Pupusas

I set out on a mission today to make tamales. I've been obsessed with the idea of cutting out my lunch expenses entirely or near entirely, such that I have a $5 budget on a side order at the ferry building. I went to the mexican grocer on clement and id guess 24th. I was planning on ripping off Donna's Tamales chipotle tofu filling. So I found the Chipotle in Adobo sauce and masa de harina, i was still short on those corn husks. I wish somehow highschool spanish taught me enough to ask for tamale wrappers or corn husks, but it didn't. I bet it was a funny sight me all squinty eyed with a smile on my face making hand gestures of what I think means tamale wrapper. The lady laughed at me and just said "sorry nino".

Well, I had my heart set on some tamales, what am I going to do? Reading the label on masa it said tortillas, tamales, pupusas.... PUPUSAS! life's a lot less coincidental than you'd think. I did end up learning that tamale and pupusa filling should definitely be a different chunkiness. I should've just made cheese and blackbean pupusas.

Anyway, the filling. Carrots diced. Onions diced. Can of black beans, rinsed. corn kernels. chipotle peppers, some of the adobe sauce. tomato paste.

So now the fun part, filling the pupusas, don't worry I watched a few youtube videos... I'm good to go.

You roll them into a ball then thumb out a little cavity, fill it up then seal it trying to have no air in it. then you press it down into a pancake. Due to the chunkiness of my filling I had a hard time getting the thickness down to where I wanted it.

Then you just fry it in a very lightly oiled pan.

As it turns out, my roommate decided to have an early thanksgiving day dinner... so this ended up going out to a dinner party... i didn't taste enough to know if it was as horrible as i think it was. The filling with diced extra firm tofu added ended up being great in these burritos I made the next day. Just add rice, cheese, sour cream, lettuce. Rockin.