Mexican egg cups with roasted tomato and chile sauce

Sometimes you want something a little flavourful for breakfast (or even breakfast for dinner). Some members of our household (never me) go running on Sunday mornings and I tend to take that time to whip up a breakfast/brunch that’s a bit heartier and more complicated. Also if you’re just hosting friends for brunch and want a dish that will impress, give this recipe a try. These eggs in a spicy tomato sauce served in a crispy tortilla bowl look nice and offer up some delightful Mexican flavours.

As with many chile sauces, the chile you use defines the flavour. I’ve provided a few options below. You can really use any dried chile so explore something new. I like to use costeño amarillo, which I brought back from Oaxaca, Mexico. This doesn’t work as well with fresh chiles.

Yield: 2-4 servings

Ingredients

Chile sauce 

Makes 1.5 cups sauce

chiles*
1/2 onion
3 roma tomatoes or 2 dozen cherry tomatoes
2 cloves of garlic
1 tsp Mexican oregano
1/4 tsp freshly ground cumin
1/2 tsp of sugar
juice of half a lime
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp olive oil

* I used 3 costeno amarillo chiles (med spicy) – this would also work with 3 dried red chiles that you find in the stores (spicy), 2 guajillo chiles (fruity not too spicy), 1 pasilla chile (earthy not too spicy), 2 chipotle chiles (smokey and medium spicy)

4 fresh corn tortillas
4 eggs
1/2 cup grated cheese (cheddar, jack, queso fresco)
1/2 avocado, thinly sliced
Bit of finely chopped tomatoes or pico de gallo


To make tortilla bowls:

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Make sure your tortillas are soft and pliable so they don’t crack. If they are a bit dry, sprinkle them with water, wrap in a damp paper towel, and microwave for about 30 seconds.

Spray each tortilla all over with some cooking spray. Then manoeuvre the tortilla into an oven-proof dish (I used some onion soup bowls) so they’ll create a bowl. Bake for about 10 minutes until lightly browned and crispy. Set aside when ready. Don’t remove from the bowls.

To make the sauce:

Stem and seed the dried chiles. If using larger chiles, splitting them open so you can flatten them. Heat up a comal or a non-stick frying pan and dry roast the chiles in the pan. Heat them for about 20 seconds on each side, flattening with a spatula, so they get soft. Be very careful not to blacken the skin otherwise your sauce will be bitter. Wispy smoke is okay, more than that they’ll be burnt and bitter. Place the roasted chiles in a small bowl of boiling water for 20 minutes so they can rehydrate.

Thickly slice the onion. Put it along with the garlic with its skin still on, onto the comal or frying pan. Roast them until they are blackened on both sides. Put the tomatoes on as well. If you’re using larger ones, they’ll take a bit longer to roast. Turn them frequently until blackened all over. The cherry tomatoes won’t take very long. Let them get black on one side then roll over so they get another blackened area. Don’t let them burst open because it’s messy and you’ll lose most of the meaty good stuff.

With the garlic, once it’s ready put to the side and let cool, then slip off the skin. Put the other roasted ingredients as they’re ready into the jar of a blender. Add the cumin, oregano, salt, and sugar as well as the rehydrated chiles and 1/2 cup of the chile water. Blend it all together until you have a smooth, yet fairly thick sauce, about 3 minutes. If it’s too thick add a bit of plain or the chile water to thin it out a bit. Squeeze in the lime juice.

In a small sauce pan, heat the oil to a high heat. The sauce needs to really sizzle when you pour it in so test with just a drop to see if it’s hot enough. When it is, pour the sauce from the blender jar into the pot. It’ll sizzle and sputter a bit so watch out. Turn the temperature down to med-low and simmer the sauce for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. The colour will darken and the simmering allows the flavours to all blend together. If it begins to dry out and stick to the bottom of the pot, just add a bit of water.

Check for seasonings and let rest a few minutes while you bring it all together.

Bringing it all together:

Put the oven back on to 350F. Sprinkle the bottom of each tortilla cup with a pinch of cheese (or more if you desire). Put them back in the oven for 7 minutes or so until the cheese melts.

Cook the eggs. If you are an egg poacher, then knock yourself out and poach four eggs. If you prefer to fry them, then make it so. Cook them so the yolks remain soft and runny.

