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leftover tortilla integrity

Ingredients

Note: this one is probably not easily repeatable - or at least, most food techs who are just interested in preparing a meal for consumption today won't go to the trouble of e.g. buying a package of tortillas and leaving them opened in the crisper drawer of the fridge for 2 weeks just to reproduce the condition of the torillas. I suppose a similar dish could be prepared using rice that hasn't been frozen, and fresh tortillas. Fortunately, Ghetto Kitches Labs maintains a substantial inventory of various specialized ingredients specifically for these types of experiments.

  1. Most of a quart of white rice - left over from an order of egg foo yung. It sat in the fidge until it froze. Nothing wrong with that, really, but it needed defrosting.
  2. Four whole wheat tortillas sat in the drawer in the bottom of the fridge in a torn package until the exposed part of each of the tortillas had gotten quite dried out and hard.
  3. A 7 ounce package of Starkist tuna
  4. olive oil, garlic powder, soy sauce, chili sauce

Directions

  1. Remove the frozen rice from the cardboard chinese food container, placing it in the large [microwavable] glass mixing bowl [Anchor Hocking]
  2. Adjust the "temperature" dial of the microwave to be somewhere around "medium" - this setting changes during cooking, so the precision used in this step is not particularly important - the idea is to thaw the rice gently, then heat it up causing it to give up some moisture to the tortillas
  3. Place the bowl in the microwave and lay the partly dried out tortillas over the top - on top of the rice
  4. Start the microwave - the timer setting doesn't really matter, since the m/w has to be stopped frequently to check the state of the rice and the tortillas
  5. After about a minute or a minute and half, stop the m/w and check - if the rice is not thawed, run it some more. It may be useful to adjust the temp, but if the rice gets too hot to quickly, the rest of this won't work right. Also, if the tortillas get too hot too soon, they will get too tough or (in the extreme case) too crispy.
  6. Once the rice has thawed, but before it gets hot, move the tortillas underneath the rice - a spoon might be useful for this, but is not required.
  7. Drizzle some olive oil (enough to plausibly make its way down thru the rice and onto the tortillas) over the top of the rice, increase the temperature setting incrementally and run the m/w some more. Repeat this step until the rice is steaming, and the tortillas have softened enough to eat.
  8. Take the bowl with the rice and tortillas out of the m/w, open the tuna and empty it over the rice.
  9. Add garlic powder, chili sauce, and soy sauce on top of the tuna, to taste.
  10. Stir the rice and spices into the rice [use chopsticks], then [again w/ the chopsticks] drag one of the tortillas out from under the rice - most of the way - capture some of the of the rice and tuna onto the tortilla and role it up - if you want extra chili sauce, this would be the time to add it. Repeat this step with each of the tortillas until the tune & rice are taken.
  11. Enjoy!

Notes

This is good with coffee.

This dish is significantly more complex and takes quite a bit longer to prepare than most of the stuff we do here.

Additional spices and/or different types of oils, rice, or tortillas would give the dish a slightly different character using the same procedure.

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