Salsa de fresa con totopos dulces

This is blender salsa, but you can dice the strawbs for a pico de gallo style salsa or bash the holy living f**ck out of them in your molcajete

Because it's summer and strawberries are the best summer fruit ever, I thought I'd share this lighthearted take on tortilla chips and salsa.

I'm not great at desserts, so when I'm planning a three-course menu I really struggle with the finale.

But this "dish" is ridiculously easy to make and the comic transformation of what is usually a savoury snack into a pudding almost makes it a show-stopper.

The key element is the strawberry salsa.

I came up with this because my daughter hates chiles ("They're too spicy ") but she LOVES strawberries. So I tried to think of a way she could enjoy chips and salsa.

She's four by the way.

Basically everything I would put in the classic Mexican tomato and chile salsa has a corresponding sweet ingredient in the strawberry salsa.

• Instead of tomatoes, I use strawberries (duh).
• Instead of diced white onion I use diced apple.
• Instead of fresh cilantro (coriander) I use mint.
• And instead of chiles I use chiles.

Ha!

Seriously though: you can leave chiles out of this one. HOWEVER, if you want to use chiles, try a bit of habanero. It's fecking hot, but the fruity flavour is ideal for this recipe. Just take it easy if you or your guests aren't hardcore chileheads.

So now that you have all this stuff, make it into salsa more or less the same way you would make standard (raw) tomato and chile salsa.

Then make the totopos (tortilla chips).

For these I uncharacteristically use flour tortillas.

First I preheat the oven to 160 C.

Then I cut the tortillas into triangular wedges using a pizza cutter (I kid you not).

Then I melt some butter and brush a baking tray with the butter using a pastry brush.

Then I place the tortilla wedges on the tray and brush them with more butter.

Then I dust them with ground cinnamon and sugar and bake them for about 20 minutes or until crisp.

(You can deep-fry them instead, in which case you would have to use oil, and dust them with cinnamon and sugar after frying, before they cool. But I never deep-fry my totopos.)

Y provecho!

I don't think they really eat these in Mexico, but they are still the bomb. 

I like to put a few totopos on everyone's plate and put the bowl of salsa in the middle, so it becomes a sharing activity and promotes socializing. 

You should also have a bowl of extra totopos to hand, because even after the strawberry salsa is finished, your guests will want more of these. In fact, so will you, then next day. 

Breakfast with MexiGeek: Migas en salsa verde

When I saw that Nigella had basically done a version of migas, I knew it was high time I did one.

(This was before we found out about the cocaine but after her now ex-husband choked her in a public restaurant in broad daylight. She's living the dream.)

Anyway, migas literally means "crumbs", but in the kitchen it means a dish of scrambled eggs and tortilla chips.

That's right: tortilla chips for breakfast.

This dish is pretty simple, and there are many variations, depending on what you have lying around.

Some people fry the tortilla chips first, but I only recommend this if your tortilla chips are homemade. Store-bought ones disintegrate too easily.

I didn't have an onion so I used minced garlic, but as a rule chopped onion is the way to go.

And I had some leftover salsa verde.

I started by heating some oil in a pan and sweating the garlic (use onion if you've got it. This is also where you'd fry your homemade tortilla chips. Remove them once they start to brown.)

Then I tipped in my salsa and fried it until it reduced and most of the water had cooked off. This is kind of like making salsa de huevos.

Then I added the eggs and a couple handfuls of crumbled tortilla chips and scrambled it all up.

¡Y provecho!

I served it with a few more tortilla chips, some sour cream, and chopped coriander or cilantro.

Just so you know, I do have one of these.

Review of Cool Chile Company Tortillas

Some Cool Chile Company tortillas, with a few of their friends

Being MexiGeek, I do a lot of labour-intensive cooking. I don't buy tins of chopped tomatoes. I buy fresh tomatoes, asar-roast them, and bash the living hell out of them in my molcajete.


I don't buy ground spices like cumin, clove, and cinnamon. I buy whole seeds or sticks, toast them in a pan until they release their fragrance, and then grind them by hand in my molcajete. (I don't own a spice grinder.)


