Friday Dinner: Mexican Breakfast

This week Trix and I seemed to have one of those brain-melding moments in which we had very similar thoughts about what we should do for dinner on Friday, even though it wasn't necessarily the exact same thing. I don't even know how we came to the conclusion we did, how it was raised in the first place: that's a blur. All I know is, we brought up the topic of dinner, and about 5 minutes later we had decided on Mexican breakfast.

I have to admit from the outset that I was at a disadvantage, having never actually eaten what I was proposing to make in a restaurant. Due to a recipe I'd seen at Homesick Texan, I was very eager to try making my own chorizo -- and one of the classic ways of eating chorizo is with scrambled eggs. It sounded easy enough.

Trix decided on huevos rancheros, which was more complicated than chorizo and scrambled eggs, particularly because she wanted to find an authentic ranchera sauce. She eventually found one here.

I marinated the ground pork for the chorizo overnight. I was excited about using my new Mini-Prep food processor for the first time. There are many times when I want to use a food processor to make a bit of something, but my normal food processor is simply too large to be effective. Especially as I'm usually just cooking for myself, I don't need a big batch of sauce that a normal-sized food processor effectively makes. Just some photos to illustrate:









As you can see, it was the perfect amount for the Mini-Prep, which worked great. The marinade consisted of guajillo chiles, onion, garlic, and apple cider vinegar. It was then mixed into the ground pork along with some seasoning:







This mixture was marinated overnight. To prepare, I simply browned it in a cast iron pan until fully cooked. I then spooned some into another pan and added some beaten eggs with milk. I scrambled it well (how I prefer) and served with some fried potato coins. The finished product:



The following day, I had the same thing, but dressed it up a bit -- I added pickled jalapenos and cheddar cheese to the dish and ate the chorizo and eggs with flour tortillas.

Trix began her efforts by chopping up green bell pepper for the ranchera sauce:



When that was cooking away she also heated up some black beans and rice (the latter not pictured):



And the delicious finale, with fried eggs, the ranchera sauce, black beans, rice, and white corn tortillas.