Breakfast egg sandwiches, only for lunch

 

In between the sky is falling posts and cat videos, my Instagram feed quickly seemed to default to offering me all sorts of variations on what people refer to as breakfast sandwiches. Something that you can prep a bunch of for the week and quickly zap in the microwave on the way out the door or at the office. 

Since I've never been a big breakfast eater except on Sundays when we treat it as more like a brunch, I never really saw the point. But the same premise definitely applies to a fast lunch fix, and I find I'm still in need of those, so I decided to test drive some of the more promising recipes out there from Instagram-land and beyond.

Freezer egg sandwiches

From Better Homes & Gardens, January 2020 issue

Ingredients

8 eggs, beaten
⅓ cup milk
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground pepper
6 English muffins, toasted
6 slices cooked bacon
6 slices Cheddar cheese
Fresh spinach leaves, optional

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 13- by 9-inch pan with tin foil. Spray with cooking spray. Combine eggs, milk, herbs, mustard and salt and pepper in a medium bowl. Pour into prepared pan and bake until set, 8 to 12 minutes. Slice into six pieces, then each piece in half. Stack two slices on one half of an English muffin, then top each with a slice of bacon and a slice of cheese. (If using spinach, you can tuck that in on top of the cheese before topping with remaining muffin half once you're ready to reheat them.) Bake until cheese melts.

To assemble ahead and reheat, wrap prepared sandwiches in plastic wrap after assembling them and before melting the cheese. Ostensibly you can freeze them, then remove the plastic wrap and reheat them in a paper towel in the microwave for a minute or two. 

Rating: Tasty. The herbs and mustard give the eggs some character. It's a bit like bacon cheeseburger topping meets egg sandwich. As for their instructions about reheating, well, I'm not a microwave fan in this case because of what it does to bread products, so I opt for reheating in a 350-degree oven until the cheese melts and sandwich is warmed through. I couldn't bring myself to try it from a frozen state, but I'm not imagining that being the work of a moment. It still counts as tasty fast food, at any rate.

Tomato, feta egg sandwiches

This is kind of like a bit of a caprese version of an egg sandwich, or at least one that incorporates flavors of peak summer with pesto and tomatoes. Adapted from the Instagram post of ellena_fit; go there if you want a video how-to. She cut her frittata into 4 pieces that were a bit deeper to make 4 sandwiches, but given my pan dimensions (8-by-10) it made sense to cut them into 6 because otherwise it would have hung over the edge quite a bit.

Ingredients
1 pint cherry tomatoes
1 teaspoon olive oil
8 eggs
A generous ½ cup of cottage cheese
2 tablespoons torn fresh basil leaves or 1 tablespoon oregano leaves
½ salt, plus more for sprinkling
½ cup crumbled feta
6 English muffins, split and toasted
6 slices of mozzarella
Pesto for spreading 

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place tomatoes in a mid-size baking dish. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with some salt. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until smooshable. Remove from oven. I chose to smoosh a few of the tomatoes and leave the rest whole.

Combine eggs, cottage cheese, herbs, ½ salt and a generous grind of pepper. Pour over tomatoes in pan. Sprinkle top with feta. Bake for 20 minutes until set. Let cool slightly.

Cut egg bake into 6 pieces. Spread toasted English muffins with pesto. Top muffin bottoms with a square of egg bake, a slice of mozzarella and the English muffin tops. Bake at 350 until cheese is melted and sandwich is heated through.

I opted to store the egg bake separately after serving us sandwiches for lunch because I was concerned that the amount of liquid in the pesto and tomatoes might result in a somewhat soggy sandwich if stored assembled, but I suppose that depends on the nature of your pesto.

Rating: The tomatoes and feta help bring more to the egg party, and pesto pairs nicely with the tomatoes. This sandwich had surprisingly good structural integrity, which can be an issue with this type of sandwich. With prebaked, precut egg bake squares it's no more trouble to make than any sandwich for lunch and it's another way to get a decent hot sandwich into the rotation on a cold day along with the soup du jour or semaine.

