Carnitas & homemade flour tortillas

I love Mexican fare. Of all the "ethnic" foods out there, it's positively my favorite. I love the contrasts - colors, flavors, textures, temperatures (hot/cold, spicy/mild etc). Today, we had MEXICAN!!! 'Ole!

First, I started by reheating the yumminess that I'd started yesterday in the crock pot - at that time, it looked like this:

And THIS, this is pork carnitas, AFTER being cooked for hours upon hours - trust me, the flavor is out of this world! I added a can of fire roasted chiles and diced up a largish roma tomato. Set the crock pot to high. After cooking the better part of yesterday, the meat was fork tender and was easily shredded. Certainly not "authentic" Mexican carnitas, but it's my own spin on them. AND a dear little Mexican friend of mine gave me her seal of approval, so I'm good with it!

A couple hours before dinner time, I put the crock back in the heating unit, set it to "warm" and left it alone. While the carnitas were spending some quality time with the chiles and tomatoes and broth created from cooking all day yesterday, I made PW's flour tortillas.

I opted to wait to make these until I had lard. Having never made fresh flour tortillas before, and having never used lard before, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to do both. I'm glad I did, on both accounts. The lard was essentially like shortening, with two subtle differences: 1. consistency - it's rather gelatinous where shortening is more solid. 2. smell - well, this should not have been a surprise but I really wasn't expecting it. It smelled like FAT, as in the FAT smell when I cooked down the pork carnitas and the fat was all liquified. I know, big shocker!

As far as PW's recipe goes, it was NOT hard. I kneaded the dough, let it sit, and then shaped it into balls. Clearly, I have NO ability to make uniformly sized balls of dough though:

I followed the recipe, and after rolling out a few with my rolling pin (which is marble), I decided to try just sort of smushing them out. Remarkably, I found this to be FAR easier than the rolling pin and I was able to achieve a more uniformly round shape - which pleased my inner perfectionist quite nicely. I rushed Beth through the next few pics.... sadly they didn't turn out as clear as we'd have liked).

Cooking them proved to be the more challenging part of this - getting the heat to be just right so that they weren't under or over cooked. After they were cooked, I placed them in my handy-dandy tortilla keeper and left the lid on them until the rest of dinner was ready. The only thing I noticed was that they became a little brittle after being exposed to air for a while - my guess is that I made them just a touch too thin. No matter though, they were WAY better than store bought.

Now, a Mexican meal is not complete without an appropriate side dish. And I'm not talking beans. NO BEANS ALLOWED here. While I could  have made one from scratch, by adding some of my pico to some cooked rice:

I opted instead to use this little number - FAR easier than steaming some rice etc. AND, this is NOT Spanish rice, which is more red than this. My family prefers this to traditional Spanish rice. Go figure!

Though I didn't get any pictures of it all together, I served up the shredded and seasoned carnitas with the Mexican Rice, pico, the fresh tortillas, tomatoes, lettuce, colby jack cheese, Cotija cheese, sour cream... and of course limes and cilantro.

YUM.