Enchiladas any time
Is your mealtime routine drifting toward the culinary doldrums? Change it up a bit: Serve breakfast for dinner.
Breakfast for dinner — or “brinner” — is the powerful lure that draws people craving bacon, eggs and home fries to 24-hour diners. Breakfast for dinner puts the grease in “greasy spoon.” And there's something liberating about sitting down late at night and uttering that early-morning benediction: “two, over easy.” Not to mention that eating breakfast for dinner seems slightly subversive, like wearing shorts to work or eating dessert first.
When you think of eating “brinner,” you are most likely not thinking of a bowl of Cheerios, oatmeal or a smoothie. You are thinking of something substantial: a ham-and-cheese omelet, or corned beef hash, or an egg strata, or grits and cheese. So here's a breakfast that virtually screams “dinner”: a meaty chili spooned over corn tortillas and served with a fried egg on top and salsa on the side.
The recipe comes from a new cookbook called “Big Ranch, Big City” by Louis Lambert (Ten Speed Press), a Texas-born chef who trained at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, opened restaurants in San Francisco, and then returned to his roots with eateries in Fort Worth and Austin.
Lambert may have proved that you can, in fact, go home again, but he sure gussied himself up before returning, bringing with him some decidedly citified interpretations of down-home delicacies. He takes a fancy-pants ingredient like quail, for example, dips it in a beer batter, fries it and finishes it with a jalapeno peach glaze. He makes a Southern staple like fried pie with beignet dough and fills it with pears and candied ginger. He dresses up a plate of humble fried green tomatoes with crab remoulade.
Most of his food is like this: a balance of gutsy and gourmet. But Lambert occasionally lets his inner Texan speak louder than his outer chef, as he does in his chapter on Tex-Mex cooking and in a “Soups & Stews” section with some hearty favorites such as gumbo, chili and posole. His recipe for Stacked Chili Con Carne Enchiladas with Fried Eggs is a standout. You could even serve it for breakfast.
Ÿ Marialisa Calta is the author of “Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the American Family” (Perigee, 2005). More at marialisacalta.com.