Lekker: Bacon Wrapped Baked Eggs

This post is about bacon. That alone should be enough to grab your attention. How about breakfast for dinner? I'm a big fan of that, since my love for eggs is WELL documented, and usually by the time I am home and have had a glass of wine, breakfast is about as complicated as it gets around here! This little dish takes about 30 minutes to whip up start to finish and is fancy enough to do for a Sunday brunch, for a winkwinknudgenudge morning after, or to make yourself feel fancy for dinner. Bottom line: this stuff is the SHIT.

Give it a spin.

Serve with a fresh green salad for lunch, steamed/grilled/sauteed asparagus and feta for dinner, or with some cut fruit and a tall glass of OJ (read: mimosa) for breakfast.

Because bacon.

Bacon Wrapped Baked Eggs
makes 1 serving

What You Need
serves 1; scale up as needed, depending on how many guests you have the morning after--I'm not judging
2 slices bread OR a bit of Pillsbury croissant or biscuit dough (in the pop-open tins that are like jack-in-the-boxes for adults, that is to say, awful)
2 eggs
4 slices of bacon (thick cut, applewood smoked, whatever you like)
Optional: shredded cheddar cheese (yes), sliced scallions or green spring onions (yes), salt and pepper (of course) and/or anything else you like with your eggs.

What You Do
1. Preheat your oven to 375 and grease a muffin tin well. If you're using slices of bread, use a highball glass to stamp out two circles of bread, smooshing them down into the bottom and sides of the muffin tin. You'll want to spray the bread with whatever Pam or melted butter or whatever you used to grease the pan, too. If you're using the croissant dough, just unroll it and layer it on the bottom and sides of the muffin tin. That's stuff got enough grease on its own to be a musical.

 See?

2. Cook the bacon in the microwave until it's pliable but not cooked. Usually this takes only about a minute for me. Wrap two pieces in a "halo" of sorts above the bread, overlapping each other a bit.

3. You can add cheese/onions/herbs to the bottom and then pile the egg on top, or vice versa. Usually I do a bit of both. So, I drop a wee bit of sliced onions and shredded cheese on top of the bread, and crack an egg into that lovely little well you've made. Then top with more cheese, onions, salt and pepper, because you worked hard today putting up with all those idiots out there and you deserve it.

 Voila!

4. YOU'RE DONE. Pop into the oven for about 16 minutes and enjoy a whiskey drink, then remove. Depending on how hot your oven gets you might want to start checking at 14 minutes; take it out when the whites are solid and cooked through. Let it cool for about 3 minutes (this gives the bread and egg time to release itself from the sides of the muffin tin) and run a knife around the edges, popping out onto a warm plate. Serve with your vegetable of choice (to counteract all that whiskey and bacon, of course) and bask in the praise of whomever you've decided to bless with this.

Lekker: Hollandaise Sauce

It's Saturday morning, a beautiful, crisp, fall Saturday morning and I am NOT hungover today! Woo hoo! That means I could get up and mosey on down to the kitchen to whip up this breakfast of Eggs Florentine, giving me the opportunity to make some Hollandaise sauce from scratch.

We've already established how nuts I am for good sauces. They should be their own food group, and when you combine my favourite meal (breakfast) with my favourite thing (sauce---a BUTTER SAUCE) and my favourite drink (boozy breakfast drinks of course) you KNOW it's gonna be a great day. :)

Hollandaise is a very basic egg yolk and butter sauce, rich and thick and utterly creamy and decadent. You've had it on Eggs Benedict before, though it's delicious over vegetables like grilled asparagus (green, or if you want to be traditionally German, white) as well. Don't be intimidated if you've never made it before, just work slowly and one step at a time to avoid making the sauce "break" or letting the yolks scramble. I promise, it's worth the effort and truly only takes 10-15 minutes to whip up.

Thank god for weekends.

Hollandaise Sauce 
yields about 1 cup

What You Need
4 egg yolks
1 tablespoon lemon juice, fresh squeezed if you have it but I just used bottled
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
1/2 teaspoon salt, or more to taste
pinch of cayenne or chili powder

You'll need to create a "double-boiler" set up to make this sauce. The simplest method is to find a stainless steel bowl that will fit on top of a smaller pot so that water can steam underneath it without touching the bottom of the upper bowl. 

What You Do
1. Set a small pot of water on the stove and bring it to a gentle simmer. In a medium sized stainless steel bowl, whisk the egg yolks and lemon juice together until the mixture is thick and light yellow in color. Meanwhile, melt the butter in the microwave in a separate dish.

2. Place the mixing bowl on top of the pot of simmering water, whisking constantly. Drizzle the butter into the bowl in a thin stream until fully incorporated. The sauce will get thinner at this stage and you will need to make sure you are whisking CONSTANTLY (and keeping the water in the pot at a bare simmer) to avoid letting the yolks scramble. Keep whisking until the sauce thickens, only about a minute or two.

3. Remove from the heat and add the salt and cayenne pepper. Now, at this stage I found that it had gotten too thick for my liking, so I whisked in 1/2 tablespoon of warm water to thin it out.

I had this drizzled over two poached eggs, sitting on top of two pieces of wheat toast and some wilted baby spinach. It was, in a word, divine.