And I make my own corn tortillas, which takes forever.

But I'm a MexiGeek. That's just what I do. What if you want to eat Mexican food and you don't want to spend your whole night cooking and then eat dinner at 10pm?


When I arrived in the UK in 2001, I couldn't find corn tortillas, even at Mexican restaurants. But now that supermarkets are selling disgusting polenta/wheat flour hybrid things as "corn tortillas", I feel it's my duty to steer my readers in the right direction.

Because you can now get real corn tortillas here in the UK: just order them from the Cool Chile Company.


First a bit of background on Triple C.


The Cool Chile Company began importing dried chiles from Mexico into the UK in the early 1990s. Many, many Mexican recipes call for dried chiles, so they're an essential part of authentic Mexican cuisine. Also, because of the historical ties to India, most fresh chillies available in the UK are Asian varieties. CCC were one of the first (if not the first to make Mexican chiles available in Britain.


Honestly, I could not cook without these guys.


In 2005 they brought in the UK's first ever tortilla press (which they named "Lupita") and began making the UK's first (as far as I know) ever real Mexican corn tortillas. Demand has grown, so Lupita has been replaced by El Monstruo ("the Monster"), which makes 3,500 tortillas an hour.

You can order these tortillas online. They ship anywhere in the UK and Europe.

By the way, I don't know these guys personally. I learned this from their website, which I visit frequently.


I've bought these tortillas a few times. They're a real lifesaver when you want tacos but can't be bothered spending the two hours or so it takes to make a homemade batch.

So how good are they? Well, consider I basically fisked the sub-par Old El Paso tortillas, I feel I should be systematic.

Appearance. Professional. They are perfectly round and just the right colour (because they are made from real masa harina (and not polenta like some commercial brands). Basically, if you placed these next to any of the commercial brands in North America, you could not tell the difference.

Taste. Spot. On.

This is exactly what tortillas are meant to taste like (I should also add that the inviting smell of proper tortillas greets you when you open the pack).

You have to reheat them before using (helpful instructions are on the package). Corn tortillas need to be warm to unlock their flavour. Also, because corn is gluten-free, a cold tortilla cannot be folded like a flour one can.


Texture. Again, spot on, because these are made from just masa harina and water. They have a uniform thickness and when warm they fold easily without falling apart (very important for tacos).

Usefulness. The Cool Chile Company actually sells two kinds of tortilla: soft ones for tacos (the kind I bought) and "frying tortillas", which are a bit coarser and are for making tostadas and totopos (tortilla chips).

I used the soft tortillas for my tacos de carnitas de pollo, and they worked brilliantly as expected. The next day for a snack I heated a tortilla up, put some cheese in it, folded it and finished it off on a hot dry frying pan before drowning it in chile sauce: a rough quesadilla. It was so good I had to make another right away.

And although they don't recommend you fry these tortillas, I found they worked perfectly for baked totopos:

Cut the tortillas into wedges (I used a pizza-cutter).

Preheat the oven to 150° C.

Grease a baking sheet and lay the tortilla wedges on it.

Using a pastry brush, brush them with some oil (I used olive oil, to keep them as healthy as possible).

Then bake for 15-20 minutes. Keep an eye on them so they don't burn. They will continue to crisp a bit as they cool.

Sprinkle lightly with salt as soon as they're our of the oven. These are way more delicious and much healthier than crisps.

So are there any negatives?


Well, as with all professional, machine-made tortillas, they lack the charming irregularity of homemade tortillas. Also, commercial tortillas like these are never slightly charred, they way homemade ones often are.

Also, because these are made from masa harina instead of masa, conventional wisdom holds that you can't use them for enchiladas or chilaquiles, though I actually made chilaquiles with my baked totopos and found they worked fine.

In any case, these aren't really negatives. There's nothing like a fresh homemade tortilla. But if you want it you're gonna work for it. With these on hand, you can have tacos as an easy mid-week meal, instead of a big production thing you have to leave for the weekend.

Bottom line. I really can't fault these. They are, as far as I know, the only authentic corn tortillas available in the UK. It's this or homemade.