Potato taquitos!

Real Recipes for Real People!

Potato Taquitos.

Time:

11 minutes

(for God, chef ruler of the Universe)

or

5 intensely difficult hours 

(for you!)

Ingredients:

Potatoes

Cheese

Oil

Corn tortillas

Pallet of paper towels

Salve

Pantry items

Step 1:

Boil potatoes. 

What variety?

The variety you bought at the store!


Step 2:

Blend cooked potatoes in a food processor or just mash them up with grated cheddar or Parmesan, garlic, salt, olive oil, maybe some lemon or lime juice if you have it.

How much of each for all these?

Look, I could make up amounts, but whatever you do at random will probably turn out better than what I used.


Step 3:

At this point, you should have a modestly gluey mash of potatoes and an already distressing number of dishes to clean. These potatoes, as is, taste pretty good. You might want to cut your losses now and just eat these. No? Okay, but consider yourself warned.


Step 4:

Heat two fingers width of peanut oil in a large frying pan. This will turn out to be a terrible mistake, but it's in this recipe so you're supposed to do it.


Step 5:

Plop a large scoop of potato filling onto a corn tortilla. Then, with the back of the spoon, spread the filling evenly on the whole tortilla to the very specific depth of 11/57 inches thick. For the rest of the world 49 mm thick will work, but not as well. If this recipe does not work out exactly as I say it will come down to depth variations of potato on tortilla and so is not my fault.


Step 6:

Gently roll the tortilla into a tube, like a taquito! Watch in horror as the tortilla rebels against being curved and breaks apart into useless, messy slabs.


Step 7:

Turn down the oil! It is so hot that it's singeing overflying aircraft!


Step 8:

Okay, new plan. We'll make these more like quesadillas!


Step 9:

Make a new layer of potato on tortilla. Press another tortilla on top of it. Perfect!


Step 10:

Put your "taquito" in the oil. Because the searing oil didn't exactly cool down in the two minutes since Step 7, bits of blinding hot exploding particulates will now fly painfully into your face. Swear freely.


Step 11:

If blind seek medical care, if not blind, carry on.


Step 12:

Prepare your second "taquito", then note with alarm the following two things:

The insides of your taquito/quesadilla are somehow sort of oozing out into the oil, and

The top tortilla is no longer flat! It has sort of curled up on itself like a dead spider.


Step 13: 

Flip the taquito thing. How do you do this without burning yourself and losing most of the filling and having the top tortilla all bunched in on itself? Now is not the time for a bunch of affected niceties!


Step 14:

With a metal spatula scrape all the stuff off the bottom of your frying pan. This will be the first of so many times that you have to do this that I will no longer mention it in the steps. Rather I'll just advise you now to do this every minute or two for the next several hours.


Step 15:

Remember that broken mess of an original taquito? You might as well throw that in the oil since the chaos in your frying pan can't get any worse.


Step 16:

Remove your first taquito or whatever it is now (the one you flipped). Set it on a pillow of 20 sheets of paper towels. Oil will still soak through this amount of paper towels, but concern for the environment has prevented me from fully exploring how many paper towels it would really take to prevent this.


Step 17:

Repeat with the oozing, scraping, splattering, blinding yourself process. Don't be gentle with these quesataquitos. You want to cook them into crunchy submission!


Step 18:

At some point, with all the oil and potato filling you will wonder if you can make a potato pancake. Scoop a couple large dollops of batter into the oil and lightly press down.


Step 19: 

When it becomes clear that you can't make potato pancakes because they dissolve in the oil you will need to up the frequency of your pan scraping. Set aside fried bits scraped out onto more forest killing layers of paper towels.


Step 20:

Keep cooking until all tortillas and batter has been used up. Turn off stove.


Step 21:

While waiting for quesataquitos to cool, eat your collected crunchy bits. Extremely delicious, no? Yes they are! You have now consumed the equivalent of two 12 ounce glasses of peanut oil.


Step 22:

Eat what you can of your quesataquitos as they will be no good to anyone in about 45 minutes. If you have anyone in the house or nearby in your neighborhood feed them quesataquitos until there's nothing left in your kitchen that a full container of dish soap and two hours of washing won't take care of.


Step 23:

Figure the nausea will pass in about ten hours, at which point you will crave:

Potato Quesataquitos!

Yum!