When take fast food and make it at home, it's called slow food.

but is it ever so wonderfully delicious

I started early so we could have a nice lunch, one that is completely unavailable where we live.

Prep time 🕠

Corn tortillas: 2 hours
Frijoles: 2 hours
Meat: 30 minutes
Sauce: 15 minutes
Slicing, dicing,
de-pitting, and shredding: 1 hour

Starting with ground corn, you have to make a pasty dough and then roll it into what will soon become a big round corn chip. The ingredients are simple enough: ground corn, salt, warm water.

I don't have a tortilla press, so I roll out the tortilla and drop it on a really hot cast-iron pan. No oil or coating necessary - that's right, it will not stick.

One quick flip and that part is done. You have a corn tortilla that is soft and flexible. Next you want to drop that in hot oil and fry it until it is crispy. Repeat until there are enough for the family.

Prepped yesterday, we start with frijoles, which just two days ago we rock hard pinto beans. They were washed, put in the pressure cooker, salt, water, and oil added, then cooked at 15psi for an hour. When they come out, they are still whole but very soft.

Vigorous mixing turns the beans into the paste that you see here, but it's not done yet. The mixture is cooled, then dropped in a frying pan, and reheated on high for twenty minutes, thus the name, "re-fried beans."

best mud ever.

Beans are the mud holding it all together

Now take a generous portion of the frijoles and spread those over your giant corn chip. Add some meat and distribute it out on the blanket of frijoles.

Now it's time to build!

The sauce you see is made out of tomato sauce, onion powder, garlic powder, ground jalapenos, and a dab of Tabasco.

The ingredients are entirely up to the person who's going to eat the tostada. Each person at home assembles their own "beefy tostada." These are the ingredients I used to use when I was 13 years old, working at a Taco Bell.

Almost there

We sprinkle onions over the top of our other ingredients, then we add avocados and sour cream, continuing with the other cold ingredients, lettuce, mild cheddar cheese, tomato and black olive slices.

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I think the project was successful.

What do you think?

^{for those of you who would ask me, "why don't you just go to Taco Bell then?" because they don't exist here in Buenos Aires and I wanted a tostada, plus my kids have never had one.}