Breakfast On The Go

Breakfast is one of the toughest meals for me.  I’d rather stay curled up in my bed for an extra 20 minutes than get up and prepare a proper breakfast. My husband is even worse for this because he's usually up at the crack of dawn. In his zombie like state, he tends to forget to sit down and eat.    

So many people can probably relate. And what’s the solution? Grab something from a fast food joint to feed our self and our family. And while this is the easiest option, it’s certainly not the healthiest nor the cheapest.

Over the course of this blog you will hear a lot about my love of meal prep.  So today I thought I would start with my go to breakfast meal.  My husband simply would not survive without these! When buying ingredients on sale and putting in the time to cook ahead in bulk, you can actually save more money eating at home than hitting up a fast food place.   

Once every couple months, I spend a Saturday morning making breakfast sandwiches.  And I don’t mess around! Usually I make around 75 at a time.  Yes, I heard your gasp as you read that.  But I like to buy ingredients in bulk when things are on sale and I am lucky because I inherited a big old deep freezer.  So I watch for those sales and once I have all the ingredients, its go time! With careful planning, I can make these for less than a $1 per sandwich.

Assembly line in action 

The process is very simply – I use 4 ingredients:

English muffins

Eggs

Cheese

Protein (Bacon, sausage etc.)

  

After years of making these, I’ve gotten pretty efficient. If I am planning to meal prep on a Saturday, I will try to prep as much as I can the day before. So if I am using bacon, I will cook the bacon on Friday. Or I will get all my cheese cut/shredded and english muffins sliced.  This saves time on the next day, where I am basically just assembling the sandwiches.

I cook the eggs first with my non-stick frying pan. Slightly under cooking the eggs will prevent them from turning rubbery when they are reheated. So I always make sure to get them off the frying pan before they are fully cooked. 

Lay out half the english muffins and start topping them with cheese.  In my experience, if the cheese is shredded as opposed to sliced, I can stretch it a little further.  Next, I add the meat. I am lucky in that my husband is a hunter. We normally get some of our game meat made into sausage. This is his favourite meat for breakfast sandwiches and it's healthier than other processed meats.  However, not everyone has this option available, so I would stick with low sodium, low sugar ham or bacon. Just remember to check out the ingredients and nutritional label. You’d be surprised by the amount of added sugar in something like honey ham or honey cured bacon.  Of course you could always go for a vegetarian option and omit the meat entirely.

Lastly, add the egg. It’s literally that simple! I don’t butter the english muffins, as we really don’t notice the difference with or without it.  And this eliminates another step, so it’s really a win-win for me.

Allow time for them to completely cool before freezing. I use both plastic wrap and tin foil to wrap the sandwiches. It’s really your preference.

The finished product 

Tips

·      Reheat in a toaster or regular oven for best results.

·      Take your frozen sandwiches out the night before and let them defrost in the fridge.

·      If you forget to take out the night before, which is often the case of my husband, you can defrost in the microwave first before putting into toaster oven or oven.

·      Don’t microwave with tin foil on.

·      Buy your ingredients when they are on sale and freeze until your meal prep day.

·      Avoid toasting your english muffins during meal prep.  They will get too crispy when you reheat them at a later date, as you’d be toasting them twice.

·      Invite a friend over to help. While one person is cutting cheese, the other can be cutting slicing the English muffins and so on. 

·      Mix up your protein so you don’t get tired of eating the same thing over and over.

Hello! Let Me Introduce Myself..

For years I have struggled with various medical issues.  Issues that could never be explained by medical doctors or specialists.  At the age of 19, I started developing problems.  With the promise of resolution from my doctors, I continued to take various drugs and antibiotics well into my 20's.  At 30 years old, I am still struggling with the same issues, albeit another set of problems that I believe were brought on my the endless regime of drugs.

In 2016, I saw a naturopathic doctor and we really dove into the last ten years of my life.  I believe my body took a toll on account of all the medications I was taking.  But sitting in that office on my first visit to the naturopath, was the beginning of my journey into taking health into my own hands. It was the first time any medical professional questioned me about my diet.  I’ve always considered myself to be healthy, but it wasn’t until I was really honest and conscientious of the food I was eating, did I realize that maybe I wasn’t as healthy as I thought.

Through the course of the last 18 months, I’ve tried a couple restricted diets. Restricted in the sense that they didn’t involve foods I was used to eating or avoiding foods that were once my “go to”.   And while I can’t say I am 100% healed or symptom free of my health issues, I can say this.  Diet has made the biggest impact on my health in one year, than in 10 years of taking medication.  The food that I put in my body has the power to make me feel better or make me feel worse.

And so over the last 18 months, I have spent countless hours researching correlations between food and illness, understanding how to read labels and ingredient lists.  Finding recipes that are healthy, affordable and easy to make. It was never a chore do to this, in fact, it became my passion! 

Recently, I’ve been researching and reading about the rampant diseases that are affecting North Americans.  We are becoming fatter and sicker each year. Processed food surrounds us everywhere…  Forget the grocery or convenient stores.   You can’t even shop at a clothing store without being surrounded by chocolate or soda at the checkout lanes.  Think about it.  Can you picture the checkout lane at a Marshalls or JC Penny?   Do you see the Godiva chocolate at the Kohls cash registers? Look behind the cashier at Best Buy, do you see the gummy candies?  Sugar and chemical laced food is everywhere.

But the problem is.. It’s cheap. Fast food is cheap. Soda is cheap. Chips are cheap.  So if you are on a fixed income, how the hell do you even attempt to eat healthy?

In the last year, I moved to a very remote, northern area of Canada, where food cost 3x as much as it does in the south. So I can fully understand how difficult it is to eat well when you have to stretch your dollars.  And now my passion for healthy food has developed into a passion for finding AFFORDABLE healthy food choices.   So this blog will be dedicated to sharing exactly that.

It is my sincere hope that I can share what I have discovered with those of you who may also be in a fixed income situation and struggling with your health. May this blog help provide advice and ways to overcome these obstacles.  Everyone should be able to make healthy food choices.

Stay tuned. XoXo

Sara