Cinco de Mayo Special!

Make sure you get your Cinco de Mayo cooking off on the right foot, because tonight, we're making Burritos!

Look at all those fresh ingredients!  So tasty looking.

So here is something interesting.  Both of us have studied industrial design which turns you into a mutant that is completely obsessed with the physical world and the subtle details of manufactured items.  Even in the store is was readily apparent that the box for the dinner kit was on some sort of a wicked lean.  My first instinct was: okay, it was amateur hour at the packaging facility.  But upon closer inspection it's obvious that this is no accident; the sides of the box are die-cut in that shape.  My better half proposed the following explanation which we assume to be correct:  Flour tortillas do a lousy job of standing up straight on edge.  Even stacked 8 deep, there would still be some odd rippling and sagging if they were expected to maintain a vertical posture.  So if you recline the box a few degrees, the tortillas can lean up against the box and they will be somewhat less misshapen when you liberate them.  It also prevents a tortilla induced domino effect when you pull a box off the shelf; they're not all going to fall forward into your face.

Box contents: 3 Envelopes.  Where is Carnac when you need him?

The colour of the seasoning sort of reminds me of the Hungarian alumina spill.  

We also made some tomatillo salsa verde.  First you get a bowl, and to it you add:

...a jar of store bought tomatillo salsa verde.  It eats pretty good.

Always a sucker for new things, we picked up some of the new Tostitos Artisan Recipes: Roasted Garlic & Black Bean tortilla chips.  They were pretty good.  But with the flavour built into the chip, you really don't need anything to dip them into.  

So here is the spread.  It took about 13 minutes, all told.  

I tried to get mine to look exactly like the box art. The ones on the box are really full and round and magically self sealing though.  I suspect that if I flip up that tortilla, I would find a piece of two-sided tape.  And probably the cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper.

Well there you have it.  Burritos.  This is the perfect Cinco de Mayo dinner in the sense that, it really isn't authentic Mexican.  The burrito dinner kit is like IKEA furniture.  It's reasonably priced, comes in a box, and has instructions for easy assembly.  They both fulfill a basic need, and if that's all you're after, that's great.  This is how we got started with Friday Night Mexican.  It was supposed to be a fun and easy dinner on Fridays after work that let us escape to Mexico, or at least El Paso, Texas.  Since we've started cooking things from scratch they've become a little less easy, and a little more stressful, but still fun and a whole lot more tasty and arguably more healthy.

Regular FNM resumes tomorrow!