Homemade Breakfast Bowl

I made my first ever breakfast bowl yesterday morning. I've never had one anywhere, but I know you can buy them in the grocery stores in the frozen food section (usually Jimmy Dean brand). I wasn't actually planning on having a "breakfast bowl" for breakfast, but that's how it turned out. And, I enjoyed it!

First, I took a handful of fresh ground beef that I had bought at our small grocer in town (with a real butcher!) and browned that while adding salt and pepper. There was very little grease, so when I took the meat out, I added some olive oil to the pan and put in some diced potato hash browns to cook up. When they were done, I added the meat back to the pan intending to make sure it was still hot. Meanwhile, I had scrambled a couple eggs in preparation of cooking them separately.

While the meat and potatoes were reheating in the pan, I decided that I would just pour the eggs over them and cook everything together. That's what I did. I then put everything into a bowl I had waiting and sprinkled the top with a handful of shredded cheddar while, at the same time, heated up a couple of tortillas over the open flame on the stove. I set the tortillas on top of the bowl and got the salsa out. When I took off the tortillas, the cheese had melted from the heat of the tortillas and the potato/meat/egg mixture. I then put some salsa on top of all of it and enjoyed my breakfast!


Photo credit - Some rights reserved by theimpulsivebuy (www.flickr.com/photos/theimpulsivebuy/) An amazingly raunchy and negative review of the Jimmy Dean Breakfast Bowl linked on this photo. But, I didn't think to write about my bowl until after I'd eaten it. So, this particular photo does closely resemble my breakfast except I had ground beef instead of bacon and my potatoes were more finely diced.

Breakfast is Better When Someone Else Makes It!

Scrapple with Eggs and Toast

TG asked me this morning what it is about breakfast that makes me enjoy it so much to want to go out to eat it. Frankly, I enjoy eating breakfast any time of the day, but when I'm in the mood for a full breakfast in the morning and I'm out, I would much rather stop to eat than make it at home. I'm just not ready to be standing at the stove cooking first thing in the morning. Even when I was growing up, when we had a full breakfast, it was later in the morning that we had it. Early morning was more toast and coffee. When I made big breakfasts for my kids when they were little, it was on weekends when I could make more at a later time. During school days, they had cereal and juice or grilled cheese or PBJ sandwiches before heading off to school. So, when I took TG to the airport this morning, I was looking forward to stopping and getting something to eat.

I've eaten breakfast at the Metro Diner two days in a row now. Yesterday, TG and I stopped for breakfast before doing some errands for him before he left today for Arizona to see a friend. I had scrambled eggs with scrapple and wheat toast and a side of grits

Buttered Grits

instead of potatoes. TG had Eggs Benedict with a side of scrapple. We shared a side of bacon.

Today, after dropping TG off at the airport, I stopped again at the Metro mainly because I wasn't able to find my glasses and thought I'd left them there yesterday morning. I didn't, but I still stayed for breakfast. Today I had a bowl of dried beef gravy with grits instead of potatoes and wheat toast. Of course, coffee is a given on both

Crispy Bacon

days. I had originally planned to stop at Wawa and get a bowl of eggs or a sausage egg and cheese croissant with coffee. 

I'll eat the gravy over toast, but I prefer it over potatoes. But, in recent years, potatoes haven't been kind to me, so I've been avoiding them when the option is available. So, when I have the option of grits instead, I take it. I eat grits like I eat other hot cereals. I put butter on it and I add a little sugar. Not a huge amount since I'm diabetic, but enough to keep the grits from being too bland. I've tried it with artificial sweetener, but it's not the same.

Chipped Beef on Toast

What's your favorite breakfast? Do you like any of these things?

Dave Milsom, Flickr - scrapple
Paul McRae, Flickr - grits
Wikimedia Commons - chipped beef
Wikimedia Commons - bacon

Scrapple and Eggs and Whole Grain Toast! Pure Deliciousness!

Whole grain toast, scrambled eggs and pan-fried scrapple

Before I go much further, let me explain scrapple. According to Google, it is a noun. It consists of scraps of pork or other meat stewed with cornmeal and shaped into loaves for slicing and frying. From Dictionary.com we find: cornmeal mush mixed with pork scraps, seasoned with onions, spices, herbs, etc., and shaped into loaves and sliced for frying. But, according to me, it is just plain delicious!!

Basically, scrapple originated with the Pennsylvania Dutch as a way to use up all the meat from a slaughtered hog that wasn't being used some other way. It would all be cooked down with spices (mostly sage, thyme and pepper) and cornmeal into a mush. That would be poured into pans and allowed to cool. Once cooled, it would be cut into blocks which were then sliced and pan fried for breakfast (usually). I grew up on it and I love it. 

The eggs are simply eggs. The only way I will eat them is scrambled or some derivative of scrambled (omelets, quiches, etc). I mix mine with milk so that their texture is somewhat custard-y.

