Make ahead burritos

I have fond memories of early mornings in college (typically after an all-nighter) sitting in front of the 24-hour on-campus McDonald's, waiting for breakfast hours to start so I could get the ultimate breakfast food to satisfy my ravenous hunger. That food? The McSkillet Burrito - the perfect combination of eggs, sausage, potatoes, veggies, cheese, and salsa that still makes my mouth water. That love affair unfortunately ended after a few short years when I went to a local McDonald's one tragic morning and was told they had stopped serving it.

Although none will ever live up to the McSkillet, I do still enjoy breakfast burritos, so I was pleased that we included them in our make ahead breakfast items. There was a decent amount of work involved here with filling, wrapping, and plastic-wrapping 20 burritos, but once that was all done we had 20 low-prep breakfasts waiting for us in the freezer. These hold up really well in the freezer; I found them to be very tasty after a minute in the microwave and some salsa on top.

Egg and Black Bean Breakfast Burritos adapted from Hello Bee blog
Ingredients
2 tbsp butter
18 eggs, thoroughly beaten
2 tbsp cooking oil of choice
1 medium yellow onion, medium chop
1 large red bell pepper, stem and seeds removed, medium chop
2 1/2 c cooked black beans
1 tbsp ground cumin, divided use
3 c grated cheddar cheese
salt and pepper
15 tortillas, burrito-sized (at least 7 inches in diameter)

Directions
   Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Pour in the eggs and stir with a wooden spoon or spatula frequently until the eggs are softly cooked. Season generously with salt and pepper and pour onto a large plate or platter to cool to room temperature.
   Rinse or wash the skillet, coat the bottom with the oil, and return to medium heat. Add the onions and peppers and 1/2 tbsp cumin. Saute until the onions are translucent, season with salt and pepper, and pour onto a large plate or platter to cool to room temperature.
   In a medium bowl, stir together the black beans, remaining 1/2 tbsp cumin, and two big pinches of salt.
   Fill each burrito a layer of beans, vegetables, eggs, cheese, and cilantro. Try to fill the burrito about 1/3 the way full and to evenly distribute between all the tortillas – It doesn’t have to be perfect; just eyeball it. Wrap the burrito and place on a large baking sheet.
   Move the burritos to the freezer for at least an hour, then transfer to a freezer bag until ready to eat. Microwave until heated through.

I got to do the easy part

Burrito pyramid!

Guts picture - they don't all fall apart like this

Make ahead egg muffins

Today we're sharing our first recipe for make ahead breakfasts! They're egg muffins and one thing I really like about them is that they're completely customizable to whatever fillings you'd like. These are great to pop into the microwave for a quick breakfast. I'm excited to try these again with various fillings and maybe even with bread to make them like mini-casseroles.

For our first egg muffin adventure we used spinach, mushrooms, and sausage for the filling. Unfortunately I wouldn't recommend using spinach. The final product just has a bit too much water in it but the sausage and mushroom give it great flavor.

Egg Muffins adapted from The Lemon Bowl
   Yields 12 muffins
Ingredients
one dozen large eggs
½ cup skim milk
salt and pepper to taste
4 oz cheddar cheese, shredded
6 slices Candian bacon - diced*
¼ cup minced scallions*
   *We used sauteed spinach and mushrooms with browned sweet Italian sausage as the filling

Directions
   Pre-heat oven to 350F and spray a muffin pan with cooking spray or use a silicon pan.
   In a large bowl, whisk together eggs and milk until light and fluffy. Stir in the Canadian bacon, scallions and salt/pepper to taste. [We divided our filling into the muffin tins and then poured the egg mixture over.]
   Divide egg mixture evenly between 12 muffin tins (about ⅓ cup each) then sprinkle evenly with sharp cheddar.
   Bake until eggs are set, 25-30 minutes. Let cool slightly to ensure eggs are set before removing from pan to serve.
   Notes: If saving to eat later in the week, let cool completely before storing in an airtight container. To freeze, wrap each egg muffin individually in plastic wrap then store in a plastic bag. Reheat in the microwave for 60 seconds if refrigerated, 2-3 minutes if frozen.

Ready for the freezer

Happy wife, happy life ...
But don't forget happy husband too!
Breakfast makes Patrick a happy husband!

Patrick will be writing the next make ahead breakfast featured post so check back for it tomorrow!

Make Ahead introduction

We've got an exciting week of blog posts coming up. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday posts will feature our recent endeavors in the "make ahead" breakfast world. Make-ahead breakfasts seem to be all the rage these days - I see them featured on news media segments, Pinterest, Facebook, magazines, the paper, and so many other places!

I found a few recipes for us to try and then we set aside one weekend afternoon to prep them. We made breakfast burritos and egg muffins. Patrick wondered why we were making so many but I liked going ahead and getting them all done in one afternoon versus dedicating another afternoon to the second recipe. As mentioned earlier those recipes will go up on the blog in the next few days.

