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.