Yay! It’s snack food Sunday! Um, I mean Super Bowl Sunday. If you’re looking for an easy snack to serve at your Super Bowl party, look no further than these Crispy tortillas with salsa and cheese. They are easy to make, always a hit, and go well with beer. What more do you need for Super Bowl Sunday?
I have admitted this here before, but the Super Bowl is not the highlight of my sporting year. My town doesn’t have an NFL team, my parents never really cared about the NFL (we were college football all the way) and my husband really only follows the MLB. I now work with a bunch of sports heads who take fantasy football VERY seriously and spend all of lunchtime talking about sportsing, so I have to at least pretend that I know what’s going on, and that all sports interviews don’t sound like this to me. So this year, I’m totally rooting for the Seahawks, because a) West coast represent b) the Pats totally cheated — hello deflategate! and c) Tom Brady ditched his pregnant girlfriend for a supermodel and was really terrible when he hosted SNL. Mostly c. Priorities people!
As indifferent as I may be to professional football, I DO like beer and cheesy snacks, so Super Bowl Sunday is still kind of great. Recently, my favorite snack/appetizer/lunch when I’m home alone are these crispy open-face quesadillas, which my family used to make all the time when I was growing up. They’re not too fancy, please a crowd, and are just great.
The recipe’s obviously fairly simple, but there are a few tricks to making them great. 1) Cheese before salsa. The cheese has to adhere properly to the tortilla – this isn’t some Mexican pizza, after all, and the salsa would interfere with that. 2) Not too much cheese – you want the tortilla to be pretty uniformly covered, but not too thick – you want them crisp, not rubbery. 3) The salsa cannot be too chunky. A relatively thin, uniformly textured salsa works best – I used Trader Joe’s Salsa Autentica here. 4) Finally, keep it in the oven long enough for the tortilla edges to turn golden brown and the cheese to bubble.
If you follow these rules, you’ll end up with a super satisfying snack – one with the textural contrast of crisp edges and a soft, melted cheese interior – with a good balance of heat and salt. And that’s something I don’t have to feign interest in.
- Flour Tortillas (Each tortilla will feed 1-2 people)
- Salsa (each tortilla takes 2-3 Tablespoons salsa)
- Shredded sharp cheddar cheese (each tortilla takes about ⅓ cup shredded cheddar)
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
- Arrange your tortillas on a baking sheet (I prefer to line them with foil).
- Scatter the cheese on your tortilla, trying to ensure the cheese is spread uniformly but thinly over the surface of the tortilla.
- Dribble the salsa over the cheese.
- Bake until the edges of the tortilla are browned and the cheese is bubbly - about 7 minutes.
- Serve hot, cut into wedges.
