Frozen breakfast burritos

As a way to facilitate my new morning gym routine (we'll see how long that actually keeps up), Maki suggested making breakfast burritos that I could freeze and then take into work. So here's my attempt at that.

I used large spinach tortillas at room temperature.

I first fried up a tube of sausage,

8 jumbo eggs, 

and baked about 2/3 a bag of frozen tater rounds for 35 minutes in a 400 deg oven.

I also chopped up a whole bunch of cilantro -- note these photos all show the ingredients after I'd made a few burritos. I brought all ingredients to room temperature before stuffing the burritos and let the sausage rest in a bowl with paper towels to dry it.

Then I filled the tortillas with about 1/4 of cheese and about a half ladle of each ingredient.

I rolled up the burritos using these instructions -- here are five of them completed.

I rolled the ten burritos up in saran wrap and put five in a freezer bag, then into the freezer.








So we'll see how these taste on Wednesday when I go back to the gym.

Here's the price/calorie per unit breakdown:

• 10 Don Pancho large spinach tortillas -- $4/290 calories
• 1 lb mild sausage -- $1.78/95
• 8 jumbo eggs -- $1.37/72
• 2/3 bag of tater rounds -- $0.95/85
• cilantro -- $0.83/0
• 1 bag of WinCo brand monterey jack cheese -- $2.34/110
• 1 jar of salsa -- $1.89/~0

for a total of $13.16 or $1.316/burrito and 652 calories/burrito, giving $0.02/calorie.

Just for comparison, the Jimmy Dean breakfast croissant is 410 calories and $1.25/sandwich, so that's $0.03/calorie.

Buttermilk Biscuits II

 Another attempt at biscuits yesterday. The recipe I used is here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/better-buttermilk-biscuits-recipe.html.


After mixing together the ingredients, I rolled the dough out and folded it over four times. Finally, I rolled it out to 3/4" thick.

Then I cut the biscuits out using the 3.75" cutter. That made five normal biscuits and one gimpy one.

Then I buttered the tops and into a 400 degree oven for 14 minutes. I turned them after 7 minutes, hoping that would brown the tops...

...except that the biscuits didn't brown properly.

But all in all, I was pretty happy with the biscuits. They were delicious, much better than previous attempts -- very dense but a bit crumbly.

Next time, maybe try 3/4 cup of buttermilk, instead of 1/2 cup or a little butter.

Buttermilk Biscuits I

As part of my quest to perfect my breakfast repertoire, I'm trying to reproduce the Bojangles biscuit recipe.

I've made a few batches of buttermilk biscuits over the last few months, but now I'm going to record my efforts via blog.

Today, I made this recipe -- http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/330/Bojangles_Biscuits16768.shtml. I made it a few weeks ago, and it was fairly mediocre. I tried to tweak the recipe a bit today.

Here are my ingredients and tools:

STEP 1: Mix together dry ingredients

STEP 2: Cut in shortening -- I have read in several places that using very cold shortening is a key to good biscuits, so I put it in the freezer for about 15 min; probably wasn't long enough freeze it, though.

STEP 3: Pour in buttermilk -- I bought a quart of buttermilk, and the 1.25 cups required for the recipe used about 1/3 of it. This website says it'll keep for 7-10 days opened, so I can use another 1/3 for next weekend.

STEP 4: Mix together wet and dry ingredients, pour out onto floured counter, and knead a few times

STEP 5: Flatten with rolling pin to about 3/4" -- Unlike previous attempts, I did NOT flatten and fold the dough several times to avoid making layers since Bojangles's biscuits seem not to have any layers.

STEP 6: Cut out biscuits -- I used the 1 3/4" cutter (the fourth largest in Maki's set).

STEP 7: Put biscuits on baking pan -- I forgot to pre-heat the oven, so after cutting out the biscuits and putting them on the pan, I popped them into the freezer while the oven warmed up.

STEP 8: Into a 450 deg oven for 10 minutes

STEP 9: I pulled the biscuits out after 10 minutes (2 minutes early) to baste their tops with butter, then back into the oven for 3 minutes.

STEP 10: Then out for eating.

The tops weren't quite as golden as I wanted:

And the bottoms were a little toastier than I wanted:

So next week, I'll bake them for 6 minutes, pull them out and baste them with butter, then pop them back into the oven for another 6 minutes. In fact, I'll put them in upside down at first.