‘Omelette’ for a given value thereof

Did you know that you can buy completely precooked bacon and not deal with the problem of discarding bacon grease ever again? Yes. It is, indeed, a thing one can do.

For when one is perpetually out of bagels, this is useful information. This is also prepared with my own preferences in mind: I can’t abide runny egg white, but I love when the yolk is still gooey.

Ingredients:

• bacon
• shredded cheese
• egg

Crack a couple eggs in a nonstick pan that is over medium heat. Go stare at your caffeinated beverage of choice to try to make it ready faster. When the eggs are showing completely white on the bottom and starting to firm up a bit, put your bacon and cheese and chives or veggies or whatever if you want them in the middle.

Use a flat spatula to flip part of the eggs over so the fillings are contained in egg. If you do it softly, you won’t break the yolk. Cook it another couple minutes to let cook through, and serve. Feeds one.

It is vaguely omelette-like! Not necessarily as pretty, but it is delicious eggs that taste like bacon, so who cares?

Egg Toast

My ideal breakfast remains an everything bagel with smoked salmon cream cheese, but T is on night shifts, so we haven’t been grocery shopping in a very long time except for the runs I’m making with E for ingredients for specific dishes. Anyway, the upshot is that I’ve had to piece together breakfast from other things.

The Correct Breakfast in absence of bagels always strikes me as involving eggs, toast, and, if possible, bacon. My personal preference is for that combination to involve as few dishes and utensils as physically possible. Thus: egg toast.

Ingredients:

• eggs
• as many slices of bread as eggs
• whatever you like on eggs

Put your bread on a tray that fits in a toaster oven. Crack the eggs carefully over the bread, so it all stays on the piece of bread. Add your seasonings – I used taco seasoning and pre-shredded taco cheese because cheese makes everything better and the only cheese options we have right now are taco cheese and Kraft singles. Salt, pepper, w/e, will all work, but if you’re fond of salsa or ketchup or hot sauce I’d either go light or wait until the end so the bread doesn’t get super soggy.

Toast for five minutes! Our toaster oven has various settings like ‘bake’ and ‘keep warm’ and ‘toast,’ and also a temperature control. I left it on the bread toasting settings because honestly it is morning and everything is already too complicated.

When I am actually making breakfast, I like to clean the kitchen while it goes. There’s a definite end-point in sight, but it’s kind of amazing how much you can get done in five minutes. When the toaster goes off, transfer the toast – which will be very wobbly with egg – to a plate, and microwave for 45 seconds. This cooks the egg most of the way, but it also makes the bread kind of soggy, so if you then transfer the toast back to the tray and toast it another five minutes, it should be completely cooked, with crispy toast and cooked egg white with still slightly runny yolk. Yum.

Eggs and Mushrooms

We had some mushrooms that needed using up and we’ve been keeping eggs in-house more often, so breakfast seemed like a great way to take care of them.

Ingredients:

• eggs
• mushrooms
• garlic
• butter

We buy the little things of pre-sliced mushrooms. They’re like ten cents more than the not-sliced ones, and I’d really rather not fiddle with having to do all that chopping. So I just needed to slap a little bit of butter in the pan, turn it to medium-low, and rinse the mushrooms.

Drop the mushrooms in the pan, toss in some diced garlic, and ignore it for a while: they need to sautée down.

When they’re mostly done, crack a couple eggs on top, add a little pepper and seasoning salt. Cook the eggs until they’re the way you like them, and serve.

Egg Sandwich

We’re out of bagels.

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 2 pieces toast
• whatever you like to season your eggs and toast

I made this while also making tea and emptying the dishwasher, and I think the whole thing took under 15 minutes. Stick eggs in pan! Add w/e seasoning – I added a bit of milk, so they’d be a bit more liquid, and pepper, and Worcestershire sauce. Toast the toast. Cook the eggs on medium until they start turning opaque, then use a spatula to break them up and turn them so everything gets cooked. I added some shredded cheese at that point, too.

When everything looks cooked – nothing is runny or transparent – put the scrambled eggs on your toast.

If you want ketchup or butter or whatever on your sandwich, do that, and you have a lovely breakfast.

Tortilla de patatas or Spanish omelette, probably

So I should preface this by saying that leftover potatoes are rare in our house. When we do have leftovers, though, they make a phenomenal breakfast – and a quick one, since the ingredient that takes the longest is already cooked.

Ingredients:

• leftover potatoes (recipe, recipe)
• eggs
• seasoning
• shredded cheese (optional)

Directions:

We had a few leftover potatoes, enough to mostly-cover the bottom of my 10″ non-stick frying pan. I dumped them in and spread them out, then cracked four eggs over the top of them. Then I turned the burner on to medium heat.

These were the vaguely-Italian potatoes, so I added more Italian seasonings, garlic powder (not salt, this time, because salt makes eggs get rubbery), and some paprika because why not. When white started to show at the bottom of the eggs, I stirred everything, breaking the yolks finally. I cooked that another couple minutes, then put shredded cheese on top.

Like, the cheese isn’t necessary. It’s still a delicious dish with no cheese! We just really like cheese a lot.

I gave the cheese like a minute and a half, maybe? Then used the spatula to lift sections and flip them over. The bottom of the eggs were adequately-fried brown, and the cheese started hissing pretty much immediately, so I only gave it like 30 seconds of that before dishing it up.

Eat plain or with your favorite egg-topping sauce (ketchup, A1, a few drops of Worcestershire sauce, breakfast is too early in the day to judge anyone’s condiment choice).