The toast is a recent purchase from my first ever visit to a Trader Joe's supermarket. I've heard so much about them, but I am never close to one. So, when my friend decided to stop there to look for a particular item, I went in, too, since I knew I needed bread and milk. I found this wonderful loaf of sliced artisan bread just chock full of whole grains. It has made the most wonderful toast!! I eat it toasted with chunky peanut butter or just buttered as I did with this meal. It is just so good, I want to go back and get more!!

Now, back to scrapple, according to Wikipedia, scrapple bears similarities to white pudding and hog's pudding of England. Now I know I won't eat black pudding (blood pudding) because they do incorporate the blood into it, but if I'm ever in the UK again, I might just try either of those other two just to see how they compare.

Originally published on my Bubblews account.

Peppers, Onions and Eggs for Dinner

Veggies atop the chicken at the restaurant.

Over this past weekend, my friend Tom and I went to a local Mexican restaurant we hadn't been to in a while. I decided to try something I'd never tried before and went with the Pollo Salvadoreno - Grilled Chicken El Salvador style. I had imagined that the veggies would be cooked down more than they were, but they were still mostly crispy. If you've ever had fajitas, you know what they looked like, but they were cooked LESS than that. I was disappointed, but still ate the chicken, which was delicious. The veggies smelled fantastic, so I brought them home along with the leftover rice, beans, chips and salsa. 

I decided on Thursday that I was going to use those peppers and onions. Perfectly good food that deserved being eaten, even if it was in a different way than originally served. But, I didn't want to thaw out any meat. I wanted something fast and easy. 

Peppers and eggs are very popular in our area, especially where there are a lot of Italians. I'm sorry to say that I refused to ever try them until after my mother passed away five years ago. She would have been thrilled to see me eat them. I discovered I liked them quite a bit. Yes, these peppers came with onions, too, but they were sweet onions, which I'll eat cooked. I don't like onions that have a sharp bite to them and I'll never ever eat an onion raw. So, I tossed the

Shortly after pouring the eggs in the pan.

Salvadoreno vegetables in the pan with some olive oil and began to pan grill them to where I like eating them. While that was happening, I got out seven eggs and put them in a bowl with some milk and scrambled them. 

Once the veggies were cooked (some might call these burnt - I prefer "blackened"), I poured the scrambled eggs over them and began cooking everything together. I took two pictures of the eggs - one while they were setting up and one after I'd stirred them and they were done. There is also a photo from the restaurant showing the veggies as they were before I decided to cook them again. 

After stirring with a wooden spoon until they were just set.

Add two slices of some fantastic artisan whole grain bread from Trader Joe's, toasted and buttered, and I can't deny that I had a pleasurable meal. 

Have you ever brought leftovers home and turned them into something else?

Originally published to my Bubblews account.

Ham and Eggs (and Pintos, too)

Top to bottom: pan fried ham, scrambled eggs, pinto beans.

Holy cow, I've enjoyed my meals since cooking that ham and those beans. But, I think my favorite of all was when I used the ham for breakfast and fried it nice and brown along with eggs nicely scrambled and some of those wonderful pinto beans.

I know this photo isn't the prettiest. Our plates aren't made to display our meals and there was more juice in the beans than I'd meant there to be, so what you see surrounding the eggs is that juice that ran across the plate. (My daughter bought all of our plates at Dollar Tree because she liked the colors and how sturdy they are. My set of white plates is unused in storage.)

Well, I enjoyed this breakfast so much that I just had it again for supper (or dinner, depending on where you live). The slices of ham were nicely crisped, the eggs had picked up the ham drippings (this time I cooked them AFTER the ham) and the beans were as good as they were the first time. I didn't even have bread or a tortilla with this. It was satisfying just as it was.

I wish my daughter would eat ham (not counting deli ham which she will eat). I could have it more often. But, by the same token, I can have more of it since she doesn't like it. 

Now, I'm wondering, and maybe someone reading this could advise me, about making ham gravy. I'm not talking about redeye gravy or the milk gravy you make from the ham drippings (love it!!), but ham gravy in the sense of sausage gravy or dried beef gravy. These slices are too thick to really do it justice like dried beef could, but there's so much flavor in this ham, I was wondering if I could grind some of the ham up (one time through the grinder) and then sizzle the ground ham until it begins to get color before adding my fat, flour and milk. Do you think that would work? I'm really craving a milk gravy with that kind of salty kick that sausage or dried beef would give it. I'll take any suggestions!

Oh, and even after eating beans for four meals, I still had enough left to freeze two pints of them. Well, they're not frozen yet, but they will be once the containers cool off. Good for making chili or burritos.

Plastic Cheese and Eggs

I asked someone to pick me up some cheese at Dollar Tree a while back because I only had a few dollars and I wanted to stretch it. I know that sometimes they have little blocks of cheese and that was all I needed because I was planning to shred it for a recipe.

