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so I finally did nixtamalize some corn and make tortillas,

this is the recipe that I followed, but cut in half:

2 pounds clean, dried flour-corn kernels (about 1 quart)
1/4 cup pickling lime (food-grade calcium hydroxide)
3 quarts water

cook for 15 min and then let sit for 4 hours
and then rinse very very well
go find instructions here

I used a flower corn and one pound was one quart in size,
and it did not work out perfect.
the husks just dissolved entirely...
and some of the kernels were out of the water at the end,
so I think that the key here is to use one quart of corn to 3 quarts of water and just ignore the weight of the corn
and maybe the corn should be a dent corn...

so after getting the nixtamalized corn,
I then put it through the grinder and then came up with a damp powder,
it was way to dry to make a tortilla, I tried, but it just crumbled apart,
so I added water not knowing if that would work at all,
and it worked perfect.
so then I pressed out the tortillas and cooked them about one min a side (they were kind of thick)

the end product was good, but I should have set the grinder for a finer setting...

the entire thing was way less scary than I had thought (mainly because I did not get any chemical burns or anything (yay !))

Labels: cooking

so last night I was trying to make tea to take to work today, and it worked out mostly well,

I made the tea and then poured the almost boiling liquid into a canning jar,
I then put the lid on it, then I got the idea that I should turn it upside down so that the hot liquid would kill off any bacteria or viruses on the lid (I have been sick),
when I did that, the tea forced it's way past the lid and spilled all over while burning me,
so I spun it upright very quickly
at the time it seemed as if the air over the tea expanding was causing me the problem,
so I decided to put the jar in my vacuum chamber to remove the air,
I set the lid on the jar to let out the air but not back in (just like you would if pressure canning),
and closed the chamber up and turned on the pump,

just to let everyone know, if you have almost boiling liquid and then take all the air away,
it starts boiling again very very fast.
it over flowed very fast and made a mess of my chamber,
so I turned off the pump and let the air rush back in to the chamber
then opened up the chamber and pulled out the jar of tea
so I tightened the ring on the lid and turned the jar upside down again
this time it started boiling again but did not spew everywhere,

so I went back and started to clean my chamber out.

the moral to this story is that it is a bad idea to turn a canning jar of boiling liquid upside down
and even a worse idea to put it in your vacuum chamber to get the air out
but it did work in the end and it is very good tea.