Huevos rancheros

This morning I made huevos rancheros for me and Dave - a healthy, relatively low-calorie version from the Cook Yourself Thin cookbook. Huevos rancheros kind of intimidated me, because the ingredients list from the book is as long as my forearm. However, I love Mexican food, and this had a lot of veggies and good ingredients, so I decided to go for it.

First, you make a red sauce. This involves lots of tasty veggies, like peppers, tomatoes, onions, and jalapenos. You sautee that for a while until it gets nice and saucy.

While that is cooking, you make the refried-style black beans, which involves cooking black beans with cilantro, chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, and chicken stock. Then you mash the beans and they have the texture of refried beans. I've had refried black beans in restaurants, and I'm happy to have a good recipe for them now.

You also make some guacamole, which is just avocado, tomato, onion, lime, and cilantro. I don't remember having had this on huevos rancheros before, but it was delicious!

After all that, frying the "huevos" is really an afterthought. you fry a few eggs, heat the corn tortillas, then pile it all on strategically with some added yogurt (instead of sour cream) and chopped scallions.


Mmmmmmmmm.

Dave took one look at this and got excited, but then quizzically looked at me. "Am I supposed to eat this like a taco, or what?" I indicated that you're probably just supposed to tuck in with a fork. So that's what we did.

This was a very, very tasty dish, but honestly it's a little too much work for the first thing in the morning. I could see making the guac, beans, and red sauce in advance, then heating them up with the eggs in the morning. Dave hasn't had a look at the amount of dishes I dirtied yet, but you can do your own math: 1 pan for the red sauce, 1 pan for the beans (then re-used for the eggs), 1 dish for the guacamole, and 1 cutting board for all the veggies. It was worth it, though!