huevos casitos

Not precisely a ranchero over here, just a little house.

This is my new way to make scrambled eggs -- similar to a failed sauce, or almost like a custard. I'm aiming for very wet, barely cooked, creamy with miniscule curds. It's cooked on the lowest heat possible. Coriander and cumin and mustard are added to the egg mixture before it's cooked, pre-heated onion and jalapeño mixture is added after it the eggs are cooked.

I made bread just so I could have toast with eggs, but now my eggs are Mexican so they need tortillas. Corn tortillas.

Buy this.

Mix with hot water. keep adding one or the other until a workable consistency is reached. Too wet and you won't be able to peel them from the plastic. Too dry and they'll crack when pressed. Use your intuition.

Spray oil on the plastic, at least for the first one. Not necessary to re-spray for each tortilla.

Smash it with your hand. Fix the edges which tend to crack.

Let 'er rip.

Rotate and press again. Much more gently this time. I like to press each one three times. Hard, light, light. Turning it, thinking of it as a clock. Producing a few failures will show you where you went wrong. Too thin, too thick, too dry, too wet, those sorts of things. Once you get going, you can really whip 'em out.

Peel off the plastic from one side onto your palm, then c-a-r-e-f--l-l-y pull off the plastic from the other side. If you're not careful, the thin and delicate tortilla will rip, and that will ruin everything and everybody dies!

Fry the tortilla on medium heat for no more than a few seconds. It does not have to actually brown. Incidentally, this is the first step of chips. For chips, you can take a stack of COOKED tortillas and cut them all at once. Deep-fry them in batches and salt immediately out of the oil for the best doggone tortilla chips you'll ever have, and I mean it. We make them here for parties. Guests get a kick out of helping, and they're always completely devoured. I urge you to try this sometime. It's fun.

You do not have to oil the pan.

Milk, cream, chicken soup, whatever, some kind of liquid, beat into the egg.

Jalapeños in a tiny tin. These are sliced. The tins can come in diced, sliced into rounds, or whole. These are strips, so another cut on the board turned 'em into diced. Where I live, these can take up an entire grocer's aisle. They can be mild, medium, or hot. They come in all sizes of tins. Get the hot ones, or why bother? You know you're in gringo-land when your only choice is mild. Which is so pathetic it makes me mad.

We're aiming for a thick egg sauce cooked on very low heat. This can be speeded by heating the liquid first then tempering into the eggs. In that case, you're half way there before it gets to the pan. I did not do that.

You'll notice I didn't add cheese. What, do you think I'm insane? I'd have garnished with cilantro if I had it, but alas, for I am presently cilantroless.