Mexican dinner!

Tortilla making ingredients, all brands you would not find in the USA. Yay for measuring spoons!

We finally got our stuff together enough to try making our first Mexican dinner here. We first started by “fast soaking” the Pinto Beans (Here they are called Sugar Beans or Red Speckled Beans), which means boiling them for 10 minutes, then soaking for the rest of the hour. This saved us about three hours, good thing since we started at 4:30 and still had to cook them for another 1.5-2 hours!

Proof I made some of them!(And never too far from the iPhone:)

Then we set to making tortillas. This was actually the second time we tried to make tortillas since we have been here. We have been trying different flours (there is nothing called all-purpose/general flour here), for these, we used a combination of self-rising flour and white bread flour.  We have not been able to find manteca (lard) or Crisco (shortening- what do they bake with here?) here, so we had to use Canola Oil. They tasted much better the second time around and had improved texture. 

Our tortillas

Once the tortillas were made, we set out to make our bandera salsa (red, white, and green, the colors of the Mexican flag.

Salsa ingredients. We only use the reddish chile.

Salsa Bandera!

Lastly, we made chile colorado. We were concerned that we would not be able to find the right type of powdered chile, but we did. The most common chile here is peri-peri, which P has mixed feelings about. He still has not found a suitable hot sauce for his food. P made the red sauce by making it with water and the powdered chile. After he complained that it was not reducing right, I suggested that he add some flour. Then he proceeded to smack his forehead, remembering that his mama does do that. Although we added it pretty late, it incorporated well. My only problem was that it was too hot and I only ate about three pieces of meat! In the USA, you buy different levels of heat for the powdered chile, but we had not such options. 

The finished product.

Paired with a South African beer, Hansa, because the only Mexican beer that we’ve seen is Corona, which we detest. 

We were in heaven!

Hope you had something yummy for dinner!

P.S.: Hubby’s blog can be found here.
P.P.S.: I added this to Sew Much Ado's Wednesday linky. 

Song of the day: Oye by Mara. It’s not necessarily a Mexican song, its more reggeaton, but it’s so fun to Zumba to! The video has somewhat of a strobe-light effect, so beware if this tends to bother you.