Mexican eggs

Three eggs are loosened with cream and combined with one rounded tablespoon of masa harina. Half a small tin of jalapeño chile peppers is included with the mixture.

The mixture is poured into a heated pan and cooked gently as an omelet.  The cooked edges are folded on top of the uncooked center, uncooked liquid mixture pours out from the center into the vacated area. The pan is tilted to facilitate the action. This continues with alternate edges, N, S, E, W, until liquid mixture can no longer pour out of the pile. The pile, now about 1/3 the width of the pan and wet inside, is tapped loose and turned with a flipping motion of the pan. Within a few seconds the mass is cooked entirely through. 

The egg mass is rolled out onto a plate and smothered with cheese, onion, lettuce and tomato.

Served here with orange bell pepper drizzled with oil, and thick-slab bacon.

Apparently I am in a masa harina phase.

If this batter were thinner it could be a crêpe.

I became curious about how it would go to mix a heaping tablespoon of masa harina into a few eggs as one would make a crêpe batter except thicker. Would it impart its wonderful tamale magic? 

Conclusion: It does impart its wonderful tamale magic. If you haven't already, buy a bag of this masa harina, tamale mix by another name, tortilla mix by another, and start adding it into things in place of flour and behold the amazing flavor it imparts. 

For the millionth time, possibly the third time, the masa harina de maiz (masa means mass, harina means flour, maiz is corn, so, a mass of corn flour), is different from simple ground corn kernels because with masa the corn kernels are treated with an alkali, originally pot ash, the ashes remaining after a fire, but presently usually lime (calcium hydroxide), the chemical not the fruit. This treatment renders the corn more nutritious than regular untreated corn by ridding the kernels of their  pesky unhelpful husks and by making the calcium available.  

So EAT IT !, I said. 

This treatment of soaking maize along with wood ashes was not universally understood. As it was developed from the wild grass, teosinte, by careful selection and wise planting that predated Mendel's studies with peas by millennia, and as the puny teosinte grain slowly became larger more useful maize and so acquired ever increasing importance in the Amerind diet, cultivation of the grain spread northward but not the knowledge of the alkaline process of nixtamalization. As reliance on the grain grew but without the alkaline process, serious health problems began to appear among the native North Americans with increasing frequency. This is known by a large rise in cases of scoliosis (spinal curvature) evident in skeletal remains. Native North Americans that became dependent on maize were simply not getting complete nutrition in their diet because they did not understand the process of nixtamalization. Neither did the Spanish who took the grain with them back to Europe. 

The Spanish made the same mistake with vanilla, an orchid that blooms only once and at night, at the time the vine was pollinated by a single insect, a specific Melipone bee found only in Mexico, abeja de monte, mountain bee. But that is another story. I will just say, it took three hundred years to find a solution to vanilla orchid infertility, which strikes me as exceedingly slow on the uptake. In fact, the solution itself became known by lazy lolling around idly watching some black bees force their way into unopened flowers growing on vines up the side of a porch. So the moral of the story is ... well, I don't know what the moral is. If you figure it out, let me know, okay?