Huevos Rancheros

The idea of cooking something "foreign" has always scared me. I always find the list of ingredients overwhelming, the instructions daunting, and the weight of my own inexperience exhausting. However, I decided that this year I was going to make an effort to cook those things which scare me most. This is how Huevos Rancheros came to be. Jonathan and I have always talked about making Huevos Rancheros at home, but ultimately we would neglect to pick up corn tortillas at the grocery store and would end up using the beans and salsa to make nachos. But with a dismal amount of leftover salsa, a handful of cheese, and leftover homemade black beans, excuses were running low. The only part of making Huevos Rancheros that scared me was poaching the eggs. I have never poached eggs before, and as I have seen on other posts, most people fail at their first attempt. This made me reminisce about my first experience of making crepes, in which half my batter went to waste and my frustration lead to a tearful morning.  Plus, my only know-how of cooking poached eggs was a glimpse of how Mama's cooked them in San Francisco- there was this large shallow pan filled with boiling water in which the cook cracked open an egg and the poaching began. So today I decided that I would try this very method to poach my eggs and try my hand at Huevos Rancheros.

Poaching the eggs..

At first I thought that perhaps my glimpsed insight into how to poach an egg may have been wrong. But as I assembled the Huevos Rancheros my self doubt subsided, and the eggs began to look more like the poached eggs I am used to being served at restaurants.

Assembling the corn tortillas with cheese and beans...

The poached eggs look much more normal when removed from the water and assembled on the corn tortilla.

My final product: corn tortilla + cheese + black bean puree + two poached eggs + salsa + Cholula hot sauce= delicious Huevos Rancheros.

Afterthoughts:

Next time I will cook the corn tortillas a little longer and with more oil, they were not as crunchy as I would have liked. But it was my first time cooking with corn tortillas. My poached eggs were PERFECT, so I will change nothing about my poaching method! If serving more than two people I will add sour cream, freshly sliced avocado, and minced cilantro. Overall, I was very pleased with my first attempt at Huevos Rancheros, and I used up some left over food to boot! I will definitely be making this again!!

Up Next... Enchiladas! Why not, I have left over corn tortillas.