Eggplant You Can Spread on a Pita (a couple of bucks, maybe an hour including pre-baking the eggplant)

This is a recipe I owe to Manjula, sort of -- it's Manjula plus Bombay Cafe minus oil plus a cuisinart (this is exactly the low-rent one I own), which, trust me, makes it all so much easier.

The first thing you need is two medium eggplant, maybe a couple of pounds at the store. Buy the big ones, not the little Asian or Indian ones. When you're buying eggplant, make sure you get unbruised, shiny eggplants whose tops are still a little greenish.

When you get home, stick the eggplants in the oven on 350 and bake them for about half an hour to forty-five minutes. When you poke one with your finger (be quick: they're hot), it should be soft. Set the cookie sheet somewhere to cool. The eggplants should collapse onto themselves entirely.

When you're ready to make the dip, you'll need:

a red or green pepper diced in about half inch squares (roughly a cup)

a cup of frozen peas, set out to thaw

2 cups of crushed/pureed tomatoes

2 tsp ginger, grated

jalapeno mash

1 TBSP oil

two pinches of asafoetida (hing)

2 tsp cumin seeds

2 tsp coriander

1 tsp turmeric

1 tsp red chile powder

2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp garam masala

4 TBSP cilantro

Take the eggplants, now cool, and cut off the top. With your fingers, peel off the skin and discard it. Put the pulp into the cuisinart and process smooth. It should take no time at all. Set aside.

In bowl that pours (I use my large measuring cup), mix tomatoes, ginger, jalapeno, coriander, turmeric, red chile and salt. Set aside.

In a large saucepan, heat oil and lightly saute the diced peppers in the oil. Remove to a bowl, leaving the oil behind. If you don't have much, splash in just a hair more. When it's heated so that a cumin seed cracks when it hits it, add the hing and cumin seeds, stirring and cooking one minute.

Add the tomato mixture and cook 2-3 minutes until a little reduced and you can see the oil separating from the tomatoes.

Add pureed eggplant, stir thoroughly, and cook for 8 minutes.

Add reserved peppers, peas, and cilantro. Cook for one minute to heat the peas through.

Remove from heat, stir in garam masala, and EAT. We spread this on whole wheat tortillas I've toasted in a hot skillet. It's AMAZING.

There you go.

Cheap, Easy Bread (30 cents a loaf; preparation takes 15 minutes max, baking about 30)

You'd think that a post with the title "Cheap, Easy" and "Bread" -- well, it would inspire me with my most risque content, my most glittery, tube-toppy, lucite heeled (with a slot for tips!), dominatrix-centered prose.

Yeah, okay, it did. I am now picturing Denzel Washington in drag on the Vegas strip, leaning over in a mini-skirt, his stockings just run enough so that we know he's cheap (as if the tawdry pink tube top and multiple gold necklaces, and well -- those SHOES -- didn't already say that loud and clear) -- leaning over, I say, at the window of a long, dark BMW or Lincoln, and the window snicks down, and Denzel says, not even trying to disguise his voice, "So, you want a date?"

And the man in the car says: "Sure. If you're really Denzel."

Denzel flashes his actor's union card or something, looking over his bare shoulder for cops. Oh, and he's chewing gum. Blue gum. He also cracks it.

The guy in the car says: "I'm all for a date, so long as you're easy and cheap."

Denzel, with his long, fake fingernails, each one with the American flag painted on it, reaches in and pops open the door with one hand. He's carrying a clearly knock-off Gucci from the 1990s. He slides onto the seat, the window snicks up, the car drives away somewhere where the most hideous lights reflect off the back window.

Cheap. Easy. You knew I'd go there. You just didn't know I'd take Denzel down with me.

You won't underestimate me again, will you?

So. To the point: when, exactly, did bread become difficult?

That is, when did we start letting people make our bread for us, and then letting them jack the price up on us until, at my local Publix, a loaf of palatable fresh bread costs $3.00--10 times more than it costs to make it at home? "Good" bread is now about $5.00 a pound. Ridiculous. Ridiculous!

All you need is fifteen minutes every two weeks to mix up a batch of this; a pizza stone (find one at a garage sale); an oven; some water; and the bottom of a broiling pan.

For ingredients: whole wheat flour, white flour, vital wheat gluten, water, salt, yeast, spray grease.

You will not be required to knead.

Yes, you heard that right.