Well, when they brought the items back, I didn't get two blocks of cheese; I got two packs of cheese food slices, the kind wrapped in cellophane. Not always top quality, but generally edible. Still, they weren't what I wanted because they don't melt all that well, these Dollar Tree slices. But, I thanked my friend and put them in the fridge.

Well, we're pretty much out of cheese except I had a very few slices of white American and these two packs of "cheese" food. I split the white American to make two grilled cheese sandwiches with the white cheese surrounding the yellow "cheese" between the two pieces of bread. They turned out decent, but I had a piece of cheese that broke off left over, so I tossed it into the pan by itself to melt it into a crispy something to go with the sandwiches.

Except.......

That damned piece of "cheese" refused to melt. Literally REFUSED to melt! It bounced and skipped and sizzled, looked like it was blistering, but when I put the spatula under it, it didn't stick at all to the pan. When I flipped it over, it was hardly even discolored. A few attempts to scorch in some spots, but no melting, no change in shape whatsoever. It looked and felt like plastic. Both sides were nice and hot, but no discernible change in structure like real cheese should have had (or other cheese "foods" I've had, for that matter). It stayed entirely intact as it had gone into the pan. And, the pan was hot because it had just cooked two sandwiches and the fire was still on.

So.....THAT was the "cheese" I had in my scrambled eggs, broken up into little pieces to simulate melted cheese within the eggs, and topped with salsa. I've had worse.

E is for Eggs

My daughter and I went to Golden Corral on Saturday for their breakfast buffet. I've been wanting to go for a while and we were right behind them at America's Best Eyewear for Deb's appointment. 

Scrambled Eggs

The only way I will eat eggs is scrambled (I count quiche as a type of scrambled), but I especially love how eggs taste when they're made in mass quantities like they are at Golden Corral and other breakfast buffets. I don't know what it is about them - maybe because they cook them moist to allow them to sit on the buffet longer. I don't like dried out eggs or even ones that are overly browned. But, when they're shiny and wet (not raw), I'm totally all about them. 

SOS - I can eat it like this, too.

They also had cream dried beef (SOS) on the buffet table. I just love that stuff! They also had hash browns, so that's what I put my gravy on. I'll eat it on toast, but I'd rather have it on potatoes. And, Golden Corral has Texas toast, which isn't my favorite. But, their biscuits were surprisingly good - tender and flaky. Oh, and a tray stacked full of super crispy bacon. Wow, we'd been craving bacon all week. Deb wants to participate in a bacon eating contest if she can find one. We both enjoyed bacon. And, they had grits! Happy days!!

Fried eggs - a lot like home.

My kids like fried eggs. They got that from their dad because I won't touch the things. I know how to cook them, but I will never eat them. Deb likes hers over medium, which in our area means the whites are set, but the yolks are mostly runny. When she's in Utah, she orders over easy, which means she'll get them the same way. Funny how cooking terms mean different things regionally.


But, I do like scrambled eggs - I just wish I could make them at home like those in the steam pan at Golden Corral. Then I could make myself some egg and cheese breakfast sandwiches on toast. (Oops - I think I'm getting hungry. I'd better go to sleep before I decide to cook.)

The Process of Poaching

I thought it would be wise to finally approach the letter of the day (yesterday, actually) without delay, especially since my sanity may be in question after having produced THREE “R” posts after forgetting twice that I’d already posted one. *sigh*

The topic is going to be about the process of poaching. Poaching consists of cooking “delicate” foods in water with the addition of an acid and, often, aromatics. It’s interesting because until I began looking at this, I thought the only thing poached was an egg…an egg I won’t even eat on Eggs Benedict because I just don’t like eggs cooked any way but scrambled. So, I’m learning something, too.

So-called delicate foods are foods such as eggs, poultry, fish and fruit. Based on what I’m seeing, poaching is similar to braising in that the food is cooked in a liquid. To prevent these foods from falling apart or drying out, the cooking is kept to a bare minimum.

Traditionally in poaching, eggs are cooked in water and vinegar, poultry in stock, fish in white wine and fruit in red wine. The vinegar and the wines are the acids, although it appears that chicken cooked in stock can be acid free, unless one of the aromatics has an acid content I’m not aware of.

One of the benefits of poaching is the reduction of fat content in recipes. Chicken that is poached can be used in a variety of recipes that require already cooked chicken. I’ve always viewed poached eggs as “frying in water”. Obviously, that’s not culinarily accurate, but the resulting egg is very similar to a fried egg cooked medium minus the fat.

Fish can be poached in a variety of bases such as water or milk; even coconut milk or olive oil. Fruits, while often calling for red wine, can be poached in white wine, brandy or even coffee. Dried fruits can be reconstituted through poaching as well.

All in all, poaching appears to be a very healthy way to cook these foods. I don’t know that I would ever use this method myself, but I saw a couple recipes I’d be willing to try if someone made it. I’ll post a few interesting recipe links below.

Cranberry Poached Pears with Vanilla Ricotta

Mediterranean Poached Fish

Creole Poached Chicken Breasts

Moroccan Ragout with Poached Eggs