Eggs in muffin tins

Several (many?) years ago, I had the good fortune to experience what might be the world’s greatest internship: working at the French Space Agency (CNES) in Toulouse, France. I was there during the Euro Cup, so I learned a lot about French “football” culture (and useful vocabulary, in the instance of a player who got a red card for spitting on another player), in addition to experiencing three months of warm dry sunshine, pastries, wine, cheese, meat cooked on small barbecues with other international interns from all over Europe, train rides through fields of lavender and sunflowers, and exploring many towns throughout southern France. I also did some work, and in what I still consider to be one of my greatest achievements, gave a one hour presentation in French about satellite design. To the head of the department. I don’t know if anyone in the room was actually listening to what I said so much as thinking, “HOLY SHIT SOMEONE FROM THE US SPEAKS FRENCH.” Or at least sort of speaks it.

This was a summer where my main form of entertainment was walking around new places (which is free), eating sandwiches from carts in parks (cheap), and window shopping (also free). When the massive annual July sale arrived (“les Soldes”), after weeks of staring at the same pair of shoes, I finally broke down and bought them (the $40 commitment felt huge at the time). They were an espadrille style, with a closed toe made of brightly patterned red and yellow fabric, heel strap, and ballerina laces (two different kinds! Luxury!). I thought they were the greatest thing I had ever owned, and considering that I wore jeans and a t-shirt throughout the entirety of college and found the concept of a “going-out outfit” utterly mystifying, I was almost certainly correct.

Imagine my surprise, when a few months later, I was back in the US and abruptly exposed to advertising for the “latest thing in fashion”, which just happened to be shoes exactly like the ones I bought (but much less awesome because they typically lacked the pattern I had found). I can count the number of times I had even vaguely participated in a fashion trend previously, and it was zero. Maybe you can’t count that. Is that the whole point of zero? Regardless, I had never before even arrived at the tail end of a fashion trend. JEANS AND T-SHIRTS, people.  (Currently sitting in my grad school office wearing just that). To say the very least, I was flabbergasted. And I got compliments on my shoes (also had never happened. No one compliments Dansko clogs. They just tolerate that you have made a “sensible” shoe choice. Unless they are teenagers in Philadelphia in which case they mercilessly tease you right up until the point where Dansko-like clogs also become the latest thing in fashion and you are once again ahead of a curve you never intended to participate in).

Shoes are not the only places in my life where this has happened, but as someone who generally DGAF about whatever is cool right now (initially because of financial constraints, and now more out of laziness and “wow-that’s-ugly”-ness), it never ceases to amaze me.

In the last year, I have become increasingly horrified by food waste, experiencing the kind of liberal guilt around such an environmental issue that only an upbringing in a place like Seattle can really instill in you. When you’ve been brainwashed to recycle everything (WAIT WHAT ARE YOU DOING THAT’S COMPOSTABLE), throwing away leftovers that you didn’t feel like eating at any point during the two weeks after you made them feels like a sin. (Although, to be fair, I don’t actually know what that feels like since I lack any sort of religious fervor. AT ALL).

My solution to the problem has been to try to come up with creative ways to use the random bits of things that always linger (see also: we never finish a loaf of bread. Even if it’s the greatest bread anyone has ever eaten). I’m not talking breadcrumbs here (I will never use that many breadcrumbs in a lifetime) or fancy grain bowls (with that last little bit of whatever weird grain and vegetable and sauce that I would never in a million years have in the first place). I have been somewhat hampered in this in that I am perfectly willing to eat the same thing in the same way ad nauseum, so magical new applications of the last three chicken cutlets that are not enough for a meal for anyone do not regularly occur to me (my husband (!) is much better at this, I suspect because he never wants to eat the same thing more than once in a row).

Things came to a head in the fall when I realized I was (a) hungry all the time and (b) that there are only so many granola bars a person can eat. Also, it’s hard to make it through a workday when you eat your lunch at 10 am because breakfast seems so long ago. I experimented with making breakfast burritos, which have the advantage of being freezable and then microwaveable, but also are not really labor saving in any meaningful way since it takes hours to construct them. And I always had to buy new stuff for them that I would never otherwise buy. They did alleviate the hunger issues (and the granola bars. UGH), but I could not stay motivated to commit hours of my weekend to them.

