Simple Savory Eats

Lately I've been showing you lots of sweets. I have also been showing you my full-blown sometimes time/labor intensive recipes. So today I decided to show you how I eat about 75% of the time. Which is either leftovers or dishes that are quick and easy to make while still tasting delicious. These ones just so happen to be spicy and savory because I had a full bottle of amazing new salsa and a food baby from my recent sweets overload.

First up:

Lazy Huevos Rancheros Salad

In the salad mix:
-3 leaves Romaine lettuce
-1/2 Tomato
-Fried Egg
-Sauteed onion (sauteed with the frying egg)
-Fried Polenta (Also in the frying pan)
-Garbanzo Beans
-Sprinkle of Mozarella Cheese
-Salsa, salsa, and more salsa

So easy to make and so delicious.  It's nice to have some warmth in a salad for a change.  It's so easy to grab a medium sized skillet and coat it with olive oil, crack and egg on one half, and sautee onions/veggies/polenta/meat/whatever you can think of on the other side.  It makes a boring old salad into an easy super savory gourmet-style lunch!

Don't let the photo fool you, this salad was HUGE.  We just had no clean salad bowls...thus I had to put my giant salad in an even more giant bowl...making it look mini.

Next easy dish:


Savory Oatmeal

In the Oats mix:
-1/2-3/4 cup cooked stell cut oats
-1/2 cup almond milk
-Little sprinkle of mozzarella cheese
-Fried Egg (sunny side up)
-SALSA
-Jalapenos (for those of you who don't know about my obsession with jalapenos don't worry I know it's not normal to eat them in the morning...or plain...)

This breakfast is so so so so delicious and filling.  Frying an egg takes about .25 seconds so don't whine to me that you don't have time to make this in the morning.  Also if you're like me and cook up a pot of oats for the week and then keep it in the fridge you'll be able to easily make this breakfast.

The best part about this breakfast? The runny yoke. Oh my gosh if you like moist thick oats, this is right up your alley.  The yoke, with the salsa, and the cheese ahhh now I'm hungry again!

I don't know why I've been wasting my time with sweet oat mixes for so long.  Well, on that note, I also had steel cut oats with a crumbled Winter Wonderland Cupcake Muffin on top AND a bowl of oats with a mini slice of Butternut Squash Apple Pie on top.  One of the easiest ways to make boring oats turn into gourmet oats is to crumble some leftovers from baking on top.  It is always a winner!

Anyways the moral of this post? You don't have to make super intense recipes to eat really delicious food! Find some flavors that you like and find ways to play them up.  As in this post- I love rich and spicy food so I basically just put rich food (fried egg) and spicy food (salsa) on top of two of my favorite staples in my diet: salad and oats.  Easy enough, huh?  One last thing, never underestimate the power of leftovers, you can do SO much with them.  But that's for a topic for a whole other post ;)

What are your favorite flavors?

Quiche French Toast Breakfast Muffins

Whew say that blog title 5 times fast.

I decided to step it up a notch and use my week of eggs to really show you how flexible and delicious eggs can be.

If you missed out here are my other posts about the incredible edible egg:
Omelet Failure and Omelet Success (bottom of post)
How-To make French Toast


These are perfect for my lifestyle. When I'm lazy in the morning or don't have time to make a delicious nutritious breakfast I can grab one (or two...ok or three) of these from the fridge. Pair it with an apple or banana and have a well balanced to-go breakfast.

These muffins aren't just for breakfast they are also a perfectly portioned healthy snack. The protein from the egg combined with the fiber from the veggies and bread will fill satisfy my hunger and keep me full until the next chance I get to eat a full on meal.



Quiche French Toast Breakfast Muffins

Ingredients:
2 eggs
1/4 medium onion
1/2 cup veggies (I used broccoli)
1/2 inch slice of polenta cubed (optional, I just threw it in because I had some)
1 piece of toast
Spices to taste (I used garlic powder and some fresh basil. Other good ones for this recipe would be oregano, thyme, rosemary...etc.)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Whisk together eggs until most of the clear chunks are mixed in. Whisk in onion, veggies, polenta, and spices. Toast bread and cut into 1/4 inch cubes (large enough to hold together in chunks, but not too small that they become crumbs). Mix in bread cubes making sure that each cube gets fully covered/saturated in the egg mixture. Pour into greased muffin tin, should make about 3-4 muffins. Bake at 350 degrees for twenty minutes.

Sweet Variations:

Fruity French Toast Break fast Muffins:
Instead of onion, veggies, and polenta use 1 banana and 1 small apple (or half an apple). For spices use nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger. Top with walnuts or pecans.

Pumpkin(or squash) Quiche French Toast Muffins:
Instead of onion, veggies, and polenta use 1/2-3/4 cup pumpkin puree, or cooked butternut squash cubes (or sweet potato). Use nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger for spice and top with walnuts or pecans.

The options are seriously limitless!


I think these will become one of those breakfast dishes, like oats, that I prepare a large batch of on Sunday nights to last me for the week. These would probably be a nice savory side to my usual sweet bowl of oats too!