Here's how it goes. In a bucket that holds at least five quarts and that you can cover LOOSELY (since yeast breathes) -- I got a big plastic container at Valdemart and cut a hole in the top -- mix the following:

(NOTE: To measure use single cup cup measures so you don't get too much flour. Pack the cups loosely.)

4 c whole wheat flour, packed LOOSELY in the cup measure.

3 1/2 c bread flour, packed LOOSELY in the cup measure.

1 1/2 TBSP (2 packets) of yeast

1 1/2 TBSP salt (kosher or sea is better, but any will do)

1/4 c vital wheat gluten

When these are mixed together, add:

4 cups of water at about 100 degrees. I get this by nuking my winter tap water for about 30 secs. Until you get a feel for how hot this is (it barely registers as warm when you touch it), you might want to use a thermometer.

Mix with your hands or a large wooden spoon. It should be very sticky, but not runny and not dry. Mix until all the flour's been taken up into the dough. Since my bin is clear, I can see this pretty well, but before I had that, I used a big bowl and just lifted the dough with my hands to make sure there was no loose flour underneath where it likes to hide.

Cover loosely and stand in a corner somewhere you can forget it. Forget it for at least three-four hours.

When you get back to remembering about it, don't touch it, punch it down, nothing. NOTHING. Just cover it loosely and put it in the fridge. You want it tightly enough covered that it won't dry, but loosely enough that the yeast can breathe. Again, I just cut a slit in the top of my bin here, and it works beautifully. Leave it alone for about 24 hours or more.

When you're ready to bake:

Sometime in the next two weeks, after at least 24 hours in the fridge, get out a cookie sheet and grease it lightly. Take the container of dough out of the fridge, dust your hands with flour, grab a long, sharp knife, and quickly pull up on the dough. Try not to compress it--the air in it is the air it will have, so if you compress it, it gets REALLY dense. Cut off about a third of it (a little more than about a grapefruit size hunk).

QUICKLY shape the dough into a loaf by tucking under the ends. Don't handle it too much -- this should take no more than 30 seconds. It won't look perfect, but that's okay.

Put it on the cookie sheet, and using the knife, cut three slashes in it, then cover it completely with plastic. Close the bin back up and return it to the fridge. Forget about the bread.

Come back in about an hour and a half. The dough will have warmed up some and look a little more grey and flaccid and unpalatable. That's exactly right.

In the oven, set two racks, one on the lowest rung (closest to the element), one high enough above that so that the bottom of the roasting pan slides on the bottom rack easily. Put the pizza stone on the top rack and turn the oven on to preheat to 450 degrees.

When the oven's hot, measure out a cup of water. Take the plastic off the dough and slide the cookie sheet and dough on top of the stone. Poor the water in the hot roasting pan, shutting the door quickly to keep as much of the steam as possible in the oven.

Set the timer for about 11 minutes.

When it rings, open the oven and shake the cookie sheet a little to free the bread from it, then slide the loaf onto the sheet to finish the baking. Close the oven door. Set the timer for 11 minutes.

When it rings, take the bread out of the oven. Wait until it's cool to cut it. It should be yummy, heavier than your normal loaf, and without the dramatic rise, but solid and good for you.

When you've used up all your dough, DON'T wash your bin. Just make another batch right over the scraps. In two or three batches, your dough will begin to acquire a subtle tang that will be the taste of fermented dough and your local yeast: otherwise known as sourdough, but again, much subtler than the stuff you buy at the store.

It's the staff of life, folks. Make some.

There you go.

Sweet Potatoes ala Davidson sort of (less than a dollar, a little more than half an hour)

Danielle Davidson was one of the finest students I've ever had the privilege to teach.

No, she's not dead. She just graduated and got a job. What were you thinking?

Anyway, she wrote me a while ago with a recipe, which like a terrible self-replicating virus (not the kind I was envisioning, but oh well), I read, punctured the membrane of, wrote my genetic code into, and began merrily to change. I'm sorry, Danielle. Never trust me to pass on anything directly. I just can't. It's not in my nature.

Now, when I think of Gone with the Wind (1939), I tend to remember a couple of key scenes. The dead and dying at the station. The red dressing gown. But mostly: "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!" [Music rises.] I tend, however, to forget that the food she's found is radishes. RADISHES.

Not what in my mind even starving people relish. Radishes. So when I remember the scene, I unconsciously replace the radishes with a better tasting, creamy delish food, a yummy, non-radishy substance.

Sweet potatoes. Ummmm.

