Nowadays, you can get all kinds of things named enchiladas, some filled with beef, pork or chicken, or others with downright weird ingredients. We wanted to go back to the enchiladas we had in Arizona which are pretty straightforward, but with the twist that they add a fried egg on top to cut the spiciness.

Of course, spiciness is different for each person, but the idea is the same. You just add some sort of sauce and season it to taste. In our case, we bought soft, premade corn tortillas and two kinds of packaged taco sauce. Neither turned out to be very spicy, so we added some red pepper flakes and some slices of jalapeno.  You can go pretty far into spiciness by picking the right peppers, but since the ones in the supermarket were completely unlabeled, we stuck to jalapenos. However winter jalapenos shipped to Connecticut are pretty mild things.

Here’s our pretty easy recipe. We used cheddar cheese shredded in our food processor, rather than using a grater or buying the tasteless pre-shredded cheese which has had plenty of time to oxidize on all of its surfaces. You could also use the fairly similar Colby cheese.

• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 medium onion
• 3 cloves garlic, mashed or minced
• Taco sauce
• 1 tsp red pepper flakes
• Jalapeno or hotter peppers
• 4 Corn tortillas
• 1/3 lb cheddar cheese, shredded
• 2 eggs

1. Saute the ground beef in a little olive oil. Remove and keep warm.
2. Saute the onions in the same oil, and add the garlic near the end of the cooking process to keep it from burning.
3. Drain excess fat from the pan, and add the ground beef and about 1 cup of taco sauce. The bottled sauces have much more body than the powdered ones (like Old El Paso).
4. Add the pepper flakes and slices of hot peppers to taste.
5. Heat the tortillas in a pan or on a griddle.
6. Spoon meat sauce into each tortilla and top with grated cheese.
7. Add sliced hot peppers and if you like, sliced black olives.
8. Roll each taco up and place them seam-side down in a baking dish.

9. Top with more grated cheese and bake for 10 minutes, until the cheese is melted and the filling heated.
10. While they are baking, gentry fry the eggs in butter.
11. Place two tacos on each plate, and top with a fried egg.
12. Serve at once.

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