Masa

My dad made this tortilla press. I think he got the plans from Sunset Magazine, something like that. He's pretty handy, a couple of years ago he and my mom built the house they live in.... At our old house in Setauket, Long Island, NY he had a little wood shop in the basement: table saw, circular saw, mitre saw, etc. There are 2 funny things about that. One is the cats, Kit and Nike liked to hang out down there and catch mice. They ran like banshees whenever the power tools fired up. The other is there were no lights down there except in the far corner, but there wasn't a switch, you had to plug in the cord, by touch -- you kinda had to feel the prongs in order to plug it in successfully. Shocks happened. C'est la vie.

Anyway, he brought the wooden tortilla press down to SB for me recently, and I fired it up tonight. Alas, it didn't press the dough very well like I remembered, went back to the old pig iron one I've used for a while.... Made up some masa (2c masa, 1 1/4 c water, salt) and we made quesadillas --press out the dough, add cheese, fold in half, press together, cook on a comal. Pretty good, though the aforementioned amounts didn't really feed 5.