Chilaquiles

Tuesday April 3
Volume 2 of the venerable Veggie Epi (okay, The Vegetarian Epicure) is the source for this, but there it's all veggier-than-thou and a huge mass of work: you have to individually fry up tortillas, make a sauce from scratch, etc. But when you break down the recipe, you realize that it's what to do with the leftovers from any Mexican food party: crushed-up tortilla chips layered with salsa, cheese, and any taco-meat, then filled up with an egg-milk custard and baked till it bubbles.
In short, it's a process parallel to UTOPia, that is, SOB, the Stale Object of Breadness. All cultures that invent bread will wake up one morning after a party and find lot of stale bready (or bread-like) objects lying about. What to do? So bread pudding, French toast, panzanella, rebollita, bruschetta (the greatest boon to restaurants, ever), etc.
In this case, we did do some extra work. We bought fresh poblano chiles, and roasted them; and we made chorizo out of a recipe from the Southwest Tastes cookbook. We actually had no idea what exactly we were going to do with them when we made them earlier in the week, but then inspiration hit. They got layered in a casserole along with a better brand of bottled cilantro salsa, a heap of Colby-jack cheese, and plenty of crushed chips. On top of the layers, you pour a custard made from three eggs beaten into a cup of milk. It's usually topped with shredded cheese, but in this case the thin strips of poblano looked lovely. It baked for about an hour at the People's Temperature. Strangely enough, despite all the salted chips, it needed more salt.