Vegetable Cheese Quesadillas

Ingredients:

• low carb tortillas
• cauliflower
• red onion
• zucchini
• yellow squash
• red pepper
• orange or yellow pepper
• fresh jalapeños, sliced and seeded (optional)
• 1 8 oz. bag shredded cheddar cheese
• butter (for frying)Sauce:
• 3 tbsp. sour cream
• 1 tsp. taco seasoning mix
• 1/2 tbsp. or 1 tbsp. cream

Directions:
Before you begin, go ahead and mix up your sauce for garnish — the sour cream and taco seasoning mix. Add just enough cream to ensure it will squirt out easily from your squeeze bottle. Yes, that’s where I want you to stick it. In your squeeze bottle. Place it in the refrigerator to chill and to allow the flavors to meld. Now it is time to tackle quesadilla making.

Wash your grubby vegetables before you take another step. When I make these, I pull out my handy dandy slicer dicer (otherwise known as a mandoline). You may want to do the same. Or maybe not. Line up your freshly cleaned vegetables and tell them they will have to take turns to be sliced and diced. Yes, you can do it by hand, rather with the tool, and some of you are probably better off doing so until you earn your license to drive the slicer dicer. (Sadly, some of you never will.) I use it because I value all my fingers, so I’m very careful, and I have squat worth of time, so I want to choose the most effective method to get the job done.

You’ll need two bowls: one to put the cut-up vegetables into, and one to use as your garbage bowl.

I begin with the blade that dices vegetables. You can see how I position it over the big bowl so the bowl catches everything.

I use the same blade to do the two colors of peppers (and the jalapeños, if I am using them). I just dice up the very end of the peppers, stopping before I begin to encounter seeds. On the jalapeños, I cut off the top and scoop out the seeds.

When I get to the red onion (which has patiently waited its turn), I switch to the slicing blade and very thinly slice the red onion before moving on to slice the zuchini and yellow squash.

After all the vegetables have been whipped into submission, I add my bag of shredded cheese and toss well. FYI — tongs work better for this task than a spoon. Slice some butter into small pieces.

Warm your skillet over medium high heat. OOOOH — I should mention that for this particular meal, I actually used a biscuit cutter, stacked up the tortillas into a pile four tortillas tall, and cut 2-inch rounds, so that I could make baby quesadillas, rather than the big boys. The only low carb tortillas I had on hand were the huge ones and they are difficult to flip when the time comes for flipping. Trust me, you don’t want half-cooked vegetables flying everywhere. Don’t ask me how I know.

Anyway, place a few pats of butter into your warm skillet, then arrange your tortillas in the pan. Using your tongs, drop generous amounts of the vegetable cheese mixture on top of each tortilla round in the skillet. Top with another tortilla circle. You want to cook these quickly so that they crisp. Using low heat merely annoys the tortillas, and you certainly don’t want that to happen! Watch them carefully, so they don’t burn, and stand there with your spatula (the pancake turner kind) in hand, ready to turn them over. Before you turn them over, put a little more butter in the pan and allow it to melt. You don’t want the other side to be jealous of the buttery one, do you?

When both sides are a lovely shade of brown and crispy, remove them from the skillet onto a paper towel-lined plate. Garnish with fresh avocado slices, if you have them, or a dollop of guacamole, some jalapeño slices, or pepper strips from the remaining parts of the peppers you used, cherry tomatoes, and, of course, drizzle your seasoned sour cream around.

The small quesadillas make an excellent party appetizer, too. Fiesta!