I don't remember sweet potatoes much in my childhood; in fact, though I knew what they were, mostly I remember the baked variety that my ex-mother-in-law took to my husband's grandmother in the nursing home/hospital: a single, caramelized baked potato, cold and in its skin. A kind of gift.

So for me, sweet potatoes are a newish thing. I originally treated them like white potatoes: mashed, butter and salt, etc. They were okay like this, nothing special. Then I tried treating them like squash, baked, butter and cinnamon. They were like dessert like this: very sweet.

This was not satisfying. Then I started making fudge, not with sweet potatoes, but with chocolate of course: to which I started adding chili powder. Then I got Danielle's recipe. Then I started thinking.

And THEN I bought this crazy stuff: chipotle powder (Jesus God, its own website!). Dekalb Farmer's Market is a wonder, the tenth or whatever wonder of the world. Who knew you could powder chipotles?

So: this is the simplification and perversion of Danielle's sweet potatoes.

You need about two pounds of sweet potatoes, salt, oil, chipotle powder. And an oven. That's it.

Preheat oven to 350.

Peel and dice the sweet potatoes into about 1 1/2" pieces.

Lightly oil a heavy, oven-proof dish.

Dump in the diced sweet potatoes and stir to coat them with the oil.

Sprinkle with about a tsp of salt.

Then, depending on how spicy you like things, sprinkle a pinch (not very spicy) or two (spicy) or three (you better have some milk [for Lucy] near) over the sweet potato.

Bake until they're soft, about half an hour.

Stir them half way through to distribute the spices.

Eat. It's yummy stuff. And good for you!

There you go.

Grits (Geez, I don't know: 50 cents?; about half an hour)

Technically, these are jalapeno cheese grits (milled locally).

And what about those pasty white crap grits you might find at, oh, Waffle House, that were made about 4 in the morning in a huge vat and have been cooking now for about ten hours -- if, by cooking, you mean "sitting over a moderate heat and stirred when one of the toothless but nice waitresses remembers they're there" -- into something resembling plastinated paper pulp that can only be swallowed with lakes, and I mean LAKES, of butter and about six fistfuls of salt -- or, otherwise, have to be stirred onto runny eggs, filled with bacon bits, decorated with cheese, and sopped up with white toast, and then still are less palatable than used TP?

What about them? Pig food, I say. Worse. They should be used for gluing pasta to construction paper in kindergarten classrooms.

Look, Elmer's glue, though edible, is disgusting. Waffle House grits, like the insta-grits you buy at the store, is disgusting. Unless you were starving to death, why would you eat that? It's an act of political solidarity to refuse them, I think, because grits is something the know-nothings north of here hold against us. Grits, they say, snorting. Who would eat something like THAT? Then they sit down to a bowlful of cream of wheat -- or worse, lutefisk on whipped potatoes -- and see no irony at all.

Then they set up companies like Quaker Oats (a division of PepsiCo.! Now you know they're both evil and not from around here) to sell us "instant" grits in little packets, flavored like "artificial butter" or, God forfend, sweetened with sugar. GAH. It's Reconstruction all over again, the repulsive Quaker Co. carpetbaggers and their incomprehension. They should all get yellow fever is what I say, take it home with them, and come back only when they can appreciate grits.

But first we have to make good grits available and banish the bad grits.

[Are you thinking of My Cousin Vinny (the best I could find)? Because I am. Or wait: "The grits is cold" -- Bette Davis (6:30-6:50). The Little Foxes. Lillian Helman was a genius, and so was good old Bette.]

Now, I know you're thinking: with that lead in, how could this be anything you'd want to make? I think you ask this reasonably. But you remember that I started the stuffed mushrooms with visions of fungusy toenails, and pulled THAT one out of the fire. Have faith, little ones, I can do this.

I will be assisted in this task by my beautiful new bowl, a birthChristdaymas prezzie from the Brickman-Curzons. The bowl was handmade in Tuscaloosa by Neely Portera -- it has a sea-green wash inside, a brownish purple (fig-colored, I think) wash around the outside. Perfect.

The thing you want to do is start with good grits. By which I mean, non-factory grits, grits not imposed on you by the evil machinations of post-Sherman infiltrators.

If you can get them locally, more the better. We use stone-ground grits from Logan Turnpike Mill, which isn't far from where we live (it's in Blairsville). They're extremely coarse-ground and yellow. I prefer yellow because of the color, which isn't just yellow, but a complex mix of everything from deep brown to caramel to sunshine to golden.

