The Tortilla Tote

Photo by cbertel

My parents sort of live on a farm. There is a storage shed that looks a like a big red barn. There is a somewhat ignored garden. There are a lot of chickens and a big dog that likes to chase the chickens until my dad stops him. The chickens are nice to have around because they provide us all--my sisters, our husbands, my niece and my two nephews--with eggs, eggs, eggs, more eggs than we ever imagined.

Along with our usual 30 or so eggs, Damian and I also recently came into the possession of 90 tortillas, all after a visit with my parents. There was a gray plastic tote overflowing with packages of tortillas in the guest room, and Damian, feeling both curious and greedy, asked my parents about what he fondly referred to as the "tortilla tote."

"What's with the tortilla tote?"
"Those are expired," my mom explained. "We bought them for the chickens."
"Oh," Damian said, staring longingly at hundreds of tortillas.
"You can take some if you like," she consoled.

Damian promptly packed 90 tortillas into his suitcase, thus changing the course of our life (or at least the course of our diet).

Damian and I have been trying to eat simply, in an effort to be frugal. "Not every meal has to have a centerpiece of meat," I said today, as we sat down to eat our rice and beans. But every meal does have to have a centerpiece of tortillas, when you own 90 of them.

At breakfast we have boiled eggs and avocados with our tortillas. Avocados aren't always a staple in our house, but the other day, Damian came across some for 19 cents a piece. We mash the avocado and spread it on our tortillas like butter. Then we peel and slice and salt and pepper our hard boiled eggs, which we wrap in the avocado buttered tortillas. I drink hot rooibos tea sweetened with honey. Damian drinks canned tomato juice.

At lunch we eat rice and beans with our tortillas. We make the rice in the rice maker, so it's a little sticky, almost like the rice in sushi, and we melt a little cheese in the beans. We wrap our rice and beans in tortillas, the same way we wrapped the eggs and avocado at breakfast. It's so delicious that sometimes we take seconds. At night we may stir a little meat into the leftover rice and beans and eat it once again in a tortilla. By that time we are a little tired of rice and beans. We aren't tired of tortillas yet.

Damian's father is Hispanic, and maybe Damian misses the old days, the tortilla days of his childhood, and thus felt the need to rescue the expired tortillas from the plastic tote. Or perhaps something deep inside of him feels that it isn't right to feed perfectly good tortillas to chickens, and even if those perfectly good tortillas were purchased at a small, dark store that sells old freight, he would rather eat those tortillas every meal than let them go to waste. When my dad heard from us that the tortillas were still suitable for human consumption, he put the rest in his deep freezer and now the poor chickens don't get any. But Damian and I still joke that we are eating chicken food when we sit down to every meal.