Tres de Mayo

My mother came in to town for the weekend to celebrate her birthday, along with my elder brother's birthday. I felt it would be most appropriate to cook something for them, and it all seemed to fall in place when I got an e-mail from Recipezaar about Cinco De Mayo dishes. We all have a bit of a fancy for Mexican food, and my mother is particularly fond of Margaritas, so I decided to fix up a few things. She's also really into turtles, so while I was joking with Chris about making something and telling her it had turtles in it, I was also looking for recipes and stumbled across a little gem. So, here was the evening's menu:

• Flour Tortillas


• Margaritas


• Steak Fajitas


• Turtle Ice Cream Pie

I began by starting on the crust of the pie, and accidentally used all the pecans due to missing little indicators on the recipe. Luckily, I had some crushed pecans dormant in the pantry that came into play later. The pie took an immense amount of time to craft, which I had not counted on, and it is still incomplete to this moment. I worked on it intermittently throughout the evening, as only bits of the work can be done at a time, in between waiting for the different layers to thaw. I moved on to the Flour Tortillas, which were a lot of fun to make. The dough was incredibly simple, though I was a little concerned about making it in a food processor without one of those plastic blades. I used the metal blade, anyway, and came out with a bunch of tiny, cute little balls of dough that I was then able to roll together to make properly sized balls that eventually got flattened into tortillas.


I chose to use thin cut chuck steak as opposed to the top sirloin simply because I did not want to deal with flattening the steak. This saved me some time and also doubled the amount of meat available due to the way it was packaged. I salted it as I do with all of my meats and got to work on the sauce, which was also doubled, while I set forth Dustin on the vegetables. One everything was in strips I dropped them into respective pans and let them develop that most heavenly of scents. There are few fragrances known to man that can be so purely pleasing as the smell of sautéing onions and bell peppers. I had a few mushrooms leftover from previous dishes that I decided to sauté in as well. That all came together very quickly. Incredibly simple, incredibly pleasing. I thought that I would be making too much, but by the time I made it back for seconds, there were none to be had.


I'd made margaritas the previous night(for the first time ever!), and had used up the majority of my Cointreau then, and didn't have enough for the proper measurements for a single glass this evening...but it turned out to be more of a crowd pleaser than the original recipe. I suppose I'll be making them like this from now on. I really only made it to accompany the pictures, and in the end I chose to use a picture that didn't have it present. I drank it anyway, of course!


Finally, back to this pie. It was a lot of fun to make, and every ingredient is delicious on its own. The Caramel is wonderful (though mom poured it out while cleaning the dishes and I had to remake it).
The Ganache was incredible (though I made it out of a bar of bittersweet chocolate + 1.5 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate chips), and you just can't go wrong with Vanilla Bean ice cream. It should be set up some time tomorrow, and you can poop your pants over it then. Ta-ta.