Saturday 10 January 2015

Mexican scrambled egg

This is the sort of breakfast you want when you wake up so hungry that the person next to you is in real mortal danger, but you only have about ten minutes' worth of energy max so a full English is out of the question. Yes, I eat spicy food for breakfast. I eat all sorts of weird things for breakfast, which I'll post about in a sec. So this is me stumbling sleepily and ravenously downstairs on a Saturday morning at a quarter-to-whatever-you-think-is-early, and this is what my rummage turns up:



Some eggs. An onion. Cheese. A stray chilli. Chilli powder. Some chilli sauce.
You do't necessarily need all of these (this is idea/method more than recipe) and if any peppers or cooked potatoes had presented themselves, they would've been thrown in too. Paprika could do instead of chilli powder, too.
This is going to be an overly-generous quantity for one of me.

It's a bit out of character to have Chinese chilli sauce, but a friend bought it when she was staying over, and for ages I didn't use it because it had MSG. Then I read some research proving categorically that I was wrong about MSG being bad for you, so I felt free to use it at will, and when it's empty the squirty bottle will be very useful.


I'm finely slicing a quarter of the onion (using the chef trick) - the other quarter will go into the same recipe again, most likely, and this explains why an otherwise sensible cook occasionally has such a thing as half an onion in the fridge. I also sliced the chilli.


Fry the onions with the chilli - I like to let them get quite brown and crispy if I have the patience, and given how long it takes me just to make coffee in the morning, I can use that time to make the coffee.


All nice and crisping up!


Adding a goodly half-teaspoon of chilli powder, possibly a bit more than, to fry up with the onion & fresh chilli.


Crack in the eggs, give it a good slightly frantic stir, and...


very hastily grate some cheese into it - as much as pleases you - this is probably about a quarter of a cup or 3-4 good grates, but there's really no need to fuss about exact quantities. Stir all that in, and...


Serve with a generous drizzling-over of the fresh chilli sauce. I have mine with oatcakes, I tend not to eat much toast. On a tray, extra oatcakes just in case, a big mug of coffee, and back to bed with it.

The whole notion came out of reading a breakfast in Driving Over Lemons which the English husband used to eat with the rustic-Spanish-man-down-the-hill and then the husband's English wife rejoined him and wanted Proper Breakfasts like yoghurt and muesli so then he ate that instead of the fiery eggy-potatoey-peppery concoction he liked so much. I'm paraphrasing from vague memory, so I may have some details wrong. I remember thinking that the wife sounded like a spoilsport, that I could sort of see her point because rustic-Spanish-man's kitchen didn't sound very clean, that her choice of breakfast really didn't need to impinge on her husband's, except maybe after all that was a special moment in their daily relationship that she missed, and that women are too often positioned as the spoilsports, in life as in literature. And besides all that: you can put chilli in scrambled eggs! And have it for breakfast! YAY!