06 May Toasted corn tortillas with British asparagus, tabasco butter and goat’s cheese

Posted at 14:14h in Uncategorized by

It’s British asparagus season so it annoys me to see asparagus flown in from Peru still on the shelf at Tesco’s. Why why why. Anyway, if you want to read my opinions on these matters, then read this (there’s a few extra exclamation marks than I would like to see, but apart from that it’s mine), otherwise let’s talk about lunch instead. I made corn tortillas, but in my own way. I did a bit of internet research, but there was talk of griddle pans and special types of cornmeal, so I just ignored it all and went with my instincts and my intuition. This is what this year is about for me after all – that was one of my personal resolutions and one which recently I’ve had to remind myself of. It’s only too easy to get lost in a world of other peoples’ expectations, but I’ve done too much soul searching to go down that route now. And besides, I had a special type of toasted cornmeal from Lanzarote that I wanted to use – that’s why the tortillas are brown in case you’re wondering, I hadn’t burnt them. After some experimenting, what I came up with was a cross between pancakes and socca, but since they are made from cornmeal, I’ve called them tortillas

I tried to make them without eggs first, but this made them too crumbly and fragile, so an egg is definitely needed. Apart from that I used 1 cup flour to 1 cup water, and a pinch of salt. As with the socca I didn’t turn them over, I simply fried on a low heat, in the tabasco butter (that’s butter mashed with tabasco), until the edges began to raise slightly, then layered some blanched asparagus and goat’s cheese on top. I added more tabasco butter once it was plated up, because you can’t have too much of that stuff

 And now you’ve probably guessed why I bought the toasted cornmeal. Isn’t that just the best packaging? They had different colours too, for  different levels of toastiness, but the others were big, heavy bags and I didn’t really want to overload myself with many bags of flour in my hand luggage

This one was very, very toasty and it tasted pretty amazing. It’s kind of obscure and I don’t expect I’ll be able to find it in the UK, so in the future I will try these with another type of cornmeal and see how it goes… a bit of experimentation is always a good thing I reckon