A year of cooking Mexican food at home — what changed most

A year ago I started cooking Mexican food seriously for the first time. Here is what changed most in my cooking: My palate for acid. I had been under-using lime in almost everything. Now I finish almost everything with acid and the difference is significant. My dried chile pantry. I went from zero to six essential chiles. The ability to build flavour from dried chiles is the foundational skill I was missing. My bean cooking. I had been using canned beans for convenience. Beans from dried, cooked with aromatics and good stock, are a completely different ingredient. My tortilla skill. Making tortillas from scratch weekly has given me a hand sense for masa that cannot be taught from a recipe. If I were starting over, I would start with beans, then tortillas, then dried chiles. In that order. Everything else is combinations of those three.