Meat and Cheese Board

Saturday started the way Saturday always starts: somebody was already crying before I made it downstairs.

It was Elena. She’s three, so the reason didn’t need to be good, and it wasn’t—Marco had taken the purple crayon and she had wanted the purple crayon and the injustice of it was apparently catastrophic. I’m standing in the kitchen in my NMSU t-shirt that’s older than Diego, it’s 6:15 in the morning, and I’m already refereeing a crayon dispute. Welcome to the second week of summer, Coach.

Lisa was already gone. She works Saturday overnight shifts at Denver Health, gets home around seven, and there’s about a twenty-minute window where we pass each other in the kitchen like ships—me heading into the chaos, her coming out of it. She’d left a note on the counter: Coffee’s on. Eggs in fridge. Be the adult. She writes these notes like play calls. Short, direct, no room for interpretation.

I poured the coffee. I separated the twins. I located the purple crayon under the couch cushion and returned it to Elena, who had already moved on to the green crayon and could not explain why she’d needed the purple one in the first place. Sofia came downstairs with her soccer cleats on already, wanting to know if I’d seen her shin guards. Diego wandered in looking like a man who had been asleep for three years and was not yet sure the waking world was worth it.

I opened the fridge to figure out breakfast, and I did a quick inventory the way I do when we’re down to two timeouts in the fourth quarter: what do I have, what can I work with, what gets everyone fed without anyone crying again? I had eggs—eight of them. Half a bag of tortilla chips from the coaching staff cookout I’d done Thursday. Some leftover green chile from the freezer stash I’d brought back from Gloria’s in March. Onion. A little cheese. Tomato on its last good day.

Migas.

I hadn’t made migas in maybe two years, which felt like a crime when I stood there looking at exactly what I needed. Migas aren’t a fancy dish. They’re not the kind of thing you plan ahead for. They’re an audible—you look at what the defense is giving you and you adjust. Scrambled eggs, fried tortilla pieces, onion, pepper, cheese, whatever else is in the game. In New Mexico, that “whatever else” is always going to include green chile, because of course it is.

I called Diego over. He’s nine now, and I’ve been pulling him into the kitchen more deliberately since the spring. The kid can already crack an egg without getting shell in the bowl, which puts him ahead of two of my JV linemen, so we’re building on that.

“You’re on eggs,” I told him. “Crack six. Whisk them in that bowl.”

He looked up from whatever he was doing on the couch. “How?”

“Like I showed you. One hand, tap the edge, pull it apart. Don’t mash it.”

He got up. He did it. Four clean cracks, one that required surgical removal of a small shell fragment, and one where I had to intervene before he turned it into an omelet experiment. But he did it, and he was proud of himself in the way kids are proud when you don’t make a big deal out of it—quiet, a little taller.

I was standing at the stove getting the oil hot for the tortilla chips, and I had a thought that hit me sideways the way they sometimes do when you’re not braced for it. I was thinking about my dad, Hector. I’m not sure why the migas triggered it specifically—maybe because migas were one of his things, or maybe because I’m at the age now where I find myself doing things the way my father did them without having been taught. Like somewhere in the wiring, it just passed from him to me.

My dad is seventy-five. He has Type 2 diabetes, a bad knee from forty years of welding, and the stubbornness of a man who survived raising five kids in a three-bedroom house in Las Cruces on a welder’s salary. He manages his blood sugar now—metformin, modified diet, all the things he resisted for two years before accepting that the body does what it does regardless of whether you want to cooperate. He can’t eat the way he used to. The menudo is mostly off the table. The flour tortillas are a sometime food now, not a daily one. He eats his eggs without the chorizo.

I overhaul the migas a little when I make them. Not because I’m precious about it, but because I learned in 2011 that if I was going to spend the next thirty years eating, I should probably pay attention to what I was putting in. So the chips I use are baked. The cheese is used with restraint—I know, I know, but stick with me. The green chile carries the heat, so you don’t need a pound of pepper jack to make the dish feel like something. It’s still migas. It’s just migas that your body will thank you for at fifty.

I thought about calling Hector while I was cooking. I do this—I pick up the phone and then I don’t quite dial, because my dad and I talk in person better than we talk on the phone. On the phone there are silences. In person, the silences are fine, you can fill them with doing things—grilling, watching the game, arguing about whether New Mexico State has any business playing in a conference that expects them to show up and compete. On the phone the silence just sits there.

I’ll call him later today. That’s the plan.

By the time the migas were done, Lisa had come home. She walked in still in her scrubs, which is always a particular kind of tired—not just sleepy, but the twelve-hour-shift tired that lives in the back of the eyes and the curve of the shoulders. I handed her a plate without saying anything. She sat down at the counter and ate half of it before she said a word.

Then: “This has green chile in it.”

“Everything I make has green chile in it.”

“I know. I’m not complaining. I’m just making an observation.”

Elena climbed up on the stool next to Lisa and stole a bite off her plate, and Lisa didn’t protest, just moved the plate closer to her. That’s the thing about food at our table—it’s never quite individual. It migrates. It gets shared without asking. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Diego ate two plates. Sofia came back inside and ate one plate and immediately went back outside. Marco decided the eggs were “too spicy,” which is not accurate—I dialed back the green chile for exactly this reason—but three-year-olds are not interested in accuracy. He ate the chips out of his migas and left the eggs, which is not how this is supposed to go but is probably fine for a Saturday.

This is what cooking is in this house. Not a performance. Not a demonstration. Just: here is what’s in the fridge, here’s a hot skillet, here’s twenty-five minutes before the chaos resumes. Feed your people. The game is won at the table.

My dad taught me that without ever saying it. I’m trying to teach my kids the same way.

Marco leaving the eggs and eating only the chips is exactly the kind of Saturday morning outcome that reminds me why boards like this one exist—you put everything out, and people take what they want. No arguments about what’s too spicy, no negotiations. Just a spread that meets everyone where they are. That’s the whole philosophy: feed your people without making it a production. Here’s how I put it together.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: N/A | Total Time: 10 min | Servings: 6

Ingredients

Cheeseboard and utensils
Cheese
Meats
Fruit
Nuts
Crackers
Spreads
Anything else/optional ingredients

Instructions

Arrange your board. Read blog post for my personal favorite items and arranging strategies.

Nutrition (per serving)

Meat and Cheese Board — Because the Best Meals Are the Ones That Migration Across the Table