Roll your own.

A couple times a week we have just beans and rice for dinner, and to spruce things up usually also have tortillas, and most all of the time I make the tortillas myself. I got into making my own tortillas years ago while backpacking in Guatemala. I guess I thought tortillas simply came from machines somewhere, but there along the streetsides of every town were women patting out corn tortillas and cooking them on car fenders and hoods positioned over charcoal fires. I experimented for a while with corn tortillas from a mix but never liked the results, then moved on to flour tortillas, also from a mix, and was more satisfied. After moving to Missoula I forewent mixes and did all my tortilla making from scratch.

Tortillas from scratch can be done with regular around-the-house ingredients, and I estimate I can make a batch of a dozen for less than 25 cents and in about half an hour. Better, there's really no way to mess them up, and I only measure the flour and water and just eyeball the rest. (One thing that does help is that our well has very minerally water, which I think makes them fluffier. San Antonio, which I saw somewhere was the Tortilla Capital of the World, also has famously minerally water.)

Here's my recipe:

3 cups regular flour; 1 cup very hot water; a handful of shortening; about a teaspoon of salt; about a teaspoon of baking powder

1. Mix the flour, shortening, salt, and baking powder. Then, add the hot water and knead into a ball. Add flour or water if it's too wet/too dry. It should look about like this:

2. Cover the dough with a damp cloth and let it sit somewhere warm for a few minutes; I put it atop the radiator. While the dough is rising, heat up your griddle. We use, courtesy of my parents, a good-sized plug-in griddle, though before I got that I used the largest, thickest frying pan I could find. Or, you could use a car hood -- whatever happens to work. Whatever it is, it needs to be good and hot.

3. Take a scoop of dough and sort of roll it out so the creases disappear. Nothing perfect, but perhaps like this:

4. On a floured surface, roll the dough out into something that looks like the sort of tortilla you want to eat. Mine are about 8 inches across and not totally round circles. I like mine thick, but Laura likes them thin. Does not matter. Here's what passes as acceptable at our house:

5. Put the tortilla on the griddle and cook about 90 seconds per side.

6. Here is the finished result:

Meanwhile, in the Bitterroot:

Funny moment below Lappi Lake on Saturday: I skinned 5.25 miles up Bass Creek Canyon and hooked a left to climb toward Lappi Lake, but misjudged things and had about an hour of full body contact thrashing in a heinous forest before popping up at the lake and making it most of the way to the summit. Along the way most of the time I could look back and see the hulking behemoth of St. Joe across the canyon -- one of the Bitterroot's biggest peaks. Anyway, I had a nice descent and on the way out tried to traverse north to miss the worst of the forest and coming around a knob saw a party of two in the bowl across from me who had come up the way I though was better. Even though they were 50 yards away the acoustics meant we could have a perfectly normal conversation. After talking snow for a moment I said, "Don't follow my tracks into the forest -- it's a morass." One of the guys thanked me, paused for a moment, and added "And don't follow our tracks either -- the forest we came through is awful."

A bit more of a chat revealed that they had left the trailhead an hour ahead of me and already summitted St. Joe, and were just having a fun tour to Lappi to take in the scenery. BURLY!

Parting shot: baby's first time skiing.