Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Breakfast Quesadillas

I like think I know a fair amount about cooking. I'm no pro chef, but I'm friends with several of those, and on my good days I like to believe that the difference between them and me is less about outright knowledge and more the level of craft that they bring to the kitchen.
But every now and then, I get smacked in the face by some technique that is so simple, yet utterly brilliant, that I'm reminded how much there is left for me to learn.  I remember watching my neighbor make her German Potato salad with the intention of documenting her amorphous "recipe", only to be more struck by her ability to speed-peel five pounds of boiled potatoes in seconds flat.  Watching that simple action changed everything for me, and I pass it along whenever I can.
Well here I am again.  Someone just smacked me with a dead-simple solution to an old problem: Making breakfast (Egg) Quesadillas without dirtying two pans and without having the eggs fall out all over...
The solution from the dirty gourmet is to start the eggs like an omelette.  Let them start to setup, then apply a tortilla and flip.  Add the rest of the ingredients and the second tortilla, and voila', an egg quesadilla where the egg is a perfectly distributed fluffy pancake layer.


I was so excited by the revelation , I made these for dinner that very night.  They were perfect, and excellent.  And typically, I didn't take any pictures.

That however leads me on my normal path of "leftovers for breakfast".  Of course breakfast is a necessarily smaller meal, since I find I only need a few hundred calories to jump-start my morning, so I've experimented with reducing the portions and calories further.

Today's Breakfast: Open-faced egg quesadilla on a corn tortilla,  with chicken breast, sauteed vidalia onion, and green chiles.  Pico de gallo and avocado on the side.  




The cheese provides a large chunk of the calories, but it isn't really a quesadilla without it.  Since this method still yields good results with a single corn tortilla underneath, it's manageable.  Even so, this is a bit of a splurge at 380 calories.  Serving the same ingredients as an omelette with 1/2 as much cheese and sans tortilla would have brought this in at 275 calories.

For camping/overlanding purposes, I think I'll stick to the full "two tortilla" recipe from the Dirty Gourmet - it will be simpler to manage and easier to eat and clean-up, and the extra calories are never missed during a day on-trail.  For dieting at home, open-faced is fantastic!

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