Bacon, egg and cheese bagels

Also from ellena_fit on Instagram.

Ingredients
4 bagels (the everything bagels worked well here)
8 eggs
½ cup cottage cheese
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
4 slices of cooked bacon, chopped
½ salt
4 slices smoked gouda or cheddar cheese
Sriracha mayo for spreading, or see Cane's dipping sauce recipe below

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-by-8 pan. Combine eggs, cottage cheese, chives, salt and a generous sprinkle of pepper in a bowl. Stir in bacon. Pour into prepared pan. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Cool slightly. Cut into 4 squares. Spread bagels with mayo or dip. Top each with a quarter of the egg bake and a slice of cheese. Return to oven and cook about 5 minutes until cheese melts.

Rating: This was my favorite one so far. The everything bagels really brought a little something to the party, as did that dip. (Oh, that dip. It should probably be illegal.) The bacon comes through and the smoked gouda is a nice touch. 

Cane's sauce

From Diane Morrisey's Instagram post, her version of a dipping sauce from the Raising Cane restaurant. The flavor deepens a bit if you refrigerate it for a time instead of trying to use it right away. She paired hers with homemade fish sticks, which seems like another really yummy usage, and she includes a recipe at that link.

1 cup mayonnaise
¼ cup ketchup
½ teaspoon cayenne powder
½ teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
2 teaspoons white vinegar
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

Combine all sauce ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Definitely a little kick to it, but not like get-me-water hot or anything.  The sauce is a definite keeper.

Did I need to try yet another version? Possibly not, but I did it anyway:

Spicy maple breakfast sandwiches 

Adapted from "good mood food” from Kale Me Maybe’s Carina Wolff. This one drew my interest because of the homemade sausage and I liked the idea of cutting out circles of egg bake to match the English muffin size. More on that later.

Ingredients

2 tablespoon olive oil, divided
2 pounds ground pork
⅓ cup maple syrup
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt, divided
1 tablespoon Calabrian chili
10 eggs
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 small onion, diced
⅓ cup milk
2 cups baby spinach leaves
10 English muffins, toasted
10 slices cheese of choice, I found pepper jack works well here

Method

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9-by-13 pan with parchment paper.

Heat olive oil in a large nonstick skillet. Combine pork, maple syrup, garlic powder, ¼ salt and Calabrian chili in a bowl. Form into 10 patties. Cook in oil until cooked through, flipping half way through. Remove from pan and set aside on paper towels.

If needed, add additional 1 tablespoon olive oil to the skillet; depending on the fat content of your meat you might have plenty in the pan. Cook onion and bell pepper and until softened. Remove from heat and cool slightly. Combine eggs, milk and remaining salt in a bowl. Stir in sauteed vegetables and spinach. Pour into pan and bake 20-25 minutes or until set. 

Cut egg bake into 10 pieces. Place egg bake on an English muffin. Top with a sausage and a slice of cheese and English muffin top. Bake until cheese melts. Alternatively, you can assemble them and then either bake or microwave them later. I did resort to the microwave once with these, because, well, I needed to clean my oven after some of the egg bake fell off a sandwich onto the oven floor. A minute on high wrapped in a paper towel will heat them through and melt the cheese, providing you don't mind rubbery cheese. 

Rating: The sausages definitely bring a lot to the party and have some merit on their own. That said, if you want to simplify the prep, if you've got a good breakfast sausage brand you like, you could cook that up instead. The frittata portion is fine, and adding the spinach to the bake itself is a good call, but it's really that sausage patty doing the work. The original recipe called for ground turkey, but I wound up with pork on hand instead, so it's possible that affected the patty size. As it was, those 10 patties were pretty much small breakfast sausage size, so I didn't see the point of having equally small rounds of egg bake when the muffins were significantly bigger diameter, so I skipped that bit. I tried this once following the egg bake instructions and wound up with nearly double the amount of egg bake to sausage ratio, so I took another whack at it to rationalize for my use case.

