One Handed Meals

I have 3 assignments and 2 lab reports due on Thursday. I am doing homework no matter what I'm doing or where I am. Including eating dinner. So, I needed something I could eat with one hand.

Breakfast Burrito

• a handfull of small potatoes
• 1 egg
• a bit of onion
• some jalapeno
• cheese
• bacon!
• bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon
• bacon fat
• a tortilla
• some salsa

So, there are 2 eggs in the picture, but I cooked only one. The key to being able to roll a burrito is the filling. Don't use too much filling.

Preheat the oven to 425.

Chop the little taters into tiny bits. Put them on a baking sheet and rub peanut oil all over them. You want barely enough oil to cover them in a thin layer. Pour about a teaspoon in the palm of your hand and start with that.

That weird line on the left of the picture is actually peanut oil. Action shots are not always ftw.

Pop the tiny taters in the oven. They take about 10 minutes when they're this size and they'll come out lovely and golden because of the peanut oil.

Chop the onion, the bacon, and the jalapeno, and grate the cheese.

If you don't have bacon in the freezer already cooked... dude, seriously, cook bacon on the weekend just for fun and put it in the freezer; your house will smell like bacon.

Heat a bit of bacon fat (see, this is what precooking gets you, bacon fat to use at your leisure) in a pan and sautee the onions and jalapenos for a couple minutes.

Crack in the egg, and give it a stir. No, you don't need to beat it in a bowl first. Sure, you could, but then you'd have a dirty bowl.

Stir the egg, onion and jalapeno around for a few minutes until the eggs are set. Sprinkle on the bacon and cheese, and cover the pan with the tortilla.

This does two things: it steams the tortilla to soften it a bit, and it keeps the heat in to melt the cheese. Clever, no?

Your tiny taters should be just done by now.

Slide the bacon and cheese covered eggs onto the softened tortilla and top them with the taters. A tablespoon of spicy salsa removes the need for additional hot sauce.

Roll the side of the tortilla closest to you over the innards,

Fold in the sides,

And roll it into a one handed meal.

What's your eat-as-you-work meal?

appetizers and breakfast

I am a great fan of multi-purpose things.

My couch is also a bed. My coffee table is also storage. My appetizers are also breakfast.

I haven't been able to find a local bakery that makes good sausage rolls. In fact, of all the bakeries I've been to, I found only one that had sausage rolls. They weren't very good. I mean really, how can you mess up something that is basically "pigs in a blanket"?

I'm most familiar with sausage rolls eaten at lunch or as an afternoon snack, with tea. But I've also had small versions of them as cocktail foods. And since I'm somewhat recently enamoured with biscuits and sausage gravy, I figure we may as well have them for breakfast too.

Because really, who wants to make breakfast the morning after a cocktail party. Or a family Christmas party.... I need cocktails for those.

Sausage Rolls

What you need:

• Biscuit dough!
• Sausage
• ...
• that's basically it
• but dijon mustard is tasty
• and egg wash makes them pretty (one egg with half a shell's worth of water beaten in)

(but of course, there is no egg in the picture)

What you gotta do:

Make yourself a batch of biscuit dough. I'm going to do these rolls two ways, so I've divided mine in half and rolled out one of the halves into a rectangle that's about 10 inches long and 4 inches wide.

For the first batch, I'm going to start with raw sausage. Whatever kind you like best. These came from a local deli/grocery that makes their own sausages, usually with local pigs. If you have time and want to dirty another bowl, you can mix in some breadcrumbs and extra seasoning (sage, parsley, thyme). I opted to go bare bones with my sausage and just brush the dough with a bit of grainy dijon mustard.

Bust open a sausage and place a thumb-thick strip of sausage a little closer to one edge.

I brushed a bit of egg wash on the inside of the dough before I rolled it up.

Slice the roll into 10 pieces that are about 1 inch wide each and once they're on a baking sheet, brush them with more egg wash. 

Into a 400 degree oven they go. Mine's been preheating this whole time. Has yours?

And since my biscuits tend to rise quite a bit...

Some of them toppled, but 25 minutes later they came out looking just fine.

Now, if you've got some leftover sausage, or if you don't want to deal with the raw, you can do this all with cooked sausage.

Again, roll out a piece of biscuit dough. This one didn't quite make it into being rectangular. Close enough.

The mustard and egg wash go on first, then the sausage. I cut into the sausage in a couple places so that it would lay a little straighter.

Roll, slice, eggwash.

This time, I baked a little hotter, 425 degrees which is typical for biscuits, and only left them in for 20 minutes.

These, with a bit of gravy on top... breakfast.

Or dipped into a little more dijon... appetizers.

What's your favourite multi-purpose food?