New Mexico. Green chiles is all you need.

New Mexico was named Nuevo México in 1563 after a valley in present-day Mexico and was not named after the country Mexico since the country was named 250 years after. The present-day New Mexico has more Ph.D. holders per capita than any other state. Denver may be the Mile High State, but it don’t got nothin’ on Santa Fe. Santa Fe is the highest capital city in the United States.

When researching New Mexico's favorite meals, we discovered that nearly every meal contained green chiles. We knew our meal needed green chiles. Some of the meals had blue corn, which is rare in Northwest Iowa, so we passed on those. The other common trend: eggs. We opted for breakfast burritos to blend some of these popular flavors.

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Dang those hash browns.

I started the breakfast burritos by taking four green chile peppers and putting them on a cookie sheet, then sticking them in the oven at 350 for ten minutes to soften their skin up. After they had been in the oven for ten minutes, I pulled them out of the oven and put them in a yellow bowl that then had a plate stuck on top of it to let the peppers continue to steam out until Mom got home to slice them up.

Once Mom got home from work, she sliced the chile peppers up and started the chile pepper sauce. Meanwhile, I made Dad skin three potatoes while I got out the large size of the cheese grater. Once Dad had skinned the potatoes, I turned them into hash browns with the cheese grater.

Then, when Mom was done slicing and dicing the peppers, me and mom threw them (not literally) into a pan to saute them with some vegetable oil, onion, salt, and pepper. We continually stirred them, but they stayed together in one big ball of Miss Mush’s potato salad (read the Wayside School series for more on Miss Mush's potato salad). After about 10-12 minutes of this, we finally decided to quite literally throw them in the garbage.

Take two: homestyle fries.

Mom got three more potatoes and whipped them into ½ inch home-fries, which we then used instead of the hash browns. We added three eggs into the mix, and constantly stirred until the eggs were scrambled.

We turned a piece of aluminum foil into a “boat” and set it inside a cookie sheet. After that, we made our burritos with our potatoes, shredded cheese, and a strip of bacon on a burrito shell. We put three in the boat and drizzled them with mom's green chile sauce. Picky eater got his own burrito sans sauce.

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More green chiles, please.

We then sprinkled all four with some more shredded cheese and put the pan in the oven. When the burritos came out of the oven, they were a hot, gooey, delicious mess.

The burritos were amazing! The green chile sauce on top complemented the burrito’s innards nicely but we wish we would have doubled the sauce. It started tasting spicy, but then, once the green chile flavor faded, you could taste eggs and the potatoes. It was different than a burrito I am used to since it was eggs, potatoes, cheese, and a bit of bacon, not the burger, cheese, sour cream, and hot sauce I’m used to.

I think we'd all agree that this is one more meal to add to our list of meals. Dad's been putting green chiles on his morning breakfast ever since!