Go ahead and just buy the chips
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- March 20, 2019
- 1307
Homemade guacamole begs for homemade chips.
In the 1980s there was a television show on PBS, “Amish Cooking from Quilt Country.” I don’t think it ran more than one or two seasons, but I remember it mainly for its oddity and the fussy host, Marcia Adams, who said she spent a year poking around the kitchens of Amish and Mennonite families to find out how to cook whatever they were cooking.
Adams had a blonde pageboy hairdo, and most of the recipes she presented went awry before the end of the 30-minute show. The companion book still turns up, if you’re interested, but there’s not likely to be anything in it you don’t already know how to make.
You can cook green beans to gray mush and mash up a pot of potatoes without a book of instructions, surely.
Once, the show centered around a recipe for making Grape-Nuts cereal at home. The question, of course, is why on earth would you even mess around making Grape-Nuts when you can buy them off the shelf?
I found out just how one can go down such a rabbit hole last week, and it all started with a big bin of avocados on sale at the store. At the moment I thought some chips and guacamole sounded like a good snack for later, only I don’t buy any chips, just two nice avocados. And there they sat, on the kitchen window sill, for three days, until my hand was forced: make something or toss them out.
My wife was parked on the sofa with a good book, recuperating after a bad morning at the dentist. I knew she’d soon be asleep, so I had time to kill.
Making up the dip took no time at all. I had everything on hand: the avocados, lime juice, garlic, cumin, chilies, cilantro. But I still didn’t have any chips and didn’t feel like trotting out to the convenience store to get some. Besides, I needed to stay close by in case the patient in the living room needed anything.
So I decided to make a batch of flour tortillas. We could just use those to dip instead of a bag of chips.
The tortillas themselves aren’t hard to do. You don’t need a press because those are used for corn tortillas. Flour ones are rolled out between sheets of waxed or parchment paper.
Quickly I had a batch of dough ready to go and started heating up a cast iron pan. With a couple-dozen balls rolled out to generally round shapes, I baked them in the pan, a minute per side. They turned out fairly well, if too thick.
The recipe I used included baking powder, and in hindsight, that can’t be right. At any rate I was happily rolling and baking and stacking, lost in my own thoughts, talking to myself and forgetting completely I wasn’t alone until I heard a groggy voice behind me.
“What on earth are you doing?” she asked.
After jumping out of my skin, I sheepishly explained I was making flour tortillas for the guacamole now waiting in the fridge. She pointed to the container of pita breads I’d just made the day before. “Why would you do that when we already have a ton of flat bread?”
And that’s when I made chips.
Cutting all the fresh tortillas into triangles, I fried them in hot oil until I had a bowl overflowing with them. Looking at all that work, I thought of Marcia Adams and her Grape-Nuts. Just buy the chips for heaven’s sake.