Coarse-ground grits are actually better, since they don't dissolve into craptitude when they're cooked. They have actual substance. Which, you know, you probably want in food.

Grits cook at a 3:1 ratio; here, for two of us for breakfast, I've got 1 1/2 c water to 1/2 c grits. It's important to add salt to the boiling water, since for some reason salting grits after you cook them is really difficult to get right. I think I've got a scant tsp. of salt here.

In addition, you'll need some cheese, probably about a 1/4 c shredded (I've used jalapeno jack in the grits and a couple of spoonfuls of shredded cheddar for garnish) and a little jalapeno mash.

Here's how you do this:

1. Put the water and salt in a pan on high heat. Bring to a boil.

2. Dump in the grits. Stir. Turn the heat to medium so they don't pop all over the place. Keep it simmering, though, so don't turn it down too much.

3. Simmer for about 15-20 minutes, stirring every once in a while, until thickened.

4. Stir in cheese and jalapeno mash.

5. Eat.

See, like biscuits, which people think of as difficult, grits is easy. REALLY easy. Which makes it such an offense against God and nature that good ones are so hard to find.

Oh, and just in case you're in Carrollton, Millers grits --- VERY good. They use cream cheese and a lot of butter as the grits cook. That's another way to do it. They serve theirs with shrimp. Which of course for me ruins the whole thing, but that just makes me weird, I suppose.

There you go (with French toast, my birthday breakfast).

Cream Puffs are Not for Every Day (maybe $3, about 45 minutes)

The danger here is that you will eat them all.

I know, having womanfully tried to resist. Then halved the recipe, having failed. Then quartered it, having failed again.

Now I just make these for VERY special occasions, and say: oh, what the hell. Better to die relatively quickly of a heart attack with the taste of cream puffs on my tongue than cream-puff-less, shriveled, incontinent, and telling lewd stories from what I can remember of my past to no one, lying in some vomit-colored vinyl recliner in a nursing home where no one really cares about me because I've outlived all my lovers who died, sated on my cream puffs, of heart attacks. Like we all should.

The recipe, like all good recipes, calls for real butter and actual eggs. Don't substitute. Live instead.

I tend to fill these with flavored custard, but traditionally they're filled with whipped cream. Great gobs of REAL whipped cream. Not Cool-Whip, not that shit that comes in a can and if you suck it right, can make you high. What is that? Jet-whip? [No, it's Reddi-wip. GAH. Their website burned my retina! And what is that SOUND??] I think it's made of recycled plastic. Anyway, buy heavy cream, add a little sugar, whip it with an electric mixer until it's stiff. When you bite these, you should have whipped cream all over your face.

Which is, incidentally, why Chuck eats his with a fork.

Another note: fill these only minutes before serving. Don't fill beforehand. They get soggy fast.

What you need:

1 c water

1 stick of UNSALTED butter

1/2 tsp salt

1 c white flour

4 eggs

In a saucepan, melt butter with water, and bring to a boil.

Remove from heat and add salt and flour, stirring quickly. This will thicken immediately into a weird, doughy paste.

That's exactly right. Return to heat and, stirring constantly, cook for one minute. If you don't, your CPs won't taste right.

Cool completely to room temperature (so you don't cook the eggs when you add them).

Using an electric mixer, or upper arm strength equivalent to four hefty dudes who work construction (trust me on this one), beat each of the eggs into the dough, one at a time. They should be completely incorporated, and the dough should be consistently shiny.

Spoon into about a dozen mounds onto a greased cookie sheet. [Note: these EXPAND, so use two sheets if you have to.] I use two spoons to drop these, like doing cookie dough, then slop them into piles. The dough should be sort of worrisomely slick and loose. It's okay. Keep going.

Bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes. Turn heat down to 350 degrees and prop the oven slightly open for a few seconds to help it cool. Close the oven and bake at 350 for another 20-25 minutes, until the puffs are golden all over.

Cool completely and halve, giving yourself a top and bottom (not a right and left). Remove any soft bits inside. Eat these greedily, since they are extremely tasty; or, be holier than thou and give them to the dog, who will love you forever after, more ardently than before.

Fill with custard, whipped cream, icing, whatever; put the top back on and shake some confectioner's sugar over the top, if you like overkill. Try not to eat all of them. Let me know how that works.

There you go.

Because You Can Never Get Enough Squash in Your Dessert (maybe $10 for a whole pan; about 40 minutes)

These are pumpkin-based dessert objects that I could sit and eat forever, except that if I did I would also feel shame forever, have to go to my first confession (this is a story [not by Frank O'Connor] for another time), and spend too much time atoning.

