Can't-Stop-Eating-Them, Easiest-Ever Homemade Flour Tortillas

We love Mexican food at our house. We love Mexican food out of our house too. (the Chipotle in our area gets a lot of our money) Recently we've been resolving to make our own bread and bread products. No buying sandwich bread, bagels or english muffins or any bread-products at the store (or farmer's market, or anywhere). We've been doing it for a couple months and it's going really well! We haven't even been tempted to buy our usual favorite from the store because homemade tastes so much better! Unfortunately for us, the no-bread-buying rule also applied to tortillas. We never made tortillas before this time and were a little dubious at to how they would turn out. Well, let me tell you- these tortillas are amazingly delicious! You won't want to buy the ones from the store after tasting these. They're extremely simple to make and only use ingredients that 90% of households already have on hand. Ok, enough chit-chat. Here's the recipe: (found on pinterest)

Easy and Utterly Delicious Homemade Flour Tortillas

Ingredients:

3 cups flour

1 tsp. salt*

1/3 cup veg. oil

1 cup warm water

Directions:

Combine all the ingredients until they form a dough. (your kitchen aid mixer isn't needed-just do it in a bowl and 30 sec. later dough has formed) 

Roll the dough into a big ball and pinch off a 1-2 inch piece. 

Roll out the piece on a floured surface. Make it a circle.

Put the raw tortilla into a flat pan on medium high heat and cook until there are little brown speck on both sides (you'll have to flip the tortilla to cook both sides).

Continue pinching off pieces, rolling and cooking until all your dough is used.**

*we thought they could have used a little more salt, but that just depends on your tastes. We'll probably up it to 1 1/2 tsp. next time.

** This recipe made 19 tortillas for us. Some of them were a little bigger than was ideal, you could easily get 24 tortillas out of this batch.

Do enjoy mexican food? Corn or flour tortillas? If you've made your own tortillas before, I'd love to hear about that too!

Happy Tortilla-ing!

Gettin' My Groove On With Frimoo Glasses-A Sponsored Post

Usually when I get emails from companies to blog about their products I just delete them. First of all, I usually assume that they're spam, and secondly, I think "how in the world do they know I have a blog???" Freaky. 

However, when I got an email from Firmoo.com, I thought what if it IS real? What if I really CAN get a free pair of glasses for my aging eyes? (bad eyesight runs deep in my family) I was desperately in need of a new pair of glasses. I had ordered a super cheap pair from another online company and they were literally falling apart.I went to Firmoo's website and was pretty surprised with what they had to offer. Stylish frames. Good quality. Good customer service. and um, FREE.

After a bit of browsing I choose my frames (they're selling for around $36), entered my vision and PD info onto their easy order form, and about 10 days later got them in the mail!

I was surprised with their quality and how sturdy they are. My glasses came in a hard leather-ish case with a cloth and also a glasses screwdriver-keychain and extra arm joint screws. 

Take a look at my new specs:

sweater: Eddie Bower via savers, dress: savers, leather belt: savers, riding boots: marshalls, earrings: charming charlie, necklace: vintage, glasses: firmoo.com

So guess what? You can get a free pair too! That's part of the perks to blogging about this sweet deal I got. Click the link to get yourself some awesome specs: Free Glasses

I love that geek glasses are totally in. Who wears them best? Um, Zooey Deschanel, obviously. Someone please tell me that I'm not the only New Girl fan out there.

Our Last Leg: Vernazza, Switzerland, Paris and Madrid

Looking back over all the amazing times we had during our European adventure makes it really hard to pick just a couple photos for you. However, I'm FORCING myself to finally complete my blog series on our trip to europe this past summer in one short post. (believe me, I could go on for years sharing picts with you guys. however, there are other things that are also important to blog about like pumpkin recipes and such)

So without further ado, here goes:

 If you remember from the last post, we had been in Rome and Florence where the temps were just amazingly hot. We were so relieved to get to the Cinque Terre (5 little towns on the seacoast all connected by hiking trails). We spent a couple days cooling off in Vernazza, this charming tiny coastal town. It was one of our favorite stops on our entire trip. (and the tan I got there is just starting to wear off my legs 3 months later!)

 After Vernazza, we went to Basel, Switzerland and spent some time with our friend (and also violinist in our quartet). It was super fun to go wandering around this city! I could picture myself living here. On hot days, people get floaties and just float down the Rhine (pictured above) riding with the current. We spotted about 30 people while we were there-it's quite funny.

We went grocery shopping in Basel- cooking for ourselves and our host. I almost laughed when I saw this bottle labeled "American Sauce." I wonder what in the world that tastes like.

After Switzerland, we went to Paris and believe me, as a book lover, it took a LOT of control not to go crazy buying all these old books. There were tons of carts along the bridges selling books, art, vintage art and everything in between. I came home with 1 print. The art is so cheap too!

 Rome has beautiful fountains, but no one can deny that Paris has her fair share as well.

 Le Tour Eiffel at dusk. Rooooomantic. 

Paris Opera House. Really magnificent inside. 

Square where Victor Hugo's apartment is. If you ever visit here, go to the museum/house- it's free!

Do NOT Skip going to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore if you are in Paris! It's extremely quaint and amazing. You aren't allowed to take pictures inside but it's filled with old and new books and a rickety old staircase to upstairs where there's nooks with old couches and victorian sofas in the middle of book piles, and a piano.  

Our time in Madrid was short, but it was an amazingly beautiful city by night. We stayed with some wonderful couchsurfing hosts and had a late dinner (we started eating at 11. we were told this is pretty traditional for the summer time.)

So there you have it! Just a few little tidbits of our last leg. Perhaps someday we'll go back. I already can't wait!