Eggsperimenting (lame, I know)

I love those egg bake muffins, but my perfectionism messes with me when I'm trying to proportion the eggs into the cups. So this week I decided to take a different approach. I skipped the cream and just cracked an egg into each cup, then mixed it into the other ingredients with a spatula.

I still began with some bacon, mushrooms, and a bag of mixed vegetables. After I had them all mixed up I divided them into the cups as evenly as possible.

Then I cracked an egg into each cup. Two pans use up an even dozen eggs nicely!

The spatula (on the left) is an old Pampered Chef product that I bought from my sister-in-law many years ago. It was the perfect size and shape for my over-sized muffin tins. I mashed away until everything was mixed up in each cup. A bit time-consuming, but still less tedious than trying to evenly distribute mix from a bowl.

And of course we still need lots of cheese! I'm from Wisconsin after all.

Works of art!

Okay, I'm going to be honest. I made these a couple of weeks ago and I've been too busy to post the photos. I think I cooked these for half an hour at 350, but I don't actually remember. I have more detailed examples on previous posts. I just wanted to show an alternative way of mixing these muffins up. Enjoy!

A sour note

Just to be different, I'm going to write this post in reverse. I usually take these pictures with my phone, and my phone just bricked. I am getting a new one from Google right away (shipping NDA) but I was afraid I had lost my photos. Yeah for auto-backup! 

Look at this beautiful golden brown egg bake! Yum! This guy cooked for just over 1/2 an hour at 350 F.  There is about a cup of shredded cheddar on top.

This weekend I had to buy most of the ingredients because I didn't have much in my fridge. So I got a bag of spinach, some bacon, and some pre-sliced mushrooms, as well as a small container of sour cream. After frying up the bacon and mushrooms with some minced (dehydrated) onions and crushed garlic, I added them to the pan on top of the spinach, and then seasoned them with a heavy dusting of cayenne, as well as a little salt and a good amount of black pepper.

18 eggs were scrambled with an 8 oz container of sour cream, as well as the left over liquid from frying the bacon and mushrooms. The sour cream takes a little more effort to mix in, but the whisk makes short work of that.

I started with a few left over sweet potatoes which I diced up and threw back into the dirty pan. I love using the caramelized butter left over from baking sweet potatoes. It adds more flavor to the eggs.

Here is the experimental ingredient of the week. On New Years Day I was at my sister's house, and she had made an egg bake. It was delicious! She used our mother's recipe which includes sour cream and lots of butter. So I thought it would be fun to use the sour cream instead of my usual heavy whipping cream. All in all I can't taste much difference, so maybe I just need more sour cream. Next week I might go for the 16 oz tub instead!

When I went to the store to get bacon, I wanted to get some good stuff, not just the regular brands. I saw a big package of bacon ends and pieces that looked like a good deal. Unfortunately I failed to notice that it could be any one of three random flavors. This package ended up being maple flavored. Oh well, I chopped it up and it fried like any other bacon. But my home smells like maple flavoring, and I'm getting a little tired of having that flavor on my eggs every morning. I still have 2/3 of the bacon left, so I guess I'd better get used to it! 

Overall this is basically the same as last week except for the different cream. The maple flavor sort of overwhelms everything else, so that might also be why I am not tasting the sour cream. Oh well, it's fun to try something different every time or it can get quite monotonous!

Using leftovers from dinner

This year I spent Christmas Day with my sister and her family. I made sweet potatoes to bring to dinner. So of course I saved the pan and a couple of taters to make an egg bake.

I always say I hate to waste flavor, and the carmelized butter at the bottom of this pan is pure flavor. So I left it dirty and just added my egg bake to it. For these sweet potatoes, I cut the tips off because they are hard to chew, but then diced the rest up.

I tried to distribute them evenly, but they are mushy so it's difficult to move the pieces around.

This is as much spinach as I could cram into the pan. I usually just go by feel to tell how evenly it's spread. This time I noticed one of the corners dipping down later on, so it must have had less spinach. But it's not a big deal. It doesn't have to be perfect.

I love the bacon they sell at Aldi. So delicious!

And I love slicing mushrooms to fry in the bacon fat.

I also chopped up an onion and fried it with the bacon. Very tasty.

Just to try something different, I added the seasoning to the pan. I'm out of garlic, so this week it's just cayenne, salt, and black pepper.

This is about half a bag of cheese, so one cup, sprinkled on top.

There was some liquid left in the frying pan, so I mixed it into the cream before adding the eggs. I used 18 eggs this week.

The finished product. It turned out really well. In the past I have made the mistake of using too many sweet potatoes. This time it was perfect because they didn't overwhelm the dish.