Oooooh, the humanity!

I don’t know. What should we call it? The Great Tortilla Disaster? A Corntastrophe? The Masa Massacre?

I obviously way overestimated my facility with tortilla making. It was arrogance, pure and simple. And an arrogance punished with a near Calvinist fervor. Spanked. Just spanked.

And I thought I was doing so well. I was just mixing the masa with water. Simple proportions, a little more liquid than flour. Typical flatbread ratios. Nada problem. I’m kneading like I know what I’m doing. It’s all looking good. And I’m chuckling to myself about the wizardry of my skills. I pull out a walnut sized wodge of dough and shape it into a little fat disc and slap on the tortilla press between two pieces freezer bag – whap-ah! A perfect, beautiful round of bliss.

That won’t come off the damn plastic. I mean, just won’t come off. I finally have to scrape it back into the bowl, this thing that’s is supposed to just peel right off. Right. Sure. I figure it’s humid, so I add a little more masa to the mixture and need it again. Again it sticks like Bombshell McGee to another woman’s husband. Right. New plan. I switch to waxed paper. I come up with a vaguely Virgin Mary shaped tortilla, and slap it on the skillet. It’s not browning. It’s burning. I flip it quick, and try to save it. It was just one big mess. And it was all downhill from there. Uglier and uglier horrortillas. Luckily, most of the words I know in Spanish are bad words – and I used them all.

Okay. Fiasco. I’m fine with that. But I’m unbowed. I will not be beaten by the tortilla. I will master this skill, if I have to poison every one of my friends with bad tortillas to do it. I WILL make a good tortilla, just like mamacita used to make. MARK MY WORDS! You will be mine, tortilla! Oh, yes. You will me mine.