Once the cheese has melted, take the tortilla cups out and, if you prefer, remove them from the bowls you’ve cooked in and put on a plate. Gently place your soft eggs in the cup. Top with a generous dollop of the spicy tomato sauce. Garnish with the sliced avocado and tomato/pico.

Serve them up and enjoy.

© Gail J. Cohen 2017

Salsa verde: once you go green there's no going back

Salsa verde can mean a lot of different things from a totally fresh sauce to one much more complex. This version of Mexican salsa verde is tomtaillo-based and has become one of my favourites.  Of course, it was the very first dish that was prepared for me when I arrived in Oaxaca last year. So simple and so mind blowing. Enjoy it, over and over again.

Yield: 2 cups

Ingredients:

1 lb tomatillos husked and washed
2 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro
2 garlic cloves with skin still on
½ white onion sliced
1 fresh jalapeno or serrano chile
Juice of ½ a lime
2 tsp of oil

Dry roast the tomatillos, garlic, chiles, and onions on a comal or in a large non-stick frying pan. Once the garlic is blackend, take it off the comal and cool it, then peel and put it in a blender.

You can definitely use canned tomatillos for this. It doesn't have quite the same fresh flavour but it works and you don't need to roast them, just toss in the blender and keep going.

Add all the other ingredients to the blender and blend it all until smooth, about 2-3 minutes. If it’s very thick, add a bit of water to thin but don’t make it too thin.

Heat the oil in a pot and once it’s very hot, pour the tomatillo mixture into the pot so it sizzles. Stir and boil for a couple of minutes and then it’s ready to use in any variety of delicious ways.

Good tasting isn't always good looking when it comes to food!

The most simple dish involves dry frying a couple of corn tortillas, daubing some salsa on a plate, then layering salsa and tortillas, and toppping with some queso fresco and sliced avocado or guacamole . Makes a great breakfast. Add a soft fried egg and now you’ve some perfection. We probably eat this for a light dinner even more often than breakfast.

For a bit more of a substantial meal, you can poach or grill some chicken and serve it with rice, avocado and a bit of salad.

© 2016 Gail J. Cohen

The cooking show

First cooking class was today and I ended up being the only one in the class so it was essentially a private course and got to pick exactly what I wanted. Things started off brilliantly when I arrived and was offered coffee or chocolate. I had chocolate and it was brought to me steaming in a huge bowl with a side of sweet bread and hibuscus preserve. Dip that baby into the chocolate and you've arrived in heaven.

The class began with cleaning and preparing corn to make tortillas. We then stuck it in a bucket and headed out to a local "molino" — essentially a place where you bring stuff (corn, mole ingredients, chiles, chocolate, beans) and they grind it for you. In our case from the corn came masa, ground superfinely.

We continued with a trip to the neighbourhood market, Sanchez Pasquas, where I learned much about local herbs, fruits, and more. Most of that info has promptly been forgotton because I wasn't taking notes. I will say that there is lots of green stuff I can't buy at home. I am most sad about avocado leaves. This little market was pretty much only food and was a lot less busy, shall we say, than the big markets near the centre of town. We bought a bunch of ingredients for our class like cheese and squash blossoms, as well as these local plums that I had never seen and we used to make aqua fresca (basically sweet fruit water). Also discovered a new kind of basil here, that has a really sweet, lovely scent to it and which is not used at all for cooking but for "guarding" your business and also as a body cleanser.

Grinding the corn and making the tortillas. The ones on the bottom are the flavoured ones.

Back at Casa Crespo, we made three kinds of tortillas with our masa: plain, with plantain, and squash blossom and epazote (a widely used herb in Mexican cooking that is delicious cooked but smells like diesel fuel when raw).

Also three kinds of basic tomato salsa, well one salsa with two additions to make different flavours: cumin and avocado leaves. The latter was my favourite and I'm going to have to try to bring some dried ones home.

The first course was the plain tortillas with quesillo, the Oaxacan string cheese, and my salsas.

Tortillas con quesilla y salsa, ceviche, the local plums, and making rose petal ice cream. 

I had also opted to make ceviche, since I never have, so we made a version that was simply white fish (I didn't ask what kind) along with pickled chiles, olives, capers, onions, and tomatoes. Topped with a few slices of avocado it was totally spectacular.

