Real food Aus-Mexican

Aug 03, 2012by Farmer Liz

Farmer Pete and I love to eat burritos. Its a good way to use up all the beef mince we have, and to add a few salad vegetables. I'm sure that our version isn't very Mexican, I haven't been to Mexico, so I have no idea what burritos are supposed to taste like!

these are the spices you need

For a long time we bought the burrito flavour sachet and a packet of tortillas. Then one day we wanted to make burritos, but we had no flavour sachet in the cupboard!!! After brief panic, this finally gave me the motivation to look up a recipe and discover that is not actually that hard to make. The spices you need are paprika, cumin, ground coriander seeds and chillies, I had all but the coriander seeds in the cupboard, so we made it the first time without that spice and it still tasted good. Now I make it with about a teaspoon of each spice, and a tablespoon of cornflour, with half a cup of water, stirred into the cooked mince (about 1kg at a time, we eat it for several days). It comes out with just the right spice for us, but I'm sure you can play around with the ratios.

I like to add onions, tomatoes and mushrooms to the mince, also zuchini if I have any

Making the tortillas was more of a challenge, until I saw a recipe on Craving Fresh (for some reason Nourishing Traditions has the mince recipe, but tells you to buy tortillas), it looked surprisingly easy, so I decided to try it (Farmer Pete bought back-up tortillas from the supermarket "just in case"). If you follow Emma's recipe, just just flour soaked in yoghurt or whey for 4-12 hours and then mixed with butter and fried in a frying pan. The recipe made 8 tortillas. And Farmer Pete didn't need to open his back-up packet as he thought these ones were quite nice. Now I am confident that I can make our version of Mexican food with ingredients at home, with no additives, and without relying on packets from the supermarket.

Tortillas were surprisingly easy to make

Do you make your own "mexican" food? What other packet flavours have you learnt to do without?

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