If you haven't noticed I'm pretty excited about these breakfast muffins. I love when I invent a new recipe, but it's so much more gratifying when I invent a recipe that really fits into my life, and can become a healthy staple. Instead of a "only when I have all the ingredients or lots of time" fun recipe.

What are some of your favorite staple recipes?

P.S. I almost forgot, do you like the new background color? I realized that although the old green background looked lovely on my laptop screen it looked putrid and cheesy on my roommates- no good! Especially when displaying photos of FOOD. I'm hoping this yellow is a little more neutral and looks good on any computer screen. Let me know what you think :)

French Toast: How-To

Start with your favorite bread. Or in my case whatever reserves you have in the freezer. (In a perfect world I would be making this with Cranberry Squash Bread or pumpkin bread) If your bread is frozen like mine, revive it in the toaster, if fresh don't toast.


Whip out your carton of eggs.



















Crack the egg and whisk the egg with a fork in a shallow bowl. Then if you have the supplies add milk and spices. (In a perfect world I would have had milk, in a semi-perfect world my roommates wouldn't read my blog solely so I could steal their milk for this french toast without them knowing.) I chose to add my spices at the end (In a perfect world I wouldn't have forgotten to add my cinnamon and nutmeg to the whisked egg...) Dredge the bread in the egg mixture, be sure to get every inch of the toast covered in egg.




















Slap the eggy toast into a heated skillet with melted butter or olive oil coating the bottom. (In a perfect world I would have been able to find my nice skillet so these pictures didn't look so scary in this crusty rusty old skillet.) I had extra egg so I just poured it on top of my toast. Wouldn't want to waste any of that protein!

Cook the toast on one side, and then flip. Unlike my failed omelet yesterday you can flip this toast as many times as you want without it falling apart. Cook until desired "doneness". I like my eggs solidly cooked (unlike my father, who's perfect world consists of raw egg protein powder shakes.) So I let my egg get a tiny bit brown.


Top toast with desired toppings. I chose banana, maple syrup, and cinnamon. (In a perfect world my toppings would have included craisins/raisins and walnuts/peanut butter too).


This was my very first time making french toast, and it turned out DELICIOUSLY. It was a really nice change for breakfast. It combines the sweet from the cinnamon and banana with the heartiness of the egg and bread to satisfy my hunger. Now that is a perfect breakfast even if it's not a perfect world.

What does your perfect breakfast consist of?

Egg Week Begins

In case you haven't been fervently following my blog, let me update you. I have no time in my life to grocery shop, or make complicated meals. Hopefully (for you and I both) after this week I will be able to be making fun muffins and savory soups again.

Yesterday on my way home from class I stopped into a little corner grocery store near my apartment. Now usually I try to stay as far away from this place as possible. It smells like cat litter and everything in the store is way overpriced. Sadly desperate times call for desperate measures. So I shopped strategically, tried to pick out the best looking produce and got foods that I knew I could stretch out to feed me for a week (combined with leftovers). What did I get? Bananas, apples, carrots, dozen eggs, and frozen broccoli. For about ten dollars, not too bad.

This week it is my goal to make it EGG WEEK! (Seriously the options with eggs are limitless). And it is also my goal to finally learn how to make a perfect omelet.

Now this entire week is also for my roommates Shannon and Kate, who do not know how to cook eggs. I'm going to show you how easy it is to cook eggs.

Now here are directions and my first attempt at Omelet making.

Step 1. Whisk together 2 eggs with about 1 TBSP water. Be sure to get all the big egg clumps out (unless you like chunks of white in your eggs)

Step 2. Pour egg mixture into heated pan with some olive oil. (I set my stove top burner to the medium setting).


Step 3. If your living off frozen foods (like myself, I keep them on reserve for weeks like these) microwave the frozen veggies for the middle of your omelet for about 30 seconds to unfreeze them.


Step 4. Add about 1/2 cup or less of veggies to cooking egg pancake. Feel free to add cheese or spices as well- I wanted to add spices but completely forgot!


Step 5. When the omelet cooked enough so it is firm use a large spatula to fold the omelet in half.


Step 6. Cook the omelet until it is cooked all the way through. Flipping as little as possible so it doesn't fall apart (like mine did...)

Mine turned out to be like a scrambled pancake eggs...but I'm not giving up yet! I have 10 eggs left to figure it out.

My Failures:
1. Too big of a skillet so the eggs got too thin.
2. Too many veggies stuffed in the middle.
3. Flipped the omelet too often.

For the other half of my lunch I made spaghetti squash hash browns! I spiced them with a little cinnamon. They turned out pretty good! But now I really crave real hash browns...


I had a perfect little lunch with a side of loose leaf white sunshine tea to warm myself up. It was a little chilly today and my sweatshirt was not warm enough.


I topped my eggs with some salsa (I wanted ketchup but I got grossed out that the 2nd ingredient is high fructose corn syrup. One of these days I'm making my own ketchup, I have a recipe, but not the ambition!) For the hash browns a poured a tiny bit of maple syrup on top.


Sweet and spicy lunch! Yes I know I'm weird but somehow this lunch worked...not like I really had any other choice.

Tomorrow this week will be almost halfway over, yipeeee!

Do you believe in the wonders of the incredible edible egg?