One thing I hadn’t thought about when I started doing this article was the amount of money I would be spending on various ingredients. Now, keep in mind that I try very hard to teach people how to make things on the cheap, but, having said that, for a college student, buying stuff every week can get expensive. This week I did my best to combat that little problem by doing what I’m calling “Pantry Diving”. I opened up my fridge and cabinets to see what I had just laying around. Cooking shouldn’t always be some grand planned out event (I KNOW I KNOW! All I’ve done is preach the importance of the emotional connections that food can have on a person!), but cooking is also kind of important to…ya know…survive, and I want to be able to do more with this article than just make you all sentimental every time you smell onions and peppers cooking in a skillet. There’s that old saying “If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime”. That’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to inspire the people that read this article to just open up the fridge and make something. Because it really is that simple sometime.
I opened up the fridge and immediately saw eggs. Eggs are a good base for almost any meal. Then, I spotted chorizo. Chorizo is a spicy Mexican sausage. Chorizo actually translates into English as “f*&#ing delicious” (with the symbols and everything. Yeah. It’s weird). From those two items, I built my idea. I scoured the cabinets to find the rest of the ingredients that I needed. BINGO! Salsa, CHECK! Tortillas, CHECK! It was decided!!!! I would be making Chorizo Breakfast Burritos!
CHORIZO BREAKFAST BURRITOS
3 Large Eggs
1 Tbsp. Cooking Oil
2 Chorizo Links
1/3 cup Milk
½ cup Cheddar Cheese
4 Tortilla (Flour, NOT Corn)
Salsa
Line a skillet with your cooking oil and put it over high heat. Remove the casings from the chorizo links and break it up into the pan. Brown the magical Mexican sausage and enjoy the smells. Let it transport you to a time and place full of happy memories! THERE!!! Are you satisfied!?! I’m being sentimental about food! It’s not just about survival! JESUS! I HATE IT HERE!!!!! Anyway! While the chorizo is browning, crack three eggs into a bowl and combine with the milk. Scramble rigorously with a fork (or bamboozle the eggs if you’d like. Or agitate. Or massacre. Or just scramble). Once the sausage has browned, move it to a separate container and pour your bamboozled egg mixture into the skillet. Immediately begin moving the mixture with a wooden spoon or spatula (or hell…why not a Plastic Spoon…eh eh eh?). If the eggs sit on the bottom of the pan too long, they’ll burn. And burnt eggs are bad eggs. Bad bad eggs. Once the eggs are no longer runny (If you wanna live to see tomorrah, you better start fryin em eggs a little better than what you abeen a fryin em. I’m sicka eatin sloppy slimy eggs!!), remove the skillet from the heat. Put your chorizo back into the pan, but this time, add the cheddar cheese. Give it a good stir. The residual heat should be enough to melt the cheese. Move THAT to a separate container. A really great lampish friend of mine recently told me, “The trick to good tacos is heating up the tortillas on the skillet”. I followed her advice and put the tortillas into the skillet over low heat. Once they are properly heated, begin the construction process.
First, put the Huevos con Chorizo y Queso (that’s my fancy and cultured way of saying “egg, cheese and chorizo mixture”) into a freshly warmed tortilla. Then, spoon on some salsa. Next, I also happened to find some left over Queso Fresco which is a crumply white cheese used in a lot of Mexican cooking, so I crumbled some of that onto my burrito. Finally, roll it up and enjoy. The Lamp of My Life was correct. The already warmed tortillas make a huge difference. They are softer and therefore don’t compete with the fluffiness of the scrambled eggs. Then, you get the spice from the chorizo and the salsa, but it’s combated by the creaminess of the cheddar and queso fresco cheeses. The only thing this meal was missing was sour cream, but ALAS…it was not in my fridge, so I couldn’t make it a part of the recipe. Hopefully, you’ll fair better in your Pantry Dive.
This was a fun little departure for me. I felt for a BRIEF MOMENT like an Iron Chef. Creating delicious dishes and having to work with what was available to me. Then, that feeling went away when I realized I was more like generations of broke college students and bachelors that had come before me. But for that brief moment in time, I WAS A GOD!!!! I hope that this little culinary improv exercise helps you in your future kitchen endeavors (Or Kitchendeavors, as it were [wait! Somebody trademark that! BRUCE! TRADEMARK THAT!!!]).