Lekker: Clean Eating Egg Muffins

Mornings suck. Well, most mornings. Weekend mornings are the best because they usually involve sleeping in late, cuddling up next to someone special, mimosas, and of course, bacon. However, something went wrong with the universe and time and space and we only have two weekend mornings and five weekday mornings per week, which is some crazy bullsh*t if you ask me, but there you have it. Weekday mornings are their own special kind of hell if you're not a peppy morning person and, like me, have the bar set so low that if you can make it out the door to work with coffee in hand and your dress on the right way out you're already impressed with yourself.

So, breakfast. Ain't nobody got time for that during the week.

But we know it's important! While coffee *is* an appetite suppressant, it's not enough to keep me from turning into a real Moody Judy until I can finally eat lunch at noon. And THEN, that's usually not enough to hold me over until 6:00 PM when I get home and can ravenously destroy something before I go to the gym. It's a terrible system and I would be grouchy in the mornings when my blood sugar bottomed out, and then feel guilty and stupid later on in the afternoon because I couldn't stop myself from snacking around 3:00 PM. These are all poor decisions when you're trying to eat right and make intelligent choices so you can binge guilt-free on the weekends.

I was looking for a reasonable solution that would not require any effort on my part in the morning and stumbled across this recipe on Pinterest. I gave it a whirl several weeks ago and have been hooked since. You can go to the original source recipe, of course, but here is my version that's pretty short, sweet & simple. I whip these up on a Sunday evening and it takes me about 15 minutes of prep plus the baking and cooling time. Even you can do this. One episode of New Girl and they're basically done.

Clean Eating Egg Muffins
makes 12 muffins, a dozen eggs = a dozen muffins so scale up or down however you want

What You Need
1 dozen eggs (I like organic eggs because I think regular eggs taste like weak nothing and will probably kill you, but you do you)
Veggies of your choice, finely diced (see list of suggestions below)
Salt/seasoning of your choice & pepper (I like Lawry's seasoning salt)

Optional: shredded cheese and/or diced meat. Obviously this adds more calories to it. I've never added meat because I try to eat a more vegetable heavy diet when possible, and if I'm going to eat meat it's going to be a delicious grilled steak or perfect French cut pork chops, not some sad soggy breakfast sausage. I used cheddar cheese the first time I made these, omitted it the second time and didn't miss it. Up to you, homie.

What You Do
1. Heat your oven to 375. Grease a muffin tin REALLY WELL with whatever spray you have around. You've already finely diced up your vegetables into little pieces, so throw those into the muffin tin all evenly.

2. Crack a dozen eggs into a bowl, add salt and pepper and whatever seasonings you like and beat it with a wire whisk like it stole from you.There should be all sorts of little frothy air bubbles in it. Gently pour that on top of your veggies; it'll soak in around all the spaces between the veggies nicely.

3. Bake at 375 for 15-20 minutes--for me, it's 16 minutes on the dot every time. They will be huge and probably will have run over the muffin pan a bit; chill out, it's not the end of the world. They're going to collapse as soon as you take them out of the oven. Let them cool for 5 minutes, then run a knife around the edges and pop them out onto a baking rack until they've cooled completely. Pack them up into a giant Ziloc bag and toss in your fridge. Grab two each morning, heat in the microwave for 1 minute and voila, low-cal, protein-packed breakfast goodness is served. I nosh on mine around 10 AM with a small glass of Naked's "Green Machine" juice smoothie and it keeps me full and focused until 2 PM.

Veggie Suggestions: My go-to is baby spinach, tomato, red bell pepper and scallions. Once I made a "Sante Fe" type version with red bell pepper, green bell pepper, lots of onion, cilantro and sriracha beaten into the eggs. That was the bomb dot com. Next week I plan to do a mushroom and broccoli run. Zucchini and cucumber have a lot of water in them so don't use those because it'll make the muffins all mushy. Just use your judgement; whatever you'd throw into an omelette you can throw in here.

I'm not a genius, I don't know what the nutritional content of these actually are but a whole organic egg has about 70-80 calories each, and if you keep out the cheese and meat this is ONLY GOOD THINGS that you can stuff your face with and feel awesome about doing it.

UPDATE 09.03.13: I just did a batch with diced baby bella mushrooms, kale and turkey pepperoni since that's what I had in the fridge for this week, and they are AWESOME! The turkey pepperoni only has 70 calories per 15 slices so I used 10 and diced it up finely. It adds a nice kick and richness and some salt too. I'm going to investigate using cupcake liners next time, though, because cleaning the pan every week is a real bitch of a task.

UPDATE 09.16.13: I did a broccoli, mushroom and pepperoni mix this weekend and tried to use cupcake liners. DO NOT DO THIS. The cupcake liners did jack nothing and got all soggy in the fridge and the egg muffin still stuck to that, so...that was a completely pointless endeavor. I'm going to try swinging by Target next pay day for a silicone muffin tin to see if that might be the final solution. (I can't say I cared for the broccoli in the muffins, either, and won't be doing that again.)

UPDATE 10.09.13: My dear friend Momma Bird told me that I should use the foil cupcake liners and remove the waxpaper liner that usually comes on the inside of those. GENIUS! Use the foil liners and spray those with Pam, and the muffins pop out of those much easier and cook more evenly too. 

I probably over-filled them a bit here, but to me it's NBD. You can fill them up to only 3/4 of the way if you want more "pristine" muffins. 

Eat with a glass of this for maximum superhero capabilities. Until lunch, anyway. (DON'T EVEN TELL ME YOU DON'T LIKE IT BECAUSE IT'S GREEN. Stop it with that nonsense, you haven't even tried it yet. It's delicious.)