After I made those excellent carnitas tacos, I had lots of Mexican ingredients leftover. Jalapeños. Corn tortillas. Sour cream. Well that’s not a Mexican ingredient, but it would be if I called it Mexican crema. So let’s call it crema so my first paragraph makes sense.
This often happens after I make a big dinner: the next day, I find myself with all kinds of leftover ingredients and I want to turn those ingredients into breakfast. On this particular morning, the decision couldn’t have been easier: breakfast tacos.
Honestly, there wasn’t much to think about. For two of us, I cracked six eggs and whisked them with a splash of milk, salt and pepper. I also grated lots of sharp cheddar and chopped up leftover cilantro.
A tablespoon of butter went into a skillet and when hot and foamy, I added all the eggs. I lowered the heat and cooked gently, but not too gently; I’m not into those custardy French scrambled eggs Jacques Pepin’s always raving about: I like larger curds. When the curds had formed, I added all the cheese and cilantro. Looks yummy, right?
Then there was the question of salsa. For the carnitas, I’d made a pico de gallo with cherry tomatoes which worked very nicely. On this morning, though, I didn’t have any cherry tomatoes left. I did have a few whole canned tomatoes leftover from something else. What if I made canned tomato salsa?
It’s not a sexy thought, but it was a practical thought. So I chopped up 5 or 6 canned tomatoes, drained off the liquid and added a chopped jalapeno, chopped onion, cilantro and possibly a squeeze of lemon or lime juice. I can’t remember. Please don’t sue me under Statute 8.14 of Food Blogger Recipe Obligations. Just noodle around and you’ll get something like this, which works nicely:
The final step was toasting the corn tortilla in a skillet until it was puffy, browned and hot. I could’ve done the Alice Waters thing (from my cookbook) and held the corn tortilla with tongs over an open flame, but these tortillas were wetter than normal tortillas–they came from the refrigerated section–so I didn’t think that would be a good idea.
And there you are, folks. Quick breakfast tacos. Add the eggs to the toasted tortilla. Top it with salsa. More cilantro. Some sour cream–or CREMA–if you have it (now that I think about it, I don’t think we had it) and you’re golden.
Have a great breakfast taco-filled weekend and I’ll see you back here on Monday.
Yummm!! I want to have them for breakfast!!
I love your fridge cleanout posts–keep ’em coming!
Another leftover breakfast you can make is Migas, which is a traditional way to use up old corn tortillas. Everyone had their own way of making them, here’s mine:
Eggs – prepared for scrambled eggs
Scallions, chopped. I use the whole scallion
Corn tortillas – Ratio of tortillas to eggs 2:1 (e.g., for 2 eggs, cut up 4 tortillas. I
like my migas less eggy, so I usually add an extra tortilla)
Optional: (fresh roasted green chiles, diced jalapenos, salsa, grated cheese)
Cut up your tortillas into triangles (like chips). Saute them in a hot pan w/neutral oil until they’re cooked to your taste. I like mine on the crispy side. Add green onions/scallions and saute a minute or so. Add eggs, scramble until done to your taste. Add any optional ingredients.
My husband makes this for breakfast except he just cracks the eggs right on top of the tortillas and pushes them around.
Come visit me in Edmonton, and you’re in charge of breakfasts!
Hi Adam –
Love your site and recipes but I must say I don’t consistently try them for only one reason. It may seem whiney, but alot aren’t written (ingredients and instructions) straight through, and I need to cut and paste and print them in order to have them in the kitchen. With pictures (which are great – just not inbetween steps) inbetween instructions I need to cut and paste each segment (Momofuku Milk Bar’s Compost Cookie Recipe is a good example) and when that’s the case I just move on. Frustrating. Sorry but wanted the cookie recipe this morning, and when I saw that it, too, was like this, I had to say something. It isn’t good when visiting a place leaves you with a feeling of frustration. : (
Deana
Hi Deana,
Thanks for letting me know your thoughts. I agree and for the most part, when there’s a formal recipe I want to share (like the recent Daube de Beouf, Prune Cake, Carnitas, etc.) I’ve been using hRecipe to enter the recipe info so it’s easy to print. The two posts you cite are exceptions for specific reasons: (1) the Momofuku cookie post is from a few years ago, when I wasn’t using hRecipe; though I could certainly go back and edit that to make it more user-friendly (and probably should); and (2) the breakfast taco post was more an idea of a recipe (toast a tortilla, cook some eggs, improvise a salsa) rather than an actual recipe and I’d rather my readers just read what I did in that case and make their own version than try to recreate precisely what I made for something so casual. But I take your criticism seriously and I’ll keep it in mind going forward (and possibly backward!). Thanks, Adam