Growing up, we had some of the standard American foods for breakfast – cream o’ wheat, oatmeal, waffles, fried eggs, pancakes (no sugar coated cereals in this household!) – and a couple things I never saw in any of my friends’ homes – huevos, and my favorite chorizo with eggs. My mother is hispanic by ancestry and looks, and even though she doesn’t speak a drop of Spanish she still cooks what she was taught by her mother, grandmother and relatives, growing up in Tucson, Arizona. Thus we alone on our block had chorizo, or Mexican sausage scrambled up with eggs. I didn’t even know that chorizo was the name of the sausage and not the dish until I was in my twenties. What is chorizo? A spicy pork sausage. While the Spanish version is usually spiced with paprika and garlic, Mexican chorizo is spiced with chile peppers. I’ve seen chorizo served in Mexican restaurants most often as a side sausage, like bacon. We cook ours up with the eggs and add some raisins as well, the sweetness of which provides some balance to the spicy chile in the chorizo.

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