Made With Love

When I got home from work tonight, I found a care package from Oregon waiting on the front porch. Apparently my mother-in-law is missing her baby son and decided she needed to send him some love in the form of homemade flour tortillas and a block of Tillamook cheese. Yum!

The taste of homemade tortillas warmed and folded over with melted cheese inside brings back good memories. No matter how hard I try, my homemade tortillas never turn out as good as hers. I remember well my first lesson in making them back when I was a teenager in high school. I was in the kitchen with Sid's Mom and two sisters, trying to make a good impression and it was my job to mix the dough, which you always do by hand, never with a mixer. There I was with both hands down in the bowl and sticky dough up to my elbows, doing my best to mix the ingredients to the perfect consistency.

I looked down into the bowl and was mortified to see little red things dotted all throughout the white dough. My sister-in-law looked over my shoulder and burst into obnoxious snorting laughter while my face turned redder than the specks in the bowl! Turns out I was doing such a good job of mixing the dough that all my fake fingernails were popping off one by one into the mix! How embarrassing! We had to pick them all out to salvage the batch.

As the lesson continued, I soon realized I was a hopeless case when it came to making homemade tortillas. Rolling them out was a total joke. Tortillas are meant to be round, not shaped like the state of Florida or Idaho, all lopsided and jagged. I was never going to master this task. Even now, more than 25 years later, my tortillas aren't perfectly shaped, but at least they're edible, thank you very much! And I can whip a batch up in record time too!

But don't worry Mama, yours are much preferred over mine, so thank you for the care package and for the memories!