Luckily that course was quite light because the squash blossom soup was rich, rich, rich.  We used an ear of corn, tons of squash blossoms, mushrooms, and a little squash with some onion, a fair amount of milk and a bit of cream but the thick double-cream type cream.  What I really noticed was when sauteeing everything in butter that it smelled very sweet. I took a small taste of the fresh butter and it was like nothing I've ever tasted before. Fresh, sweet, creamy but with a particular flavour that I suppose is due entirely to the cows and the terrain from which it comes. 

Squash blossoms (flores de calabaza) that became a rich soup.

The main course I chose was not one of the seven "official moles" of Oaxaca but one the chef called mole de fiesta, obviously served for holidays and festivals and the one he said he would be making in the restaurant next week for Day of the Dead. It had many ingredients: onions, tomatoes, pecans, almonds, raisins, guajillo and ancho chiles, plantain, oregano, chocolate, allspice, garlic, and cloves. Unlike many that I've made, this mole starts with frying most of the ingredients in oil (rather than dry roasting). It makes it very rich. I'm sure given more time to sit around the flavours would deepen dramatically but even after the short hour of cooking it had, it was really quite amazing. I had it served with poached chicken.

The ingreadients for mole de fiesta and the final product. 

Then last but not least on this eating fest, we made ice cream and since I'd never had it decided to go with rose petal ice cream rather than Oaxacan chocolate. It was also a taste sensation but probably one of those things that you'll either really like or dislike. Again, the bonus of being the only one in the class was I didn't have to worry about whether anyone else wanted to do it.

I, of course, got to eat this giant feast after I made it, sitting solo in the chocolate room in the restaurant. We didn't make anything too crazy: ant mole or worm tacos (they are on the menu there) but it was totally worth it and really pleased to have done it.

Everyone needs a certificate of conpletion. 

Learning Spanish is hard work

 First day at language school was exhausting. When your Spanish is as bad as mine and you have four straight hours of trying not to sound like a total idiot with no grasp of grammar, it can really wear a girl out. It's the constant battle I have of trying to learn new languages but never being as good at then as I am at English and then just getting super frustrated. I'm hoping this three weeks of intensive study will put a bit of a dent in that feeling.

Now that I've seen Oaxaca in the day, I'm much more comfortable and it's got some real gems in it. After class I decided to walk around a bit to get situated but was without the safety blanket of having a map — you know printed on paper like us old folks like. My usual internal compass got a little off kilter with all the rain and the people and the walking through a market but after a slight panic and resorting to Google Maps, I got myself to the zocalo (main square), gave that internal compass a bit of a shake and managed to self navigate back home thus restoring a fair bit of self confidence. But honestly Google is not really doing a particularly stellar job of directing me in Oaxaca so far. 

Finally today I got to delve into some Mexican food. Breakfast was prepared by Carmelita, one of our hosts. A diminutive woman who appears to be an absolute dynamo in the kitchen. A simple omelette with a spicy tomato ksauce was completely out of this world. I wasn't going to have any tortillas with breakfast as I felt I didn't need it and there is going to be no shortage but then one of my housemates didn't want a whole one so I shared it and . . . holy cow batman. I actually thought it was a flour tortilla but no it was corn but ground so fine and with such a different flavour from your run of the mill one. Just wow. 

Pollo en mole negro.

While here, I have the option of eating comida, the main meal of the day, at the house. I am going to do it for the first week while I figure out what's what around town. There's lots I want to eat so don't want to cut out those opportunities eating at 3 every day at home. But that being said, today's lunch was Oaxaca's signature dish: mole negro. The sauce can be made with 30 or more ingredients, including nuts and chocolate. I'm not sure what was in Carmelita's version but it was rich and velvety and served simply over chicken and with rice and tortillas. Another revelation. I'm going to have to get this woman to teach me a few things!

Of course that meant I was pretty full for most of the day but I did have my first Oaxacan hot chocolate and it was superb. I went with the cool kids for a study group at a local cafe and then we wandered about and I snacked on esquites: corn kernels in a cup topped with mayo, queso, chile powder and lime. Muy rico as they say here. A fun night all around.