Side note: Duh, it’d be pretty stupid to post about buying a bag of chips at the store.

Ok this one was definitely a craving-driven adventure. I was making taco pizza for dinner (another adventure, forgot to take pictures. Oops.) and needed crispy corn strips for the top. I didn’t want crumbled Tostitos, so being the dip I am I decided to make them from scratch. It would be simple to just fry up some strips really quickly. That was the plan, and then I ended up making a whole batch of homemade chips because the strips were so damn tasty. Isn’t that just the way. The good news is I combined three almost empty salsas to eat them with and that’s three less containers in the fridge. Mom would be so proud! I may or may not have a condiment problem.

This was a total wing-it-to-win-it experiment. I’d never fried up my own chips before, but I had fried these really temperamental Swiss cookies that nobody in our family can agree on a spelling or pronunciation (the closest I could find was kaechlis but that pulls zero search results so who knows) so I figured why not.

Ingredients:

1 package corn tortillas, sliced into wedges
canola oil
salt
chili powder

Fill a deep pan with a couple of inches of canola oil, then heat over medium high heat until it ripples and a small bit of tortilla dropped in bubbles furiously.

In batches, fry the wedges of tortilla, while moving them around with a wire basket scoopy thing so that they fry on both sides. Keep them in the oil until the bubbles settle down and they look lightly browned.

Using the wire basket thingy pull the chips out of the oil, tap over the pan so excess oil goes back in, put onto a paper towel to drain and immediately sprinkle them with salt and chili powder

Repeat until all the wedges are fried. I experimented with different sized frying batches from 7 chips to a handful and didn’t really notice a difference in quality, as long as I stood over them and moved them around so the hot oil got on every surface.

Eat. Eat them all. If you make fresh salsa there’s really nothing to feel guilty about because you’re technically eating vegetables.