Quick Breakfast Tacos

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.