Takeaways

So am I enamored with the make-ahead breakfast sandwich genre? Well, not entirely. The part where I had some prepped sandwich portions to assemble quickly certainly had merit. After trying the microwave approach I definitely did not appreciate what it does to cheese, so I prefer the oven, but I get that if you were transporting them to an office setting they're better than nothing. 

The key: Something that makes them tasty, and generally that something is going to come in the form of meat. The one vegetarian option I tried compensated by bringing in more flavor to the egg bake portion, which helped, but the meat was definitely doing the heavy flavor lifting in these sandwiches. Everything-seasoned bagels are also a plus, and there's no reason to settle for bland cheese. 

That said, as much as I adore advance meal prep as a practice, it can't really hold a candle to my preferred breakfast sandwich of softly scrambled eggs piled on a brioche bun, topped with a slice of cooked bacon and a slice of smoked gouda cheese melted in the oven. Because good things often do reward spending just a bit more time, when you have it. 

Fixing the leftovers: What to do when a soup recipe doesn't cut it

It started life as pumpkin Parmesan soup.

Years ago I described my cooking style as relentless. I routinely tried more than 200 new recipes a year, sometimes five of them in a single meal (my definition of an extravaganza). Then I  drifted away from that into just sort of cooking, because when you've tried a few thousand recipes you have more or less figured out what works together and find yourself riffing on what's available that you feel like cooking. Plus I got super busy during the pandemic and some how never got back any semblance of work-life balance and a dependable, uninterrupted meal time.

Now I would describe my cooking style as diligent and strategic. My goal is more to consistently have something tasty to eat for every meal rather than trying to hit any specific target, and preferably to pull that off without burning myself out so I no longer think it's any fun to cook. The key to that is pacing, and leftovers play a crucial role.

Leftovers are a fantastic resource, providing you plan for them so you don't wind up eating the same thing multiple days in a row. That's where the freezer is your friend, and again, having a menu that schedules when you'll pull those out to thaw and recombine in new pairings. Unless I have company, I try to alternate major cooking days with days where I can coast on a previous day's labor for at least some portion of a meal.

So the Chicken Marbella leftovers and their wondrous sauce get paired with a new pan of baked brown and wild rice. The rice leftovers come out a few days later to pair with a roasted pork tenderloin and a piquant salad. The leftovers from a lunch of quiche and cream of spinach soup go into the freezer to each come out later to pair with something else. The dreamy caramelized onion dip leftover from entertaining gets tossed with pasta and some pancetta.

This is all dandy until you run into a dud. If you were disappointed in a recipe upon first serving it, aside from some soups, dressings and dips where flavors intensify with time, your enjoyment isn't likely to improve with reheating another day. 

I tried a recipe for Parmesan pumpkin soup from the "5 in 10 Cookbook," which features the gimmick of things you can make in 10 minutes with 5 ingredients. I thought the combo of a can of pumpkin puree, milk, broth, nutmeg and Parmesan cheese had some promise, and it was certainly fast. But it was simultaneously thin and stringy (from the cheese). The flavor was OK, but it seemed watered down, which might seem an odd thing to say about something that you eat with a spoon, but it just seemed to lack all body. 

I wasn't looking forward to another helping of that awaiting me. I contemplated augmenting it with a super thin white sauce, but that seemed like more effort than this slight recipe deserved. Then I realized its runniness could be my friend: I brought the leftovers to a boil and added a couple cups of radiatore pasta. There was just enough liquid to cook the pasta and wind up with a creamy sauce. So it went from runny soup to roni soup, and now I had a new entree for the leftover menu. 

It ended up life as a pasta sauce.

Bolognese Boursin soup

Converting soups to pasta can also work in reverse. I had leftover black bean Bolognese sauce on hand when I saw Amy Sheppard's Instagram post on making Bolognese sauce into soup. I had two cups of sauce, added a quart of broth, a round of Boursin and a handful of chopped parsley and it yielded a very nice, super fast soup. Definitely would repeat.

