More From The TEFL Logue Kitchen: Mexican Food

As I may have mentioned before, I am a fan of Mexican food, and good Mexican food is one of the things I miss greatly when I am away from home. Here are a couple of simple but good Mexican-ish recipes I’ve recently indulged in, which don’t require specialty ingredients:

Refried beans
Drain and rinse a can of beans (kidney?pinto?)
Heat in a saucepan with just a bit of water.
When the beans soften up, mash them using a tool that looks like this and is appropriately called a masher; add approximately one can of water.
Also add some kind of spice if you’ve got it (chili powder is a good one, as is of course “taco mix” that comes in a packet)
Wait for the water to boil off to an acceptable level, mash a bit more and enjoy, ideally with sour cream, cheese, onions, tomatoes and more importantly, guacamole.

Guacamole

Be warned, this takes more preparation – you have to seek out decent avocados and may even have to wait for them to be in the correct stage of ripeness – not too hard. If you wait til the right time you shouldn’t even need a mixer (or masher) to mash them.

An avocado or two (yes, peeled and with the pit taken out)
Salt
Olive oil
Lemon juice (nice if you’ve got some; not essential)
Diced garlic, onion and tomato
Sour cream or plain yogurt

Mix the first three or four and add the garlic, onion and tomato slowly so you can get the right proportion of each.

Neither of these is particularly complicated, but if you’re missing Mexican food they are likely to hit the spot. Once you get to know them you can add your own personal touches or spice them up with local goodies.

Tortillas?
I can’t make them well so I’m not even going to try to tell other people how. Ask someone who knows or search online.

Note that searching for “tortilla” on an otherwise great website, AllRecipe.com, yields mostly recipes using pre-made tortillas; only a few, like this one and this one are recipes for tortillas themselves.