This was my first meal cooked in the new house!!!! Yay! I made it on a night when I knew Mark's parents were coming over. I was very excited to be cooking in my beautiful new kitchen, feeding my very-soon-to-be in-laws, even if we didn't have a table.
The experience turned out to not be quite what I had expected. We didn't have a garbage disposal. For someone that grew up with one, it was a very difficult thing to suddenly find myself peeling carrots into the trash. No matter how careful I was washing pans, I still had to scoop out mushy beans and rice from the drain. Thanks to my wonderful cousin Pat, I now have a disposal, so this problem no longer exists :)
Back to the burritos - I happily roasted carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, and onion, and cooked up some rice. I added tofu (shhhh, I didn't tell anyone that was in there), black beans, and cheese, and used my new Griddler to make the burritos stiff enough to hold in your hand. I was pretty pumped to serve these to the Ajemians!
And then the door opened. And the first thing I heard was, "Oh, is that cauliflower? And broccoli? Ugh." I later found out that Mark's parents don't eat cooked cauliflower or broccoli. Or many other cooked vegetables (apparently raw is fine!)! And they walked in with aluminum pans full of ribs. Ha! Those two crack me up. So my dreams of sitting my future in-laws
at the table on the couch with healthy vegetarian burritos disappeared. I suppose now that I will be cooking for them rather than the opposite, I will need to learn their likes and dislikes. After all, they've done that for me over the past 5 years; Ed always makes sure to have vegetarian foods and "meat without bones"
Anyway - Mark, my mother and I did eat these burritos, luckily, because they were really good! I love anything with roasted vegetables, and the tofu was masked by the flavors of all the other things going on so I didn't even have to tell anyone it was in there ;) Obviously there were lots of leftovers, and Mark and I ate them for lunch at work for the rest of the week. When we got sick of burritos, we ate the filling on top of rice. After about 4 days, he begged me to stop serving him burrito filling, but still, that meant 5 days of this stuff before he got sick of it. That definitely says something!
The cool thing about this recipe is that you can make it ahead of time. It gives instructions on how to refrigerate or freeze them, which will definitely come in handy. It even tells you how to heat them up if they're still frozen. One last note: you can swap out the fillings if you're like Ed and Evelyn and broccoli and cauliflower aren't your things! Just aim for a cup and a half of filling per burrito, and you can roast whatever veggies you'd like. Swap the tofu for chicken, if you're a carnivore, or some sort of cooked meat. Use white or brown rice. Choose your favorite cheese. See what I'm saying here? The choice is yours. Make these ahead of time, make them for dinner tonight, swap out the ingredients; just make them and thank me later. And use your garbage disposal.
Recipe:
roasted vegetable burritos with black beans and rice
from
The Kitchn
makes 8 burritos with extra filling
Ingredients:
1 small head broccoli (about 1/2 pound)
1 small head cauliflower (about 1/2 pound)
1 large carrot
1 yellow onion
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 cup rice, brown or white
1 15.5-ounce can black beans, drained and rinsed (about 1 1/2 cups)
2 cups shredded cheese (5 to 6 ounces)
2 cups crumbled tofu, shredded chicken, or shredded beef (meat should be cooked prior to assembling the burritos)
8 large burrito-sized flour tortillas (9 to 10 inches wide)
Optional extras: sliced avocado, sour cream, salsa, hot sauce, sliced scallions
Instructions:
1) Pre-heat the oven to 450°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment or a Silpat.
2) Chop the broccoli and cauliflower into bite-sized florets and stems. Chop the carrot into small pieces. Slice the onion through the root into wedges.
3) Toss all the vegetables together with the olive oil and salt, then spread in a single layer on the baking sheet. Roast until the vegetables are tender but still have some bite and have developed brown spots, 15 to 20 minutes. Stir the vegetables occasionally while they're roasting.
4) Remove the wedges of onion and roughly chop them into small pieces. Return the onion to the vegetables. Taste and toss with chili powder and additional salt if desired. Set aside.
5) While the vegetables are roasting, prepare the rice according to your package directions. Once cooked, fluff and set aside.
6) To assemble the burritos, wrap one or more tortillas in a clean, damp dishcloth and microwave for about 20 seconds to soften. (This helps prevent the tortillas from cracking when you roll them.) Lay the tortilla on the counter and layer about 1/4 cup of cheese, about 1/4 cup rice, about 1/4 cup black beans, about 1/4 cup vegetables, and about 1/4 cup crumbled tofu on the lower third of the burrito. Any extras can go on top. Don't worry too much about the exact amount of each component: aim for 1 to 1 1/2 cups total filling per burrito.
7) Roll the burrito tightly by folding the sides over the filling, then rolling from the bottom up. If you're not eating the burrito immediately, wrap it tightly in foil and refrigerate for up to 12 hours; don't refrigerate burritos for more than 12 hours or they start to get soggy. Burritos can also be assembled, wrapped in foil, and frozen for up to 3 months. Individual burrito components can be refrigerated for up to a week.
→ To heat just-prepared burritos or refrigerated burritos: cover with a damp paper towel and microwave at high power for 1 minute, until heated through. (Unwrap refrigerated burritos before heating.)
→ To heat frozen burritos, unwrap, cover with a damp paper towel, and microwave at high power for 2 minutes. Flip the burrito over, cover again, and microwave for another 1 to 2 minutes, until the burrito is heated through.
These cookies actually have a rather funny story. Mark's mother let me bother her mom's Albanian cookbook. It's pretty awesome and old, and the recipes call for exotic things like "2 pounds of lamb, preferably leg," "a 4 or 5 pound fowl," "kadaif," , "flour - the green box," , and spices you've never heard of. Evelyn caught me flipping through it and taking pictures of tons of recipes to try out, so she just told me to take the book! I hadn't gotten a chance to give any of them a try because of the house and the wedding and all the life changes someone could stuff into 2 months, but then all of a sudden it was the night before our school's volunteer appreciation breakfast and I had no idea what to bring. I had only cooked in my new kitchen once, so I decided to make something rather than grab donuts in the morning, and somehow I thought to flip through the Albanian cookbook. I found basically only one recipe that called for ingredients that I had; they were called finiqe, or Albanian filled cookies in English. They seemed simple enough (I love when the recipe says "mix all ingredients together" to start off), and I was intrigued that the dough had orange juice in it. They are stuffed with walnuts and raisins, and then dipped into a hot sugar syrup once they're cooled. Intriguing, right? And while I was a bit nervous to try a weird recipe like this from a cookbook I hadn't yet learned to trust, I figured this was a perfect situation to try them out: after all, what were the chances someone at the volunteer appreciation breakfast would have tried finiqe before and would know whether or not mine were terrible? 
