Non-Mexican Breakfast Tacos

Ok, ok, so I am totally cheating. I think the vote for the last Choose Your Own Adventure post was evenly split between my grandmother’s spectacular blini and my own, somewhat less striking, breakfast tacos. Here’s the thing. I am painfully short on time these days. I will write about the tacos first because they are, well, tacos, and therefore easy. I will leave my grandmother’s blini to another day, which will hopefully be soon!

So. The breakfast tacos. The inspiration for these was part my newfound love of home made tortillas and part a brunch that Awesome Archna and I had at a wonderful Mexican place, Tu Y Yo. Archna ordered scrambled eggs with chorizo and they were wonderful. The sausage was ground up and mixed in with the eggs, coloring the whole business a burnt orange color (sigh, I am such a girl) and infusing the eggs with the oily chorizo loveliness.

I wanted desperately to make these eggs for one of my Battling Brunches with Maiya, which I have fallen so behind on (stupid thesis). I have long since stopped trying to wow her because that’s not really possible. This is after all, the woman who deep fried poached eggs in front of me. I wanted to make something that would taste simple and simply good. This turned out to be more challenging than I thought.

It appears that there are a few types of chorizo out and about – Mexican and Spanish/Portuguese. Mexican chorizo, like the stuff I had at Tu Y Yo, is sold raw, out of the casing, as basically a big pile of ground, spiced meat. The Spanish chorizo, on the other hand, is fully cooked and sold in links. I couldn’t find the Mexican stuff anywhere. I tried so hard. I even went to a butcher shop, but even they would only sell me the prepackaged, fully-cooked stuff.

With a heavy heart, I dragged my non-Mexican chorizo home to make faux Mexican breakfast tacos. The cooked chorizo tasted like a spicy kielbasa, which was really not the flavor I was shooting for, but beggars can’t be choosers. I fried chunks of the sausage in a little bit of olive oil till they became brown and crispy (oy yum. I could really just eat an entire plate of fried chorizo chunks). I then tossed in beaten eggs into the same pan, to scramble them in the chorizo oil. And uh, that was it. The end of the super un-complicated breakfast taco procedure.


The eggs were creamy and suffused with the chorizo oil, and when topped with fresh avocado and pico de gallo, and all wrapped up in a fluffy and slightly chewy flour tortilla, they were pure, non-Mexican taco breakfast beauty. I was happy with them, if not awed by their complexity. Sometimes that’s ok too.