Macheesmo

My favorite thing about this breakfast, and maybe this only applies to me, but I almost always have everything I need to make it. Without fail, I will have some stale corn tortillas sitting in the back of my fridge, neglected. I will also almost certainly have a half-container of chipotle peppers because who needs a whole can of chipotle peppers?

Onions and eggs and always in my house.

So I can fall out of bed and have these Chipotle Chilaquiles on the table in about twenty minutes. It’s delicious and all I need for breakfast or lunch. If you’ve never had a chilaquiles dish, you need to fix that right quick.

Chipotle Chilaquiles

by Nick

Serves:

Serves 2

Prep Time:

10 mins

Total Time:

25 mins

Print Recipe

Rate This Recipe

Just a moment please...

Helpful Equipment:

Did you make this?

Snap a photo and tag @macheesmo so I can see your work.

Crispy fried corn tortilla chips, chipotle peppers and eggs, topped with Cotija cheese and cilantro. The perfect Tex-Mex breakfast!

Ingredients

6 6-inch corn tortillas, cut into strips

2 tablespoons oil

1/4 red onion, slivered

2 chipotle peppers from Adobo

1 tablespoon Adobo sauce

2 scallions, minced

2-3 large eggs, scrambled

Salt and pepper

Cotija cheese, crumbled

Fresh cilantro

Instructions

1) Cut corn tortillas into strips. Mince scallion and chipotles and toss with slivered red onion. Stir in Adobo sauce from can.

2) In a cast iron skillet, add oil over medium-high heat and add tortilla strips and cook until they start to crisp up, about 8 minutes.

3) Add chipotle mixture and stir well to combine. Season with a pinch of salt and pepper and cook for a minute.

4) Add scrambled eggs to the pan and gently stir to distribute eggs. Don’t stir vigorously at this point so eggs can solidify well. Cook until eggs are just cooke through.

5) Remove from heat and garnish with lots of crumbled Cotija cheese and cilantro. Serve immediately.

Chipotle Chilaquiles

Tortilla of Corn

The base of this Chipotle Chilaquiles dish is just normal corn tortillas. Frankly, the staler the better. You can use fresh, but if you cook with corn tortillas ever you probably have some old ones because they only sell them in, like, 100 count bags for some reason.

Six small tortillas will work great for two people. Just slice them into thin strips.

In my opinion, the cast iron skillet is the perfect cooking vessel for this dish. If you don’t have one, you could use a large nonstick skillet, but the cast iron just works best. It retains heat well and distributes heat evenly.  It’s pretty hard to beat.

Just add some oil to it over medium-high heat and then toss in all your tortilla strips. These will need to cook for about 8 minutes. Give them a stir every few minutes to make sure they are cooking evenly. Don’t worry too much about burning them. Corn tortillas are pretty resilient to heat.

Peppers and Onions

I only used three different kinds of veggies for this dish because the whole point of this dish is that it’s supposed to be easy.  An onion, a few scallions, and some peppers and you’re all set. If you don’t have any chipotle peppers, you could just toss in any pepper you had on hand or even some dried red pepper flakes.

I just chopped up everything and stirred it together in a bowl.

If you are using chipotles get the kind in Adobo sauce and then add about a tablespoon of the sauce to the mix also. If you don’t like super-spicy stuff, ignore that last sentence.

Once your tortillas are getting really crispy, add in the chipotle mixture and stir it together. Let this cook for about a minute and season it with a good pinch of salt and pepper.

Be careful or the onions will burn which isn’t ideal.

Then add in a few scrambled eggs. I think three is perfect for two people, but if you’re hungry, you can go with four.

This will cook really fast once the eggs hit the pan. Stir them a bit to distribute the eggs, but don’t stir them so much that it turns to mush.  There should be some structure to the dish if that makes sense. Think of it more like making an omelet instead of making scrambled eggs.

Remove the pan from the heat when the eggs are almost cooked through. They will continue to cook a bit off the heat and you don’t want to over-cook them.

Then garnish the whole thing with lots of crumbled Cotija (or any hard Mexican cheese) and some fresh cilantro.

Serve this as soon as possible!

These Chipotle Chilaquiles are pretty much my ideal breakfast. I could eat this once or twice a week without a problem.

Anybody make something similar to this or have other add-in ideas? As always, leave a comment!