Brunch on Huevos Rancheros

HUEVOS RANCHEROS

This is Taco week for me at the Blogging Marathon.
I love Mexican food and have been planning on making it myself for a long time now. Finally I am biting the bullet and the taco!

My recipe for today is Huevos Rancheros adapted from a book I recently found – The Accidental Vegetarian. It has quite a few interesting recipes and I should hopefully make lot more of the dishes from it.

Huevos Rancheros or ‘ranch eggs’ is simply fried eggs, salsa and tortilla. It is eaten for breakfast and there are various ways to go about it. You could simply fry the eggs, make or buy the salsa and tortilla and have a go! Or you could have fun doing it this way. Guess what, the second most difficult part of this recipe is pronouncing the name.

WHAT YOU NEED ( Serves 3)

6 Eggs
6 Tortillas
1 Small Onion
1 Medium Green Capsicum
1 Small Red Capsicum
1 Garlic clove
4 Button Mushrooms
1 Green/ Red Chilly
6 tbsp Passata
5 tbsp Butter
Salt & Pepper
Oil
Chinese Parsley for garnish

WHAT TO DO

Chop the capsicums, onion, mushrooms, garlic and chilly finely.

Like that!

Mix all of them and add salt and pepper to it
Pour the passata little by little. All we need is the vegetables to be bound in by the pasta.
Divide this vegetable mixture into 3 portions
Heat little oil in a pan and add one of the portions to warm
Once warm, make a well in the middle of the pan and melt 1 1/2 tbsp butter
Once the butter has melted, break two eggs over it.
Rotate the pan slightly so that the egg whites spread across the veggies. Don’t be violent with the rotating else the yolk will go amok.

Cover the pan and let it cook for 3 minutes. It is done when the whites have merged with the salsa and cooked.
If you are like me and keep opening the pan frequently, then don’t. Instead occupy yourself by warming the tortillas on a tava.
Slide the eggs on to a plate and garnish with coriander.
Serve with the tortillas and be blissful!

Notes-
1. What I learnt through this recipe is that Passata is Italian for tomato purée. I like the word – Passata, Passata.
2. My not-so-extensive research told me that cilantro is best for Mexican salsa. I was also told that cilantro, sometimes in some places, is called Chinese parsley. So yay for me….I can find anything Chinese in this tropical smal town on the equator. But if you can’t, there is always the ever reliable coriander leaves.
3. Mushroom was not part of the original recipe but I add it wherever possible. You can omit it if you wish.
4. One portion was quite a huge breakfast for me and I ended up having only buttermilk for lunch. So I am guessing this could be an ideal brunch for a lazy Sunday!
5. The only tricky part of the recipe is to slide out the salsa and egg of the pan without breaking it. I wasn’t quite so successful. Maybe next time I should try it on a tava so that I could slide it out like a dosa with a spatula. Maybe I could also try with fewer vegetables and more butter. More butter is always good na?!

Check out what the others are cooking up in the Blogging Marathon!