Avocado Latkes Breakfast Tacos

Say hello to your new favorite hangover cure. Avocado Latkes Breakfast Tacos. The avocado is in the latke! And topped with lots of eggs, cheese, more avocado, and spicy jalapeños. Yesss.

Oh this was a good idea. Turns out adding avocado to the latke mix makes for a crispy latke with an extra creamy inside. It’s the kind of food that makes you wish you had had more Manischewitz the night before. Just so you could enjoy it that much more.

Are you familiar with breakfast tacos? Here in Austin, they are a way of life. A food group all its own, pretty much my only fuel during SXSW.

But I wasn’t always a breakfast taco connoisseur. Would you believe I was a breakfast taco virgin until 2009!? (We won’t get into how a former boyfriend stopped in his tracks when he heard I had never had chicken fried steak.)

 
Truth is, although I live in Texas, I’m not a Texan at all. I’m from arguably the most Yankee state in the union (Connecticut) and I also once lived in NYC. They say that when you live in NYC for 10 years, you become a New Yorker. I asked that same boyfriend how long I had to live in Texas to become a Texas. Oh babe, he said. You’ll never be a Texan. You can see why that didn’t work out.

Less than a month after I moved from NYC to Austin, I had a new job, my first car in years, and an apartment the size of a penthouse, for less than price of a walk-up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn (before it was cool). My new co-workers, with their southern hospitality, took me to breakfast to give me the rundown on office politics. We walked into the nearest breakfast taco joint.

Non locals may be asking, what is a breakfast taco? (Typically a filled tortilla of scrambled eggs, cheese, and greasy fried potatoes—or bacon—topped with pico de gallo and avocado if you’re lucky, jalapeño if you’re brave, the breakfast taco is an Austin staple, made even more popular by being an excellent vehicle for curing the previous night’s happy-hour indulgences.) I joyfully exclaimed that this would be my first time trying the Tex-Mex treat. When my coworkers heard I was a breakfast taco virgin, you would think I had said I had never tried pizza. Or, for comparison, a bagel. “But what did you eat for breakfast in New York?” they asked. Oy.

So I adapted the taco into something I know. And that’s Jew food! I mashed up the best breakfast taco fixins with my favorite fried treat to make a uniquely Texan dish for the Festival of Lights: avocado latkes breakfast tacos. The result is spicy, cheesy, and has the perfect amount of grease to fuel you for eight crazy days of dreidel games.

For more on how I ended up in Texas, and the full recipe for Avocado Latkes Breakfast Tacos, check out The Tablet!