I have mentioned before that Leah and I go to Los Portales Mexican restaurant almost every Wednesday for a lunch of huevos rancheros, and then on to the grocery store. I have also mentioned that we have done it so often that almost every waiter/waitress brings us a sweet tea for Leah, an unsweetened tea for me, chips, regular salsa, burrito sauce and ranchera sauce, without our having to ask. Then they ask, “The regular?” And then they bring us huevos rancheros, which mean ranch eggs, which means fried eggs. We get them with the yolk runny and the edges crisp.

Here’s Leah enjoying lunch.

The sauces are, from left to right, burrito sauce, regular sauce, empty ranchera sauce bowl, and full ranchera sauce bowl. One taste of the ranchera sauce and we knew we would need a second bowl.

Here’s a closer look at the ranchera sauce.

Seeds! Chilis!

The burrito sauce has onions.

And here I am, also enjoying.

I managed to eat my entire meal without getting any stains on my shirt.

Way, way back, we started with just regular sauce and ranchera sauce, but the ranchera sauce was so often so hot that one waiter suggested burrito sauce. That turned out to be a good suggestion. The three sauces are have distinct and quite different tastes. The regular sauce is close to what you might buy in the grocery store. Burrito sauce is a deeper and more flavorful sauce. Ranchera sauce can be very hot, but it almost always seems to have a nice, sharp flavor, not just heat.

We usually ask the waitress if the ranchera sauce is hot. Today the waitress said she hadn’t tried it because she gets heartburn. So we dipped one little edge of a chip into it and tasted. Oh, boy, was it good. It had a little heat, the kind that shows up pretty quickly on the tongue, as opposed to the kind that seems to burn the back of the mouth as well and get more intense as it lingers. The taste was more piquant than picante. Sometimes we just dribble a little ranchera sauce over the eggs, but on Wednesday we spooned it over them.

Then I added burrito sauce over the eggs. And the burrito sauce was also good. This time it had a roasted, smokey flavor.

We take pleasure in simple things.