into more trouble every time!

You might be wondering what it was this time… well I managed to get around those baking groups that bake their way through Peter Reinhardt’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice or the Mellow Bakers who baked through Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread and now have moved onto  Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf  for quite a while, mostly because I knew I would not be able to bake all that bread for a single household that I am (trust me, my fingers itched often to join when I saw my fellow bloggers post their lovely breads, but I really have enough on my plate right now).

Enough on my plate? Ha!
If mankind would still believe that the shape of the earth is a disc – that would be the size of my plate… but that’s a whole other story!

*where was I?* Ah yes that new thing I got myself into trouble with:

When my dear fellow Babe and blogging friend finished her Mellow Baker’s thing and started a discussion on our BBB & Friends Facebook group where the outcome was that we founded another group “Baking through Flatbreads and Flavours” where we are doing exactly what the title says: bake and cook our way through that book.

Little did I know when I joined Natashya in her vision… that darn book has 424 (!!) pages and about 90 (!!) recipes! 

So that’ll take a while! When we settled on the details we decided that we’d do a bi-weekly modus starting with the first recipe(s) in February. Posting deadlines will always be 15th and 30th of a month.

This is our schedule so far: 

• Feb 1 – Feb 15: We are going to Mexico and Southwest U.S.! (In our kitchens)
  p. 377 &369 - Corn Tortillas with Pueblo Chile-Bathed Pork.

• Feb 15 – Feb 28: We are going to Penang!
  p.115 – Lacy Coconut Milk Pancakes (roti jala) + p.117 Coconut Milk Chicken Curry (gulai ayam)

So if you happen to own that book and want to join us in our culinary journey around the world, just hop on the bandwagon  and give it a go!
If you do not own the book: while setting up the group we found that it can be tricky to get hands on a copy, since it does not seem to be available easy everywhere. Just keep on searching, we all managed to find a copy sooner or later ;o) We will not be sending out any recipes for those who do not own a copy – sorry!

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Corn Tortillas with Pueblo Chile-Bathed Pork

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Pueblo Chile-Bathed Pork

adapted from Flatbreads & Flavours

You’ll need:
680 gram lean pork

42-56 grams dried red New Mexican chiles or 10 dried guajillos, stems removed and coarsely chopped
175 ml water
7 grams salt
2-3 cloves garlic, minced (original recipe uses one)
1 tablespoon dried oregano or fresh

Method (sorry you’ll need to do some planning for this, but only a little):

1. The night before you’ll marinade the pork.
2. Put all of the ingredients (except the pork) in a food processor or blender and purree them nicely (mine got a nice greenish color, cause I drastically reduced on the chiles).
3. Put your nicely cubed pork pieces in a ziplock bag and pour the marinade all over the pork.
4. Zip and shake to make sure all of the pork pieces are nicely covered.
5. Off into the fridge it goes. Good Night!
6. The next day you’ll cook the pork. 
7. Heat your pan with just a little bit of oil.
8. Pick your bathed pork pieces out of the ziplock bag, making sure to remove as much marinade a possible ’cause we want that little suckers to brown nicely in the pan. KEEP the marinade!
9. Now when your pork is nicely brown add the marinade to the pan and add a little water as needed. Let simmer for about an hour until nice and tender.
10. You can uncover the pan to thicken everything up a bit if it is too watery, mine seemed fine without doing that. Remember you want to use it with tortillas and you do not want to mess around badly with dripping marinade, do you?
11. Serve your pork with the tortillas plus some sides if you like: sour cream, limes, fresh green salad (or even spinach), tomatos, onions,… everything that suits your taste!

Corn Tortillas

adapted from Flatbreads & Flavours

You’ll need:

2 cups Masa Harina
1¼ cups hot water, approximately

Method:

1. Well, basically this sounds like a no brainer, huh? Some flour plus water. Mix it up, ready!
2. That’s what you are supposed to do: mix your Masa Harina with the water. Adjust hydration if necessary and mix by hand until you have a nice soft dough, not too sticky. It won’t bind like bread dough does, as it has no gluten.
   Make into a ball and cover in plastic wrap. Let sit on your counter to rest for at least a half hour.
3. That’s what I did:  Since I had the problem that this darn flour and water thing would for the life of me not want to form any kind of dough ball I contemplated that it needed some kind of binding, I used a combination of 1 tablespoon of rice flour and 1 or 2 tablespoons of corn starch. That worked for me!
4. On with the original recipe: Divide dough into 16 equal pieces and roll each into a ball. Squish the balls gently into discs and place on the counter. Cover with a tea towel so they don’t dry out while you are working.
5. Set out 2 cast iron pans on the stove. One on medium and one a little hotter. Flatten your tortillas, one at a time, in between the plastic sheets, using either the press or a heavy pot.
6. Peel the tortillas off the plastic (haha this was fun too, I had a hard time peeling them off again, but eventually got used to the working mode and managed to peel them off nicely) and cook on the lower heat, on both sides, until cooked through and then on the higher one to toast up.
7. Let them rest in a tea towel after cooking, to keep them soft and moist. You can stack them all on top of each other in the tea towel after cooking.

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Corn Tortillas with Pueblo Chile-Bathed Pork

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In case you were – like me – wondering what that masa harina is:

Masa harina is the traditional flour used to make tortillas, tamales, and other Mexican dishes. Literally translated from Spanish, it means “dough flour,” because the flour is made from dried masa, a dough from specially treated corn.

To make masa harina, field corn (or maize) is dried and then treated in a solution of lime and water, also called slaked lime. This loosens the hulls from the kernels and softens the corn. In addition, the lime reacts with the corn so that the nutrient niacin can be assimilated by the digestive tract.

The soaked maize is then washed, and the wet corn is ground into a dough, called masa. It is this fresh masa, when dried and powdered, that becomes masa harina. (Add water once again to make dough for tortillas or tamales.)

Fresh masa is available in Mexican markets, refrigerated and sold by the pound. But masa harina is a fine substitute. Availability and your personal taste determine whether you start with fresh or dried masa.

Do not substitute corn meal or regular corn flour, however; they’re produced from different types of corn and are processed differently. They will not produce the same results. Regular wheat flour also cannot be substituted.
source: wikipedia 

Aha! This might be the trouble with my dough, I am pretty sure the one I used (or is available here) is just very finely ground cornflour. Dang!

Nevertheless the tortillas were very good and a lot more filling than the storebought ones  are. We had them on Sunday, when Mrs Q, Mr T and the Little One were here for Sunday Breakfast Club. I made chili con carne with lots of corn and black beans to go with the tortillas since none of them really fancies pork. The tortillas were welcomed by them tho!

I wonder if I can find real masa harina somewhere around here. If so I’d love to try them again.

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Corn Tortillas with Pueblo Chile-Bathed Pork

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