Thursday, November 16: Enchiladas!

Before the end of my two-week crash course in Spanish, Victoria, my maestra decided to hold a cooking class with one of her colleagues for their respective students. Danni and I raced home after our big morning out in Panajachel late enough to miss out on most of the chopping but in time to help cart all the ingredients over to Rich's kitchen (who bailed at the last minute in favour of a girl, I mean, an extra day off, but graciously tracked us down at the docks in Pana to give us the key to his place). And for the record, we were on time. And since when does anything in Guatemala start on the hour?

With all the chopping dispensed with, our work consisted mainly of forming the soft corn-flour dough into tortillas.


Or, in my case, into semi-round, not-quite-flat imperfect pancakes approximating tortillas.

Making tortillas is really hard.

But the rest is easy, especially when you've got to Mayan women in your kitchen.


Once all the frying was done—almost as time consuming as forming the tortillas—we got down to the real business: assembling the enchiladas.

The perfect enchilada is truly a work of art:


Tastes pretty good too.


If you can get your mouth around it.


But damn, all that work just for a snack?