Summer Nights Eatin’: Toastada-Tite

Before we get into the fun stuff, an apology!  Boy and I have been truants about posting recipes (and even making Toas-Tites).  It’s been a crazy couple of months filled with family events, traveling around California, and moving to a new apartment!  We’ve got a special recipe to commemorate the new place so keep an eye out for that in the not too distant future.

Now!  On to the Toas-Tites…

Summer time means warm nights and sometimes you want a nice cool dinner.  When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to eat during the summer season were my mom’s toastadas.  And they still are!  A toastada is kind of like a flat taco with a ton of variations.  You’ve got your cooled fried corn tortilla (fried flat), with cooled re-fried beans (with chorizo), and then a nice big pile of salad on top of that.  You can top it with salsa, a bit of shredded cheese, or even some slices of avocado.  Over the years, my mom developed some healthifying techniques for her toastadas.  Instead of frying the tortilla, you can essentially bake it in a microwave into a nice big chip.  Instead of using chorizo, you can use Soyrizo!

So now let’s take all that and put it into a Toas-Tite!  We thought about using a tortilla for the shell but we were a little concerned that corn tortillas might just end up being chewy without achieve the great crunch needed for a toastada.  So instead, we used some nice sourdough and put a few tortilla chips inside.

Toastada-Tite

Ingredients

• 2 pieces of bread
• Softened butter
• 3 tortilla chips
• 1.5 tbs of refried beans with Soyrizo
• Just shy of a 1/4 c. of salad (in our case, we used just a simple salad of lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and celery dressed with a bit of balsamic and olive oil)

Directions

1. Preheat your Toas-Tite grill
2. Spread the softened butter on one side of each piece of bread
3. Place the bread in the grill (keeping the grill open) to begin toasting the bread
   
4. Spread the beans onto one piece of bread
5. Top with the broken up pieces of tortilla chips
6. Top with the salad
   
7. Close the Toas-Tite grill
8. Turn up the heat and quickly toast your sandwich (of course, make sure to trim the excess bread too!)
9. Remove the sandwich from the grill and let it cool
10. Then…enjoy! (preferably with a bit of salsa on the side)

Conclusion

While it was probably a bit closer to a burrito Toas-Tite (in large part because Boy and I couldn’t wait to chow down and we ate ours kind of warm instead of cool like a real toastada), it was super tasty.  We used sourdough but I think next time we’ll try (and likely recommend) using white bread.  The sourdough we got was absolutely delicious but in this case, I wanted the beans and salad (and salsa) to be the centerpiece.

All in all, very yummy and we’ll keep refining it!