Happy meal prep Monday, friends! This week, I wanted a comforting, tasty meal prep which means…breakfast food! A few weeks ago I saw someone make a potato waffle and it’s been stuck in my head ever since, so here we are with these jalapeno cheddar potato waffles and egg cups. This week’s meal prepping didn’t go quite to plan, so let’s have a chat about what went well (the waffles!) and what is tasty but could’ve gone better (the egg cups)
Up first: the egg cups
I thought that I could skip dirtying a pan to pre-cook my veggies by greasing my muffin tin, adding the veggies, letting those cook for 5-8 minutes, then adding my egg mixture and letting that cook. What could go wrong??? Turns out, a couple of things could. Doing it this way meant that the egg sticks a bit to the pan, making it difficult to take them out from the pan which means that they aren’t as pretty as they could be.
The second issue though, is far more hilarious to me. Putting the egg mixture into an already hot pan made the egg that touches the pan cooks almost instantly. Then, when the rest of the egg cooks it puffs up, as eggs do. However, because the first bit of it, all the way up to the top of the muffin tin, is already cooked, when the egg cups cool and the puffiness comes back down, you end up with a concave top of the egg muffin. It doesn’t really change the taste at all, but again, it makes it look pretty funny. So, for the egg cups, learn from my mistakes and clean the extra pan. The recipe below has the way I’ve done it in the past and it works much better.
The next: jalapeno cheddar potato waffles
These are GOOD. I have a little waffle maker so it took a while since each waffle cooks for 5 minutes and I made 13 of them, but totally worth the time. Plus, while they were cooking, I had time to clean the kitchen so by the time they were all done, I had a couple of things to clean and I was in good shape!
I think that a lot of potato waffle recipes out there really overcomplicate things. I don’t see the need to shred some potatoes a different size from the rest, or let the liquid that comes out separate to collect the starch, or anything else like that. I shredded all of my potatoes with the large holes on my box grater. After each one, I spread the shreds out on a couple layers of paper towels, then started grating the next potato. Once the next potato was grated, I transferred the shreds on the paper towels into a bowl, put the new shreds onto the paper towels, then repeated the process. It took out enough of the potato liquid and was so easy. From there just combine everything and make the waffles!
Turns out I had a lot to say about egg cups and waffles, but hopefully you can learn from my experience and enjoy some delicious breakfast foods 🙂
Jalapeno Cheddar Potato Waffles – makes ~12 four inch waffles
Ingredients
- 4 russet potatoes
- 6 oz cheddar
- 2 jalapenos
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp pepper
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1 egg
- 2 tbsp flour
How to do it
- make the ‘batter’: using the big holes on the box grater, grate the potatoes. After grating a potato, scatter the pieces out onto a couple of pieces of paper towels. Grate the next potato, then remove the first potato pieces from the paper towels into a large bowl and scatter the second potato’s pieces on the towel. continue until all have been grated and moved into the bowl.
- grate the cheddar cheese and add it to the same bowl
- add the remaining ingredients, to the potatoes and cheddar. mix well
- make the waffles: preheat your waffle maker then grease well and add the waffle mix. don’t forget to grease well! for my small waffle maker, I used about ¼ cup of mixture per waffle to create a relatively thin waffles with maximum crispiness. mine took about 5 minutes to cook, but look for them to start to brown well before removing to a cooling rack in order to preserve the crispiness. grease the iron again and continue making waffles until you use up all of the batter.
- store in an airtight container and reheat in the microwave, or pop back into the waffle iron to reheat and get some crispiness
Egg Cups – makes 12
Ingredients
- 8 eggs
- ½ C milk
- 1 tsp salt
- ½ tsp paprika
- ½ tsp pepper
- 1.5-2 cups chopped veg – I used red bell pepper, broccoli, and green onion
How to do it
- preheat the oven to 375*. grease a muffin tin and set aside
- prep the veg: chop your chosen veggies into relatively small pieces. set aside
- make the egg mixture: combine the eggs, milk, and spices. mix well and transfer to a container with a pour spout, if you have one
- assemble and bake: distribute the veggies among all 12 muffin cups. fill each cup with egg mixture almost up to the top, leave a bit of room for them to puff up. bake for 35-40 minutes or until they’re just set
- cool and store in an airtight container. Reheat in the microwave or oven and enjoy!