That Catholic thing never leaves you. The Jesuits were right. I haven't been to mass since the last Catholic dead person forced me there, but I still get the guilties, just like the good nuns told me I would. Or Jiminy Cricket. Sometimes I get the two confused.

On the other hand, being a mother the BVM would likely appreciate that I am eating my vegetables and fruit, even if they do come looking like something intensely bad for you.

What I have for you today, the day before I have to step back into the classroom and try to justify what I love best (writing, reading, and not stock-reports), is Pumpkin Treats. They're very modified versions of BH&G's Pumpkin Bars, over which the BVM would weep if she could read English, given the sugar and oil and such.

[Hey, when you get bodily taken up to heaven, do you think you get to learn everything? Like, say, reading -- since I'm betting good money (drachmas? talents? shekls?) that the wife of a carpenter in Nazareth during Roman times was illiterate. Or, say, what the hell a pumpkin is, since I don't know if they grew ditto. Or, say, how come the word pumpkin, a nice enough word, gets all cutesified by people in the throes of sentimentalism over children, wives, dogs, what have you.]

What you need:

lasagna pan or large lasagna-pan type baking dish, lightly greased (I use spray-grease)

2 c flour

1/4 c sugar

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp cloves (ground)

4 eggs, beaten

1 can pumpkin (15 oz)

1/8 c oil

1 cup applesauce, preferably home-made. This way you get chunks and not much sugar.

Preheat oven to 350.

In a large bowl, combine dry ingredients (on the list, everything through cloves). In a separate bowl, combine the wet stuff. Pour wet stuff into the dry stuff, and mix thoroughly, then pour into greased lasagna pan. Smooth out lightly with a spatula.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool and cut into squares. Try not to eat six at a time. I bet you can't.

The original recipe calls for frosting these with cream cheese icing. Gilding the lily, I say, but if you want to, gild away.

There you go.

My Nana Calls This Gravy (about $15 makes two lasagna's worth; about 20 minutes)

My Nana. She's 91. Born in Italy, I think outside Rome. Her father was a scholar, then a coal miner. One of her sisters died in the flu epidemic in 1918; she still has two brothers living, one older, one younger.

My Nana has lived on Long Island (good lord, it has its own website!) for half a century or more, in the same house facing the neighborhood school. She had three children after the war: my aunt Irene, my father, and my uncle Rich. When my father was 17 he and my mother, the 16-year-old daughter of a local Irish family, made me, then relinquished me to my adoptive parents. Two years later, when my bioparents were legal, they married and then had five children: Chris, Missy, Tom, John, and Tracey. We found each other ten years ago. Which is when I met my Nana, who filled her house with her relatives so that I could meet them all.

This is a nice story, and I'm betting you think that what's about to follow is her recipe for red gravy. Actually, it's sort of my sister Missy's recipe, only not quite that either. And maybe she got it from our Nana, I don't know. All I know is that one day I was visiting the coast and Missy said, let's make spaghetti sauce. And I blinked and said, okay, and then we were shopping, and then she was dumping things in a pot, and all of a sudden, blammo. My whole spaghetti sauce nightmare of a childhood ended. Ended, I say. Blammo.

Because as is probably clear to you from my other posts, my mother, bless her heart, was a modern cook. Packages. Pre-made stuff. If it came in a box or a can it was way superior to the raw, naked, whole stuff. I don't blame her. She's a product of her generation, as I am of mine. Thus, on the issue of red sauce she was multiply screwed: she didn't have the ethnic, class, or more generally cultural impetus to make her own. Her idea of getting spaghetti sauce was--go to A&P. Find Ragu. Buy Ragu. Heat Ragu with browned ground beef. Serve over spaghetti noodles. Side salad of iceberg lettuce, pallid tomato, carrot dimes, either Ranch or Good Seasons Italian.

This isn't Ragu. Doesn't have fifty weird ingredients, preservatives, all that sugar. It takes almost no time to fix.

As I've written it, this makes maybe three quarts of sauce, enough for two lasagnas and a little more. Decrease as necessary for your purposes.

Here's what you need:

Stock pot

olive oil

crushed garlic

oregano

basil

red pepper flakes and/or jalapeno mash

vegetables (here, it's onions, green peppers, and broccoli, though just about any sort will do)

Three large (32 oz) cans of crushed tomatoes

one small can of tomato paste

opt. med can of diced tomatoes

a little red wine

possibly a TBSP of sugar

possibly a little salt

Chop all your vegetables up. Set aside onions and peppers, since they'll go in first. But you can glop the rest together.

