INAUTHENTIC IS HOW I roll. It’s a slogan and a helpful cliché but every now and then it’s a literal description of the dinners I make.

Sydney’s gradually getting more (I wouldn’t know about better) Mexican food. In my childhood the closest was tacos, tomato and beans sauce and cheese, which had its virtue, but these days it’s becoming a regular food court occurrence. My new job the other day took me geographically close to my old job, so as I took my award-specified 45 minute lunch break I got to pretend for an hour or so that I was still a staffer, eating a $7.50 burrito amongst other apparatchiki and financieri in an overcrowded hall. It was more pleasant than it sounds! The city’s getting the gourmet kind, too, with waiters in coloured national dress, film posters on the wall, dia de la muerte kitsch, a few self-portraits of Kahlo and a better class of ethnic stereotype. (Nothing by Rivera, though, he’s not quite rehabilitated, the old commo).

Apparently we’re even getting food trucks in Sydney now to serve those in the know enough to be a part of their own consumption and communal insider-knowledge display experience. You follow the truck on facebook, apparently, which twenty years ago would have sounded like a hell of a way to irritate a driver.

Personally, I’m quite attached to shoving Mexicanish ingredients in a tortilla and seeing what happens. Vino tinto, naturally, se ayuda a la mezcla.

Quesadillas Inauténticas

• Tortillas
• Can of red kidney beans
• Capsicums
• Onions
• Tomatoes
• Chillies or chilli powder
• Cheese
• Avocado, lemon juice and coriander

Fry roughly chopped brown onions and capsicum together with a few cherry tomatoes and leave them to slowly simmer down to a caramelised chunky mushy mass.

Mush chopped coriander into avocadoes and put lemon juice in them (attentive readers will by now have noticed a theme).

Mush the kidney beans up and sprinkle them with chilli powder.

Now, into each tortilla fold a spoonful of red kidney beans, onion/capsicum, guacamole and cheese. Once you’ve got half a dozen or so you can start grilling them in a frying pan to melt the cheese into the beans and to make everything nice and runny.

¡Que aproveche!

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