It started as pleasant pasta sauce and ended up as really nice soup. 

Along those same lines, the Star Tribune Taste section recently published a New York Times piece on three soups that repurpose the components of other dishes, including hummus, three-bean soup and pesto pasta. All look plausible.

Three newish tech features I really wish had happened sooner

Closing one of the tabs in split view is as simple as hitting the X next to it in the top tab window.

One of the tradeoffs of leaving work is no longer having a captive audience to share my delight in new tech features that crop up. Admittedly, I just as often had to share updates about the status of the latest bug, but I also got to spread good news when one of our software providers implemented a feature that could make our work lives better. Hence the reason you're seeing me dispense tech advice into the ether, because I just have to share it somewhere. 

Chrome's new split screen feature

Why, oh why, couldn't this feature have existed while I was working? So many programs I worked with were web-based, and having a super slick way to have two browser windows open side by side without any need to manually manipulate the window widths would have been a total game-changer. Just hold down the shift key before clicking on the second tab you want to add to a split view and then right-click to pick "Add to new split view." If you right-click on one of the combined tabs again under "arrange split view" you'll see options to rearrange the order of the tabs, close one of the open tabs or just restore them to separate tabs. (Or you can right-click on any tab to select that feature and then navigate to add a different tab in split view.) It may not have been available when I could have made the best use of it, but I've still made great use of this new capability, starting with having my Christmas shopping Google spreadsheet open next to a website for shopping. You can also drag and drop a window into a split view, which I learned from this post.

Windows 11 glyphs palette

Another feature I totally would have killed for at work, but one that's still super handy for things like inserting fractions in a blog post. I've used the Windows-V clipboard history feature to pin the fractions, but now can use Windows-V to get at an extensive Symbols panel and history as well as clipboard history, and it remembers your most recently inserted, so I'm finding that just as handy as the clipboard history since I don't need to cull the history to keep the fractions at the top.

Split view in Slack

Also just too late for most of my work life: Slack's new split view. It lets you see two conversations, two channels or two canvases side by side. Just click on a channel (or DM or canvas), Control-click on another channel and then right click on the first channel top pick open in split view. For canvases and lists, the option is under the three-dot menu at the upper right.

Windows+Shift+Minus for an em dash

This one isn't super new, apparently, but it was new to me when I ran across it. This was a development in keyboard shortcuts that I missed when it first happened, probably because I wasn't on Windows 11 at the time. Sure, some people think the em dash is like the mark of the AI devil, but you won't convince the style committee of that one. I worked in a program that had stomped all over any other existing em dash shortcut except for the Alt 0151, so that would have been super helpful. 

Three bean soups

As in three soups that have beans in them, not three-bean soup, which is its own thing. When you think of bean soup, if you're like me, the first thing that comes to mind is navy bean with ham or bacon. But given the variety of beans out there, there's a wide variation of bean soup recipes. In some cases they provide the solid heft, in others, pureed creaminess. Beans' basic blandness lends itself to be a carrier for whatever flavor profile you choose to apply.

The fact that these three recipes are all from Cooking Light is no coincidence. I'm finally starting to slowly go through old cooking magazines to clip likely suspects and recycle the rest. It was one of those tasks that fell into the category of oh, that seems like a good job to deal with when I'm retired. It didn't particularly strike me as odd to retain what are essentially monthly cookbooks, but if casual acquaintances came to the house, they'd invariably comment on the shelves of magazines lining the sunroom. Regular friends don't bat an eye at this apparent aberration, just file that under one of my basic personality quirks.

