Chilaquiles

This dish is about as fun to eat as it is to say — chilaquiles — chill-a-kee-lays — CHILL-a-KEE-lays *she shouted with enthusiasm*

Chilaquiles is a traditional Mexican breakfast dish, where the tortillas left over from the night before (how does that ever happen) are added to a sauce, In this case a spicy, tomato salsa. It is eaten warm with the triangles of tortillas softened in the sauce.

I like a spicy start to my day but you can amend this recipe to your palate and make it as homemade, or cupboard raided, as you like.

The first thing I did was make the blue corn tortillas.

The flavour of this dish relies massively on the corn flavour from the tortillas, or totopos.

Don’t be tempted to use flour tortillas here, that flavour will just not cut it.

You can still do this recipe even if you can’t find blue corn flour — just use yellow or if that seems like too much effort you can always use shop bought corn tortilla chips. Just skip down the page to the sauce making.

For those of you with the inclination to give tortilla making a go here’s what I did.

I combined 250g blue corn flour with half a teaspoon of salt and 320ml of warm water (a little at a time) until it formed a ball.

I then let the dough sit for 20 minutes before cutting it up into eight smaller pieces.

You can now attempt to roll them out.

If you have a tortilla press, wow *slow claps* lucky you, but if, like me, you don’t you can always make do with a rolling pin and two pieces of cling film. Roll the tortilla out very thinly— this is honestly the hardest part of this recipe.

Once you have your thin, mostly circular shaped discs of blue beautifulness you can get frying.

Make sure the pan is hot — you should hear a sizzle when you throw the tortilla on the heat.

Now that you have lightly fried the tortillas you can use them for anything you want. I immediately filled mine with tofu and ate it while cooking the rest for the chilaquiles — don’t judge me! #secondbreakfast

But, for the chilaquiles — this is why you’re here after all — you’ll need to fry the dough just a little bit longer, but make sure they don’t burn.

The aim is to remove as much of the moisture as possible and make the tortilla crisp — this is so it soaks up all the spiced, tomato flavour.

So, with that being said, it’s time to make the sauce.

Take your favourite bottled chilli sauce, or make your own, my recipe is here, and place it in a pan with onions and a tin of chopped tomatoes.

Allow the chilli sauce and the tomatoes to warm through, then use a hand blender to mix.

Now you can add the fried totopos shards to the sauce and allow them to soften to your liking. The first time I had this dish was in Mexico and they were served really soft, so that they were almost dissolved, so that’s how I have mine now, but you might prefer a bit more texture.

The softening process only takes a few minutes and then your chilaquiles are ready to serve — I added spinach, spring onion, radish and scrambled tofu to mine, but you can go mad and top with avocado, refried beans, vegan cheese or even vegan sausages. Whatever floats your boat!

Ingredients

Blue corn flour ∙ salt ∙ water — or shop bought corn tortillas — chilli sauce ∙ tinned chopped tomatoes ∙ spinach ∙ spring onion ∙ radish

Nutrition

This is based on two tortillas per person and half the tomato sauce. I haven’t included the toppings.

• Calories: 370
• Carbohydrates: 72.4g
• Fat: 4.2g
• Fiber: 14.6g
• Sodium: 3.1g
• Protein: 10.6g
• Sugar: 8g