Leftovers Burritos
R had a very rare night off, and a desire to not waste the opportunity by not going to the movies, so we were going to the movies. Since it was a weeknight, that meant we’d go after everyone else got off work, which gave us some little time between getting home and getting to the movie theater to eat. Maybe an hour if we went to the latest reasonable showing. This sort of eliminated the possibility of going out for dinner, since we would all be hungry well before nine thirty or whenever the movie ended (it was a long movie).
Unfortunately, this scheduling snafu did not occur to me until the day of the thing, while I was moving a chair from the furniture store to my living room. So I had something on the order of a couple of hours to figure out what it was I was going to do here.
We had a bunch of leftovers, including some scattered remnants of the taco night from the other day and a handful of new years leftovers still*, so it occurred to me to keep the “Fakey Mexican” theme going and buy some giant burrito-size tortillas from the grocery store and make giant burritos. Grocery-store tortillas aren’t my first choice, but these were pretty good, and while I probably had enough time to make giant burrtio-size flour tortillas, I also didn’t have the inclination, and need a slam-dunk choice. Thus it goes that I sometimes have to make this kind of compromise. Everybody pity me please.
When the time arrived I chopped up the very end of the porchetta (which had nobly held out all this time, and must have been at the last possible stages of its life) and got it working in a pan, to which I added the remnants of the braised beef rib from taco night (there wasn’t very much), along with some garlic, an onion, and a sprinkling of cumin and some coriander. The latter things had been in the braise for the beef but I thought since I was changing the texture (crisping it up with the leftover porchetta in the fat of the porchetta) I would re-season it so it was a little more aggressive.
The meat alone was not going to be enough for three big dinner-sized burritos, so I also re-crisped the taco night potatoes in a separate pan. That was just a matter of getting some olive oil down and putting them in there. The potatoes were, as previously raved about, basically perfect, so they didn’t need much gussying up.
On a roll already, and realizing that things were going pretty well, I decided to go for broke and heated a third pan up. I oiled it and dumped in a can of black beans. Some more minced garlic, some more cumin, a little cinnamon, some chili flakes and some paprika filled that out. I had drained and rinsed the can (because the liquid is weird and starchy and doesn’t act right) and replaced it in the pan with some apple cider, which I cooked until it had cooked off. Oh, and a shake of something from Penzey’s in a jar marked “Salsa and Pico” which has some more dried herbs and ground chilies in it. It’s pretty useful for making things taste “generalized nonspecific Mexican”, but I don’t always remember it’s in there. This time I did remember, because I am a burrito-making hero and that is how things go.
When everything was heated up, I laid out the tortillas and started them all. A bit of the crispy beef and porchetta, a small pile of the reheated potatoes (this used about half of those), and a spoonful of the beans. For accoutrement I added a handful of leftover peanut greens (also from new years), which also had to be near the end of their life, and which I thought would help texturally - the meat was crispy, and while I cooked the beans until the liquid was cooked off so they fell apart a little they still weren’t a very loose mixture**, and I thought something with more moisture would help. It also came from the fact that I was going to cook the burritos further, and didn’t want the weirdness that comes of sour cream, but still wanted a creamy element.
Burritos take forever in the oven, so I figured I’d probably better set something out sooner. Chips and cheese seemed like a natural, given the meal, so I put a pan on the stove and emptied a can of evaporated milk into it. I threw a couple of slices of regular old american cheese*** and then a generous oversized handful (I have big hands) of cheddar cheese in there, followed by a little more cheddar cheese. I spiked it with some of the homemade hot sauce that’s too hot for people to enjoy, and a little bit of turmeric to add a little depth of flavor****. I got the cheese sauce together and let it be friendly in the pot for awhile while I attended to some chips.
I got out the air fryer, which I am really beginning to appreciate for its no-heating-time quality. There were some homemade tortillas left over from taco night, and I was pretty happy to get those out and cut them into little chip-sized triangles and run them through the air fryer. I’ve pretty much only ever used the thing at maximum temperature, which I did here. I may experiment with lowering the temperature and upping the cook time someday, but I can’t stop using it with the mindset of it being a regular fryer, which it definitely is not. It makes great tortilla chips, though, converting the homemade tortillas and the blast of spray oil I treated everything with to a crunchy chip that went well with the cheese.
All told, everything was a hit. The burritos behaved exactly like I thought they would. Crisping the meat actively beforehand allowed me to know exactly how much dryness to account for, which I did well between the beans and the peanut greens. The chips and nacho cheese were a big hit, with the chips especially being another excellent use for the air fryer. It felt like an intentional dinner, and not like a complete emergency disaster, so I felt that my work had gone in the right direction.
Now I have to figure out what to do with the rest of these sour beans. I have so many, you guys.
* these are begin written in the future. I mean, the leftovers had been around for awhile, but these are being written after the fact.
** that method gives them the texture of basically being like a stiff refried bean.
*** proper bright-yellow smooth nacho cheese requires sodium citrate to the get the cheese to melt like that. I don’t have a jar/bag/whatever of sodium citrate, but it’s pretty easy to keep some american cheese in the fridge and just use that, which has more than enough sodium citrate to keep a few ounces of regular real cheese in emulsion.
**** this is kind of a trick, and I would ordinarily be above such things, but I did want the thing to seem more like a meal and less like an unintentional panic slap-dick assemblage. Turmeric doesn’t have much flavor, but it does have some, and when it’s not staining the food its telltale color, that flavor can best be described as “what is that flavor?”, so I’m fond of throwing it into things that only kind of have one note to give them, not really a second note, but a sort of intriguing half-note.