Real tortillas

So this is my driveway at this exact moment as we get a new roof put on the house. There is some kind of generator blasting away and debris everywhere but I have learned something extremely important from this day — where to get real tortillas made with lard.

I will back up slightly to 1989 when I moved to Reno. I made the acquaintance of a superior gentleman named Armando Durazo, the city editor the Reno Gazette-Journal where I was the features editor. Through a happy circumstance I can’t remember, he started bringing me homemade tortillas from the grannies in Tuscon, Arizona, his hometown. And they were so delicious, so different from anything I’d ever eaten that I asked him why. Lard. They were made with lard. Warm, wrapped around a mixture of scrambled eggs and Mexican chorizo, those tortillas were a happy, happy place to be.

So I was chatting with the foreman of our roofing crew, another Armando, when I happened to mention my intense craving for tortillas made with lard. Turns out they’ve been here in Nashville all along. They are the El Milagro brand and they come in the cooler section of Mexican grocery stores.

They come in a brown paper wrapper, but I couldn’t find a photo of them on Google images. Just remember: brown paper wrapper. Cooler section. Lard.