I got off on the wrong foot this morning. I went ahead and started a pot of borracho beans for later in the week, then I started gathering ingredients for breakfast. Once the beans started boiling, I had this "arrgh!' moment.
The beans smell so good! It's messing with my olfactory sense. I'm going to be cooking breakfast and I have these beans interfering with my enjoyment of the breakfast cooking.
Moving on, here's the opening statement on breakfast. This is one of those interactive breakfast entrées where I will have to give you options. People who know my eating habits know I'm kind of daring with food and this is one of those situations where your palate may disagree with mine.
This is a variation of the French crêpe, coupled with a Mexican chorizo. Think of it as a variation of pigs-in-a-blanket. The problem here is that culturally we associate the crêpe with a sweet cream or honey. The chorizo is salty and spicy.
Pigs-in-a-blanket is topped with butter and maple syrup. So there's these preconceptions we have to deal with, and a necessary shift in expectations.
This is the chorizo I'm trying today:
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| Los Cerritos Chorizo. Who makes this? I don't know! |
I doubt it's available in Texas, but I've tried it before and it's a very traditional Mexican chorizo that is marketed to the Mexican communities in Florida. Los Cerritos Chorizo comes from Riviera Beach, Fla.
It has no website that I can find, so I can't provide a link. The labeling suggests it is only distributed through Riviera Beach, but actually an import from somewhere in Mexico.
Now let's talk about my crêpe. This is a hybrid between a pancake - I'm not a fan of the conventional pancake - and the crêpe. If you look at the pancake recipe on a box of baking flour, the ratio of ingredients is usually something like 1 cup flour to a half cup milk and 1 egg.
That's too much flour! I have always opted for a higher concentration of egg and milk. I end up with a higher protein, fluffier cake. Since I just cook for myself, I use 1/3 to 1/2 cup flour, depending on how hungry I feel. Going strictly by ratios, this is the rule: flour and milk are added at a 1:1 ratio, and you quadruple the egg content.
So my mixing bowl has a 1/2-cup flour with a 1/2-cup milk and two eggs. When you pour this on a buttered hot skillet, it runs watery, more like a crêpe than a pancake, but not quite as thin as a true crêpe.
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| Crêpe cooking left, chorizo cooking right |
Keep that chorizo on a low heat! With all you have going on (and I'm making coffee on the side), it's very easy to burn it. Once you have three crêpes, you've got about all you can fold into one plate. Dribble the chorizo sparingly - sparingly! - into a crêpe and wrap. Repeat three times. You end up with something that looks like enchiladas.
Fluffy, weird looking enchiladas. Dribble blackstrap molasses on your chorizo-crêpe wraps. Yes, this is where everybody starts going whaaa?!
I'm going to assume no one has ever tried blackstrap. You may think it's sweet. Blackstrap is not sweet. It's a sugar cane-based product, but it has a slightly bitter taste. It may be used as an ingredient in cooking vegetables; in fact, my bottle has a recipe for butter beans.
It might be more accurate to think of blackstrap as a sauce, like something you would put on ham. The reason I'm doing this is the chorizo is spicy and salty and I have a problem with putting a sweet syrup or honey topping on a crêpe that has a spicy, salty chorizo filling, even if there is very little chorizo used (one link was enough to sparingly sprinkle chorizo into three crêpes.
But blackstrap is something of an acquired taste, so I'm not holding you to it. You might want to top this with a sweet cream or a sour cream, or just some melted Velveeta.
A Spanish lesson. Whenever you go to a Spanish-speaking restaurant and the waitress or waiter brings your food, they say (or they are supposed to say) "Buen provecho."
This means, "Enjoy your meal."
Buen provecho!
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| Chorizo in crêpe wrap with blackstrap topping |
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