Tortillas

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to learn how to make tortillas. It was a great experience and made me want to try it at home, too.
I had some left over white corn meal and eagerly mixed the 4 needed ingredients together. The result couldn't have been more different. My white corn meal was very coarse and instead of a nice dough I had a kind of mush and it was impossible to shape it into anything. Not quite willing to give it up I used a spoon to pour the mixture onto the frying pan and made a couple of sad looking, hard oval shaped ..things. I am resolved to try again with yellow corn flour some day.

yellow corn flour
water
olive oil
salt
Maria from Bolivia showed us how to mix yellow corn flour with water, add a little bit of olive oil and salt until the texture of the dough is just right and can be formed to tortillas. We made our hands wet so that the dough wouldn't stick to our hands (which it shouldn't do too much either way). First we made little balls out of the dough, then formed them into little sombrero shapes using the thumb and index finger, finally flattening out the sombrero into a nice round shape, about 1/4 inch thick.
Then we fried the tortillas in a dry frying pan and ate them with beans, salad, guacamole, cheese, and salsa.