Una cena 'wrap'

A few days ago I decided that my next dinner would have been a 'wrap-dinner'.. The idea was that I would put a lot of different things on the table, some tortillas, and everyone would make his own wraps. Then, I thought that I could not only make the different fillings, but.. the tortillas themselves!
So, I looked online at various recipes. There are a lot. I ended up choosing the recipe from epicurious.com for the basic dough. Then, I decided I also wanted to make some spinach wraps, so I looked for a recipe of spinach tortillas.. and I found this one. Go look at it.. the idea of making bicolor spinach/beets tortillas obviously attracted me and I decided to try.

So, Saturday morning I dedicated about two hours making multicolored tortillas. The white ones are actually very easy, once you get confortable with it. You can easily do the doses by eye, in the end: just put some flour (I tried with both white and whole weat flour), and add some salted warm water to it until the dough has a nice workable consistency. In the original recipe, they add some shortening to the flour.. In the first batch, I added olive oil instead, and then I decided to just go without any fat, and they seemed to be quite good. With olive oil, they also had a nice taste, but a bit too 'aggressive'.
For the colored ones.. at first I tried to make the green dough, with spinach. These are not too difficult, but they require a bit more patience because you have to incorporate the flour to the spinach slowly, until the dough has the right consistency. I made some tortillas just with the spinach, and they were really good. So I tried to make the red ones. These were the most difficult ones, basically because I didn't have the right tool to puree the beets. So, the beets were just finely chopped, and the little pieces remaining in the dough were difficult to work with. They also made the dough a bit too moist, and more difficult to roll. I tried to cook some red tortillas, and they were good, but the beets were hard to taste. So I went for the bicolor-spiral ones, according to the recipe cited above. Obviously, the red dough being so annoying, I couldn't really get nice spirals as they show in the pictures of the website.. So, they were just bicolor. Not too bad, though, being this my first trial, I decided.

In the afternoon, I prepared the fillings. I made
- beef: cut into small pieces, sauteed in some olive oil, then cooked in some yogurt, red wine, honey, rosmary and sage, for a long time (about one hour). It was really really good.
- chicken: similar to the beef, but with white wine and no honey and rosmary and sage. Quite good too.
- seitan: sauteed with onions, cooked with corn and little pieces of sage.
- black beans (from a can): sauteed in olive oil with some onion, then slowly cooked for a long time in their own sauce and some maple syrup.
- green bell peppers: sauteed with onions in olive oil, then cooked with some nutmeg.

For appetizer, I prepared a salad with cabbage, olives, oranges, fresh mozzarella (ciliegini), carrots (cut in small round pieces), avocados, seasoned with olive oil and salt. Also, I prepared some mini-wraps: I took some of the bicolor tortillas, spread some mayonnaise on them, put some slices of Salame di Genova, slices of mozzarella, then I rolled it tightly, making like a 'cigar', and then I cut the rolls into small pieces, that I held together with some nice colored toothpicks. So, they were bite-size mini rolls.. They were finished quite soon. :)

I served all the tortillas and the fillings together, with also some steamed rice and some salsa (salsa=pezzettini di pomodoro, peperoncini piccanti e altre spezie, per gli Americani. :) E' usata appunto per tortillas/burritos, o per pucciarci dentro delle patatine di mais).

I think it was a lot of fun. I decided that in the future I want to have some more of these 'interactive' dinnners, where people have to put together the things by themselves. It's a little bit like making them cook, and maybe some of them will be interested and will try themselves with some variations once they're at home..

Unfortunately, the batteries of my camera decided to stop working right after I took the picture of the wine that we had for dinner.. so I don't have pictures of my wonderful mini-wraps, or of the stack of tortillas that I prepared, or of all the fillings on the table.. :(

Well, here is the wine at least :)
It was really good - a Portoguese wine brought by Filipe and Vlasta.

The day after, we had a few leftovers, so I have a picture here of an example of a possible wrap made with them.. but the wrap is one of the commercial ones that we had in the fridge.. no homemade tortillas were left. :) (also the beef was quickly finished, so you can't see it in this wrap). The commercial ones taste really bad, now that we tried the real ones. :)
Per i miei lettori Italiani: considerate la possibilita' di prepararvi questi wraps... sono molto buoni, e in Italia non ero mai riuscita a trovare le tortillas, per cui non avevo mai potuto fare tutti questi piatti buonissimi tipo fajitas.. non sono difficili, in realta', soprattutto se non ci si avventura in quelli con le barbabietole.. :)