Flautas

Last Sunday night I surrendered my role as head chef and I took on the role of sous chef.  My son was tasked with making flautas for his Spanish class so I got to assist.  (It's great to watch my kids take the lead and express their creativity in the kitchen.)  I love the role of sous chef - I could definitely get used to this.  

Ryan's flauta strategy started was very simple -  heat, fill, roll and fry.  Why makes things more complicated than they need to be?  I even had grilled a couple of extra chicken breasts for our dinner so we would have some leftovers to use in our flautas.

​The first job was to shred the chicken in the food processor.  
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​He also heated some oil in a skillet over medium heat.  Once the oil was warm, he dipped each tortilla in the oil to soften it.  (The heat part of the process.)

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​Next - fill each tortilla with chicken.  

​The trickiest part of the whole process is the roll.  It's almost impossible to roll them immediately because they've just come out of the HOT oil.  (A lesson I learned after burning almost all of my fingertips during my first flauta attempt.) Don't want to wait too long to roll them because if they cool too much, the tortillas become brittle and crack.  

​My son did a great job of rolling his flautas.  (They looked way better than the batch of flautas that I made a couple months ago.)  

​The final step was to fry his flautas.  

In the words of my son "Frying just makes everything taste better."  He took the flautas out of the oil and drained them on paper towels.

We put 3 dozen flautas on a baking sheet to take to school and we got to eat the rest.  A sprinkle of queso fresco and some shredded lettuce is all the adornment that he added to his flautas.  

They were really good but I was a little worried that they would get soggy overnight in the refrigerator.  (That is also the reason that we didn't put any beans over the flautas.)  I wrapped the entire pan in aluminum foil and heated it in the oven for about 15 minutes at 300.   To my surprise, the flautas crisped up nicely.

Cinco de Mayo is right around the corner - you may just want to celebrate with flautas this year.   

Ciao!

Click here for a printable version of this recipe