It's been an interesting exercise going through the back issues. Back then I was going through each issue and writing out on a sheet of scratch paper which recipes I wanted to try from each issue, noting the page number and which sort of meal they were suited for: weeknight supper, weekend lunch, etc. I'd put checkmarks and comments by any I tried and an arrow in front of ones I really wanted to try first. Comparing what I clipped out now to what I wanted to try then shows that tastes change. Recipes I hadn't even marked to try are now in my clipping pile, while some former must-tries didn't move the needle.

This first soup makes me feel vindicated in hanging on to what for others are ephemeral periodicals. 

Creamy truffle-scented white bean soup

From Cooking Light, sometime in the aughts.
Note: This recipe called for bottled minced roasted garlic. That might be a thing still and I just haven't looked for it. At any rate, I opted for roasted garlic from the grocery store deli. I also included a bit of the cooking liquid with the beans, since I used beans I'd cooked and stored in the freezer instead of canned. The recipe also calls for truffle oil, which is dandy, but feel free to try whatever flavored oil you want. My favorite with this is actually a lemon-infused oil.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup chopped onion
1 tablespoon minced roasted garlic
¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
1½ teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary leaves
2 cups broth
2 (19-ounce) cans cannellini beans, rinsed and drained (see note)
1 to 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon truffle oil or other flavored oil

Method

Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add onion and cook until tender. Add garlic, pepper and rosemary and cook until fragrant. Add broth and beans. Bring to a simmer and cook 20 minutes. Remove from heat and cool slightly. Stir in 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Puree soup. Check seasoning, adding more lemon juice if desired. Serve each of the 4 servings topped with a ¼ teaspoon of truffle oil for each serving.

Rating: Quite nice. Worth making even if you don't have any flavored oils, because the roasted garlic and rosemary do quite a nice job on their own, flavorwise. Decent texture, and really a nice fast fix. While the flavor may deepen a bit if made ahead, it's plenty tasty right away, so it's one you can whip up quickly anytime you have roasted garlic. Well, assuming you have a rosemary bush or the equivalent. Definitely going in the Keeper pile.

Black bean soup

From Cooking Light

Ingredients

1 tablespoon olive oil
½ cup diced celery
½ cup diced onion
¼ diced peppers (I used red and yellow since that's what I had)
3 tablespoons chopped carrot
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1½ teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon chili powder
¼ teaspoon black pepper
2 cups broth
1 cup water
3 cans (15-ounce) black beans, rinsed and drained
Sliced green onions for garnish

Method

Heat olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add celery, onion, bell pepper and carrots. Cook until tender. Add garlic, cumin, oregano, chili powder and pepper. Cook 3 minutes. Add broth, water and beans. Cook 20 minutes. Cool slightly and puree. Serve garnished with green onions.

Rating: Sludgy texture, but that's not entirely a bad thing in winter, and it delivers your basic chili spices. Improves with reheating, so it's one to make ahead for best flavor.

Leek and lima bean soup with bacon

From Cooking Light, June 2008 issue. Makes 8 skimpy servings.

Ingredients

3 bacon slices
2 cups chopped leeks, white and light-green parts only
4 cups lima beans, fresh or thawed if frozen
4 cups broth
1 cup water
2 tablespoons lemon juice
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ cup chopped green onions for garnish
¼ cup sour cream for garnish

Method

Cook bacon in a large, deep-sided pot until crisp. Remove from pan, drain and chop when cool.

In bacon drippings, cook leeks until tender over medium heat. Add beans, broth and water. Bring to a simmer and cook about 15 minutes. Cool mixture slightly and puree in a food processor or blender. Return to pan and season with lemon juice, salt and pepper. Serve garnished with chopped bacon, a tablespoon of sour cream and some green onions.

Rating: As much as I ordinarily like fresh lemon in pretty much anything, it strikes a really off note in this recipe, so if I ever make it again, I'm going to skip that. The bacon is doing all the flavor work here, and it comes in more fully upon reheating, so I'd suggest making it ahead for better flavor. Because bacon. But overall, this one falls into the category of worth trying, better than canned, but not really worth repeating when the world is filled with tastier soup recipes.