Eating Cheap

Good morning!

I am beginning this posting as I finish a delicious plate of Huevos a la Mexicana.

Huevos a la Mexicana have become my favorite breakfast dish as I try (sometimes not so successfully) to abstain from meat fats...My old favorite was Huevos Con Chorizo and I still don't think there's anything more delicious.  But Huevos a la Mexicana is so simple and tasty that no one could complain. Here's how you make it. (Notice I said, "it"--this is for one egg.)

a fifty cent piece size chunk of onion, chopped
a 1/4 jalapeno pepper, chopped

Spray the pan with good pan spray and frazzle up those bits of onion and pepper.  They can even brown a teeny bit. Add one egg, and scramble away. You have been toasting a corn tortilla over an open flame, so now put it on a plate, add the egg and EAT. Very nice.  This morning my jalapeno was very very meek, so next time I will taste beforehand and if it doesn't have some kick I'll add a few of the seeds.  My chile-pequines are producing now in the back yard and I may add one (ONE) of those to these proportions. Then I will not have to worry about kick.

One egg just fills one folded tortilla. Makes you realize how many eggs you get when you get H. a la M. in a cafe--wasteful for this li'l'  old lady.  One is all I should have per meal.  I had a smallish glass of much-maligned orange juice with this. I think orange juice is very good. Too high in sugar, yes, but it is natural and has fiber and vitamins and wakes up the body. Plus it fights the cholesterol.  Zzzzz.

Last night we had Cowboy Steak for supper.  As a beef dish it is not too fat, either for the body nor for the pocketbook.  In order to make this, I look in the supermarket for good cuts of meat that have been marked way down because they've come to the doomsday date on the package. These steaks were red, bright, moist and good-looking. No reason to pass them over becauase they are $4.00 instead of $8.00!

I was watching a movie in the bedroom so instead of browning them in a skillet, I put them into the oven to let them brown. They even got a little too brown, and looked kind of like roof shingles when I got them out, but that was good because they left most all their fat in the pan. I speared them out and put them into the skillet with cut up (good sized chunks) of green pepper, onion, red pepper, tomato, and a few grains of McCormick type dried minced garlic. With water added, they merrily simmered until supper time. At the time you serve this, you could take some juice out and mix with a little flour  in a dish and put it back in to thicken the gravy. You could add rice or potato cubes toward the last if you'd rather do that. I did add a quartered carrot or two about half an hour before dinner.  Other additives could be: tomato paste, catsup(!), chili powder, herb sprinklings, and of course salt and pepper.  These steaks were some kind of thin cut meant no doubt for the grill, but adapted quite nicely to my treatment and came out tender and juicy in a relatively short time. If I were doing a thick piece of meat I would put it in the oven covered to finish up its cooking as it would need longer than an hour and a half to get tender and delicious. YUMMO. YAZZYBEL