And then I was like, wait, can’t you just put eggs in a muffin tin and things will magically happen to transform them into deliciousness? I saw a link to some most likely thoroughly edifying website about just cooking all things ever in a muffin tin so I was pretty sure this was true. Except I think eggs are gross most of the time, unless they are heavily masked by cheese or ketchup (BLASPHEMY), so I was not about to do the healthy thing and pop some egg whites in a muffin tin and end up with some weird baked egg concoction that had no benefits aside from not clogging your arteries instantly. However, eggs that are heavily masked by meat, cheese, vegetables, and starch are thoroughly acceptable, mostly because the egg is more of a sideshow. And these are conveniently the kinds of things that linger in our house. That last little chunk of cheese from the “buy-many-tiny-cheeses” section of everyone’s favorite Seattle food co-op, the last two strips of bacon (it’s just not enough for two people for breakfast, honestly. Don’t listen to the bacon haters), part of a broccoli crown, the heel of bread, four little red potatoes, and some poor lonely milk product that had a grand future two weeks ago when you found motivation and free time but it didn’t last until you got home from the store. What are you supposed to with them?

PUT THEM IN A MUFFIN TIN. And wait for magic to happen. I’m convinced that you don’t even really need to try that hard, except when it comes to greasing the muffin tin and then you should try very hard or you will end up with a big hot mess of eggy-starchy-meaty-vegetableness that does not look like it was carefully formed in a muffin tin.

And when you’re done, you can put them all in the freezer, and take one to work each day for second breakfast and convince yourself that it’s healthy since you’ve covered at least three or four food groups in one snack, it was baked not fried, it has protein (maybe even more than one kind!) and now you can make it to lunch without eating all your other snacks (who am I kidding, I still eat all the other snacks before lunch).

There is no fancy food photography here (there never is, because I can’t be bothered how to figure out the right lighting and when you make something on Sunday night after making dinner and what feels like 300 other things, taking pictures seems overrated. See also: why I am not a professional food person), but they end up looking like something eggy that used to be in a muffin tin. If you have cats with kitchen-counter-boundary problems, you’ll want to take steps to fend them off when these come out of the oven. One time, asshole-Lionel as he is affectionately called in our house knocked one off the cooling rack (ONTO THE FLOOR) and started trying to eat it. No one was surprised.

Oh, and back to my distant original point: Within months of starting to make these, I saw advertisements for similar products that could be purchased in the freezer aisle that would accomplish many of my own stated goals (except the cleaning-out-the-fridge part, which is important). I would not recommend to anyone to use my behavior as a predictor for future trends, but occasionally I would be awesome for market research.

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400°F.
2. Grease the bejeezus out of  a muffin tin (thank you, Pam spray, for providing me with this opportunity to create a cloud of aerosol fat product in my kitchen).
3. Assess your ingredients:
1. Eggs: You need the equivalent of about 8 eggs. Roughly. More if you’re light on the filler stuff. I have used whole eggs, but this past round I also used a bunch of egg whites that were taking up space in my freezer in place of some of them.
2. Some dairy product: milk, half and half, cream. I don’t think it matters. No doubt someone out there disagrees, but I’ve used all three and they’re all fine.
3.  Cheese: grated. Whatever you want. In whatever quantity you want. I probably use ¼ to ½ a cup each time. (Who am I kidding? At least half a cup).
4. Meat (optional, obviously, if you’re not into these things): I’ve used bacon (cooked), breakfast sausage, and chorizo (whatever I’m currently on track to waste). I could certainly envision using lunch meat if you’re perilously close to the “use by” day, or other fancier meats that you might have.
5. Veggies: eh. I almost used broccoli once but then it looked bug infested so I didn’t. But it would be a great option if it were chopped up nice and fine.
6. BREAD: this is not optional in my mind, but honestly this whole list is optional (although if you skip the eggs, I’m not really sure what you’re making). I have most often used the stale heal of a loaf of crusty white bread, chopped up into small cubes, but we didn’t have any last time (i.e. it molded before I got my act together), so I just toasted two pieces of regular sandwich bread and cubed it. So far, no objections.
4. Assembly:
1. Bread cubes in muffin tin (not necessary, but helps with evening out the distribution).
2. Combine eggs and milk and whisk aggressively. Probably for at least a minute to be useful.
3. Add everything else you wanted to put into.
4. Scoop into muffin tins. If you fill it all the way to the top, it will explode out the sides, so ¾ is probably good. If you’ve done a reasonable job whisking, they will expand nicely and become delightfully puffy egg-like things.
5. Sprinkle additional cheese on top (also optional, but more cheese always happens in my kitchen).
6. Cook for about 20 minutes. Should be slightly golden brown on the top (and will be nicely brown around the sides which you can’t actually see).
7. Cool on rack in tin until you can get them out without (a) burning yourself and (b) destroying them.

Eating immediately would work out great, but I typically store them in the freezer and then pop them in the microwave wrapped in paper towel for 30 seconds to 1 minute depending on frozenness when the aforementioned breakfast emergency rolls around.