Open the cans. If you're using diced tomatoes, drain them only. Don't drain the others (you can't actually, but I didn't want you to try).

In the stock pot, heat up enough oil just to cover the bottom. I'd say about 4-5 TBSP max. Use med heat.

When you can smell the oil, or when it starts to shimmer, drop in a heaping spoon of garlic, a handful (maybe 3 TBSP) of oregano, half that of basil (so maybe a TBSP and a half), and some red pepper flakes or jalapeno mash.

Saute these in the oil for just a minute. Don't burn the garlic. This is easy to do, so err on the side of undercooking.

Add onions, peppers, celery, any veg that's there just for flavor. Saute until just limp, stirring pretty constantly.

When the onions are translucent, or the other vegetables are just a little soft, add the tomatoes.

Stir. Turn the heat to low. Cook uncovered for about five minutes, until the tomatoes are simmering. Taste.

It's important to taste at this point because your tomatoes might be very acid. If they taste like can, or sort of bitter, you'll need to add the sugar. This happens unpredictably, so you have to taste. Add salt at this point, too, if you feel you need it. I almost never feel I do.

When the tomatoes taste right to you, add the rest of the veg and about a third cup of wine. I generally just dump, about two glugs.

Bring to a boil over low-med heat (to keep you from having red sauce popping all over your kitchen). Taste, adjust for bitterness -- more sugar -- or for richness -- more wine. Let simmer until the vegetables are just cooked through.

If the sauce looks too thin, add more paste or just let it cook down for a while. This will overcook the vegetables, however, so unless that's okay with you, use the paste to thicken.

[This is a picture of the sauce boiling. I thought it was really neat: a still of motion. Also, the sauce launched a giant blob of red stuff into the atmosphere; it landed on my arm, where I licked it off like Yukon Cornelius licks his pick.]

There you go.

Burritos for Breakfast (maybe $5; about 15 minutes)

I preface this whole entry with the caveat: we are not Southwesterners. These are as inauthentic as any other ethnic recipe here.

As I say this, I wonder: what is authentic Southwestern? A hybrid of Mexican and American food? What is authentic Mexican? A hybrid of Spanish and indigenous food? And which indigenous food? And which Spanish cuisine? And how long does a cuisine have to be itself before it's really a cuisine and not some hybrid? And while we're at it, what's Spanish cuisine, but a mash up of regional food ways overlaid with preferences from hundreds of invasions from elsewhere?

I'm looking for the Ur cuisine. That might be authentic.

And don't get me started on "American" food. Now there's a mare's nest if I ever saw one.

Okay, caveats and phlights of philosophy aside, here's what we do when we want quick finger food for brekkie.

You need:

** tortillas (these are El Banderito, but any will work.)

** 2 med potatoes, washed, unpeeled, and chopped into about 1 inch pieces

** 2 eggs

** jalapeno cheese slices (You too can torture your children! Use pain and bribery!)

** a little margarine or butter

** salt and pepper

You can add diced onion and salsa if you want. We generally don't.

In a microwave-safe dish, cover and cook the potatoes on high about 5 minutes. They should be completely cooked.

In a separate bowl, beat the two eggs together.

Meanwhile, heat two skillets. Lightly grease one (I use spray grease). You'll use this to heat the tortillas.

In the second skillet, melt a little butter. Use med to med-high heat.

When the potatoes are done, dump them into the buttery skillet and brown the potatoes. If you want diced onions, this is the stage to add them.

As the potatoes brown, set a tortilla in the other skillet and put a piece of sliced cheese on it. Heat for about a minute (until the edge of the cheese starts to soften). Remove to a plate.

In the potato skillet, pour eggs over potatoes and scramble with potatoes until almost dry. Turn off heat, add salt and pepper, mix.

Set another tortilla in tortilla skillet, add cheese. While that's warming, take a spoonful of the potato mixture and wrap it inside the warm tortilla. You can do a simple taco-like fold-over; we tend to want less messy envelopes, so we fold and roll like a burrito.

Repeat fill-and-fold with the now-warm second tortilla; repeat whole process with the rest of the tortillas until you run out of filling. This should make 5-7 small burritos; maybe 1-2 large ones.

If you want salsa, I'd recommend adding it before you fold, or using it to dip.

There you go.