Ham and Cheese Egg Cups. Make ahead for a quick breakfast on the go!

Just this week we got word that Tavis’s job will be taking him (and Aiden and I will be tagging along) to Washington, DC for 4 months, and we leave in 4 days!!! More on that craziness soon…

We will be taking the Airstream up to DC so we don’t have to live in a hotel all summer! I am already planning tons of weekend Airstream trips all over the northeast!!

We got a great campground reserved in a prefect location (as close as we could to the city) and Tavis’s morning commute should be about 1 hour, as long as he leaves the camper by 6-6:30am. As you city dwellers know, the commute time gets longer, the later in the morning you leave. These things are all new to us since we have lived in a rural town on a caribbean island for the past 3 years… We used to live in Miami, directly before moving here, but it is funny how quickly you forget those kind of things…

So… I was thinking through ways to make the mornings easier (and quite) when Tavis is getting ready so he doesn’t wake me Aiden up.

We normally grind our coffee beans fresh each morning, immediately before brewing the coffee.  Since we will be living in a 8 x 30 metal tube, a coffee grinder sounds similar to a freight train, so we are considering a Kuerig or relaxing on the must-grind-coffee-moments-before-it-is-brewed routine. I’m not sure if I will be able to get Tavis to budge on that one… but I am working on it.

I was also trying to figure out some easy breakfast ideas so that Tav can get out the door as hassle free as possible. We are bacon and eggs kinda folks, so a cereal bar wasn’t going to cut it. While thinking through some options this is what I came up with as a quick, on-the-go breakfast. I decided to whip up a batch today as a test run.  Here is what you will need:

18 eggs
1 and a half cups milk (use whole, you know it tastes better)
1 cup shredded cheese of choice, or more if you like it extra cheesy
1 small onion, diced
1 cup diced bell peppers or other veggies of choice
1 cup diced ham, pre cooked or other meat such as browned sausage crumbles
2 tsp garlic salt
salt and pepper
butter for sautéing veggies
cooking spray

Dice the onion and bell peppers and saute on medium heat, in butter, for approximately 6-8 minutes. You don’t want to cook them all the way. If you put them in the eggs raw, they don’t bake long enough to really cook them. So this is to just jumpstart the cooking, use your judgement as to your preference on veggie done-ness. Or throw them in raw if you want, it is all up to you.

If you choose to use breakfast sausage or if you need to cook your ham, do that now as well.

Dice the ham and set aside.

Crack the eggs into a large mixing bowl or a really big measuring cup like I did. The pour spout is helpful when you are filling the muffin cups later. If you don’t have a large measuring cup you can use a ladle but for me, that is just one more item that I have to wash later…

Add the milk, garlic salt, salt, and pepper to the eggs and whisk well. Do not add any of the other ingredients to the eggs.

If you add the cheese, veggies and meat to the eggs they tent to sink to the bottom of the mixing bowl and it is really hard to get it evenly spread out among the cups. Adding the extras to the muffin cups before the eggs tends to work out much more evenly. And you can more easily mix up the toppings when you make it this way.

Spray the muffin cups with non stick spray and add the meat, veggies and cheese directly to the muffin cups, dividing the ingredients between the 24 cups.

Pour the egg mixture into the cups on top of the toppings, filling the cups approximately 2/3 of the way full.

Bake at 350 for 20 minutes or until the eggs are set and a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.

Allow to cool before portioning them out into zip top bags and freezing.

When you reheat them, start with 30 seconds per cup in the microwave, heated one at a time. Increase the time by 15 seconds until you figure out the right length. The actual heating time will depend on your microwave and the size of your egg cups.

These will be perfect for Tavis in the mornings because he can microwave a few for a quick breakfast at the camper or toss the bag from the freezer into his backpack and heat them up when he gets into the office.

No noisy pots and pans and no $7 fast-food breakfast 5 days a week! I estimated that all the ingredients cost about $8 and the recipe yields about 24 egg muffins. That means for 3 muffins, it only costs $1!