Chex Mex

Let me start this one out with letting you know that one of friends is pregnant, and being pregnant, she has had some varied cravings for tastes that are not all Chinese. And some of those tastes she has been craving are hard to reproduce in China, one of which is Mexican. But we agreed to a group dinner the other night with that theme. Now, you can't get refried beans here, but you can get dried beans. So my task was to take dry black beans and try to make refried beans out of them. Well, they actually came out pretty good. Take in mind that you have to first soak the beans overnight, drain them, and them boil them for about 3 hours AND THEN you can saute some onion & garlic & spices and slowly add a cup of the beans and a little bit of vegy stock and then you take a potato masher and start mashing the beans while they boil down to a consistency to make room for more beans and stock. All in all, a fun experience. Oh, and then Rachel made the dough for the tortillas, rolled them out and I cooked them up, a team effort. This meal made for a long day of cooking beans and tortillas, but it was well worth it, one of the best Mexican meals I think I'll have here in China. 

I know they're not the best pictures, but we don't get good Mexican food in China that often, so nobody was dropping their plate to pick up the camera.