In this post I've got a few pictures to share from that day and then also a few blog links to past breakfast recipes we've shared to give you an idea of what our weekday breakfasts are like!

Browning sweet Italian sausage for egg muffins;
sauteed veggies on the back burner for burritos

Veggie prep - spinach for egg muffins, mushrooms to dice for egg muffins,
red pepper to dice for burritos, and a trash bowl (far right)

Final stages of cooking before assembly - Dupree was the sous chef!

So what are weekday breakfasts like at the Eibl House? They're fairly simple and some quicker than others! You know we like breakfast since we share so many weekend brunch recipes and the weekdays are no different (just not as fancy) because we know skipping breakfast isn't a good idea! Here's a look at what we typically have at our disposal on a weekday morning:

Pantry items - English muffins or bread for toast, dry cereal

Smoothie items - Frozen fruit, yogurt, protein powder, and milk

Other items - Eggs, frozen muffins

Patrick loves English muffins or toast and it eats that quite a bit. Dry cereal is a distance second choice for him but I like it. We've been doing smoothies quite a bit more recently; sometimes as much as twice as week. [Here's our post on smoothie prep] We are enjoying the egg muffins and breakfast burritos but they take a bit more time to get warm since they're frozen (unless we put one in the fridge the day before). Another breakfast item we've been enjoying are overnight oats; these are by far the quickest breakfast option. We soak old-fashioned oats in milk and yogurt overnight and they're ready to go in the morning - a post on overnight oats will be featured on Friday!

And finally one other breakfast item at our disposal are frozen muffins. Whenever I make muffins these days I make the full recipe instead of halving it so that we can freeze leftovers. Once the muffins have cooled I wrap individual muffins in plastic wrap, label them, and put them in the freezer; I do this with about half the batch and leave the rest for us to eat that week. 

Here are muffins we've featured before that made it into the freezer: Zucchini chocolate chip muffins, Healthier banana muffins, Apple muffins, Blueberry muffins, Pumpkin muffins, and finally Sweet potato muffins.

What are some of your breakfast tricks? Have you tried any of the "make ahead" recipes??

First Meals in New House! Freezer Meals

I've got some fun pics to share with you today! They're back from mid-June when we were moving into the house and some of our first meals. After many moves (almost yearly since college) I felt like everything came together that I'd learned from those past moves and this was a fairly seamless move. Many thanks to my mom for coming up the week after everything was out of the old house and helping us give it a thorough cleaning - due to all of our efforts we received our full security deposit back! I feel like this rarely happens ... there's always that random $50 stove-cleaning fee that they seem to always think is necessary to take out. The one thing I had blocked out from previous moves was how long it took to unpack! Felt like that took quite awhile.

One thing that is most important to me during a move is making sure we can stay somewhat normal in our eating habits. My body does not like eating out for a week straight - there are the days leading up to the move because everything is packed away and then the days afterwards when you're getting the kitchen set up. I did my best to avoid this scenario by prepping some freezer meals. All of my freezer meals can be found on this pdf document. What a life saver these were! I made Hungry Jack casserole, meatballs and sauce, Baked Cheesy Chicken Penne, and breakfast English muffins. More special thanks to my mom who helped assemble these things. And - exciting news here, folks - we have a garage freezer! I whipped up all these freezer meals at our old house before move and then drove them over to the new house.

So we moved and things looked like this:

Fortunately we were able to set up a table in our "formal" dining room and we made a big effort to always keep this table clean so that we could have somewhere to sit and eat because it took awhile to figure out where all that stuff should go.

One of our very first meals in the house was Baked Cheesy Chicken Penne! And it was delicious. It has sun-dried tomatoes in it. We learned that we needed to allow ample time for the freezer meal to either thaw or cook for extra time. Sometimes we would be super hungry and think we could just put one in the toaster oven and eat in a short amount of time ... boy was that a miscalculation on our part!

Our move day was the weekend after my parent's anniversary. They celebrated it in Asheville and stopped by to visit on their way home to check out the new place. They brought us some fancy beer from Biltmore - Cedric's Pale Ale - which we enjoyed with our freezer meal after a hard day of unpacking.

Then after we were a bit more "settled" and felt like we could use some pots and pans we were able to make this pasta with salad. This is actually a frozen pasta saute from Trader Joe's that I purchased prior to move-in and stashed in the freezer for a quick meal. Even though pots and pans were in their places at this point we were still worn out from our hard work and didn't quite have the energy to also prep a recipe. This was a great mid-way transition meal to taking over our kitchen.

I know I just said that we kept the dining room table clean so we could eat on it but we made this on a Monday night and Bachelor was on so eating on the coffee table was a splurge!

Do you have any tips and tricks for making moving easier?