Pretty nice looking breakfast, eh? It was. 🙂 It also was the recovery from a mistake. 😮
Let’s face it, we all make mistakes in our kitchens. We hate to admit it but we all make them. We also hate it when it happens. The question is once it happens, what do you do about it. How do you recover? Sometimes there is no recovery. You’re stuck with starting over or going out to dinner. We have all had those moments. I remember preparing for a banquet and putting salt in chantilly cream. What a disaster!!! I was glad I tasted it before I put it in the chocolate mousse. 🙂 There is no recovery from that type of mistake. You simply move on and start again. Thankfully, I didn’t sugar the mash potatoes. 😮 I do know someone who did that. Other times, it’s not so bad. That is what happened with this recipe. I had recently purchased a very nice piece of fresh mahi-mahi but didn’t really know how I was going to prepare it. I had run through a variety of different preparations but none of them stepped out and said “make me.” Baby Lady, on the other hand, had recently purchased Pati Jinich’s cookbook Pati’s Mexican Table: The Secrets of Real Mexican Home Cooking. So, Baby Lady suggested we look at Pati’s book to see if she had any recipes with mahi mahi. She did. It sounded wonderful but needed a little tweaking to match the ingredients we had on hand. First, her recipe called for poblano chiles but we had some beautiful roasted New Mexico green chiles we wanted to use instead. Her recipe also called for 4 mahi-mahi filets but we only had 2. No problem, right? All you have to do is divide the ingredients in half. Sounds simple enough. Of course, that is the problem. It IS simple. So simple that I turned my brain off and halved everything but the chiles.!! Rather than a nice, creamy sauce with a touch of heat and green chile flavor, we got a silky smooth, luxuriously creamy, green chile sauce that was long on chile flavor and heat. It very definitely would overpower a mild fish like mahi-mahi, even when the mahi-mahi is marinated for 20 minutes in a nice lime marinade. Now, of course, dinner changes gears but you have the sauce (a lot of it). It is incredibly flavorful, just not what you wanted. So what do you do? Well, you make breakfast with it the next day. You have the creamy, green chile sauce that is toned down and made richer and more creamy by the egg yolk The sauce is then complimented by the red chile in the chorizo and it’s served on an English muffin, topped with melted Monterrey jack cheese. Nice recovery with the result being a fabulously rich and flavorful breakfast. No one would know this was a mistake unless you told them. So let’s keep this just between you and me. OK? This is what we did.
Ingredients
- 2 eggs
- 6 oz chorizo
- 1 English muffin
- 1/2 cup Mexican crema
- 2/3 cup milk
- 8 oz, chopped, roasted Green New Mexico chiles
- 1 Tbsp unsalted butter
- 1/2 Tbsp all-purpose flour
- 1/4 Tbsp nutmeg, grated
- salt, to taste
- 1/3 cup shredded cheese (Monterey Jack, Muenster, Mozzarella)
Instructions
For the sauce
Add the milk to the blender
Now add the crema
and the chiles
Puree
Add the salt
and the nutmeg
and blend to mix.
Now, make a blonde roux. Add the butter to a sauce pot over medium-high heat and melt
When melted, add the flour
Cook over medium heat whisking frequently until it begins to give off a nutty aroma, some say it smells like roasting hazelnuts – roughly 2 – 3 minutes. This is when the flour is beginning to cook. Now, add the cream/chile mix in the blender to the sauce pot.
Cook over medium heat for 10 – 12 minutes. Adjust seasoning, cover and set aside in a warm place until ready to serve.
For the eggs
Fill a skillet with water. Add 1 Tbsp white vinegar and bring to a boil. Add the eggs to the boiling water 1 at a time.
It takes roughly 2-1/2 minutes for the eggs to cook but the yolk still be runny. Remove eggs from water and place on paper towel to absorb the water.
While the water for the eggs is coming to a boil, cook the chorizo.
To plate
Put half of a toasted English muffin on a plate
spoon some of the chorizo on top of the English muffin
put an egg on top of the chorizo
Spoon sauce over the egg
Sprinkle with grated Monterrey jack cheese
Put under the broiler to melt the cheese
Serve & enjoy!!
NOTES: This makes a lot of sauce and would be perfect for chicken enchiladas. 🙂
REMCooks 
That looks damn fine my good man. Very nice looking eggs too I might add 🙂
Thanks. It was very tasty. 🙂
Well my goodness, what a fabulous mistake! If it were my house, it would have gone down the disposal and pizza would be delivered. Great comeback. I love any style Mexican eggs. 🙂
Hi, Kathryn. 🙂 Thanks for the nice compliment. You definitely would have kept the sauce. It was way too good to toss. It just didn’t go with the fish. Lots of chiles, lots of heat and way too overpowering. Eggs, chicken, pork are perfect with it. Had I only used 4 oz of chiles, it would have been beautiful with the fish. Oh, well. I will have to make Pati’s dish another day. If you have never watched her PBS show, Pati’s Mexican Table, you should. She also has a blog. My older brother lived in Mexico for 5 years. He comments “Rick Bayless doesn’t cook Mexican food. If you want real Mexican food, Pati is the real deal.” I like her food a lot. So does the Baby Lady but there are other Mexican chefs I like better.
Thanks for the recommendation, Richard, I’ll check out Pati’s blog. I’m always looking for good Mexican food recipes. I’m sure I wouldn’t have tossed that, but my mistakes are typically worse. ;-D
Shush, kind Sir! So why are you telling US now: with our elephantine memories to tease you forever and after 🙂 ? That breakfast looks super [OK, the Oz ‘English muffins’ look a tad more seductive!] and will be copied . . . mistake? . . . did not see any!!!!
Hi, Eha. Thanks for the nice compliment. I don’t mind being reminded and teased about the mistakes that turn out nicely in another dish. It’s the ones that get tossed that you will never see. 😉
Delicious!
Thanks. It most definitely was. 🙂
It looks like yo need to keep making mistakes Richard. Very nice indeed. A nice twist on Eggs Benedict.
Thanks, Conor, although I prefer getting it right and having to worry about leftovers. 🙂
wow, you’ve a king’s breakfast my friend….
this looks like a upscale hotels morning supper!
Thanks. 🙂
Southwestern egg benedict. perfectly yummy!
Yep, Mimi. It is a SW eggs benedict kinda breakfast. I love breakfasts like this. We love chorizo and buy a particular type when we go to El Paso. It’s not nearly as oily and has a fabulous flavor. It’s similar to longanisa but not as dry. It’s also perfect for this type breakfast, or frittatas, omelets, etc. that you don’t want too much oil/grease/fat but need some.
Oh dear, I can’t count how many kitchen mistakes I’ve made, But the breakfast looks splendid!
Hi, Sheryl. Thanks for the nice compliment. 🙂 We all make mistakes and some of them turn out pretty darn tasty. I, too, have lost count of the number of kitchen mistakes I have made and generally don’t tell anyone about them. Nonetheless, it’s always fun when you make a mistake that still is tasty but just won’t go with what you were planning. It also can make dinner preparation interesting. 🙂
Your secret is safe with me. I agree that the sauce would be perfect not only on your eggs but with chicken enchiladas.
Thanks, Karen. 🙂
very nice! we actually just had an omelet with New Mexico green chiles at our new favorite brunch place this weekend! they pair perfectly with eggs 🙂
Thanks, Andreea. We really like the New Mexico green chiles. Sadly, this year’s harvest was not as good as you would expect. The flesh is thinner which impacts its taste and also makes roasting and peeling a little more time consuming.