The Orange Strainer: Recipe #4: Breakfast Bowls

Recipe: Breakfast Bowls

Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks

Time: 1 hr 30 min--if nothing is prepped before hand

Ease: 6

Taste: 6

Leftover Value: No leftovers!

Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep in the Strainer, but changes must be made

I love the idea of these breakfast bowls. They seem so simplistic. They are everything wonderful about breakfast wrapped up in a tiny little dish.

Only, I didn't have quite the same sentiment as I made them. It isn't Pioneer Woman's fault though. I should have known just by glancing the recipe over that prep would be king. Yet I refused to submit to such a ruler.

Don't be like me.

I could have made life so much easier by frying my sausages and my bacon, shredding my cheeses, and dicing my tomatoes and onions the night before. But did I?

Of course not.

I figured the smartest place to start would be with the potatoes which layer the bottom of the bowls. I started at attempting to make them the way Pioneer Woman makes her Basic Breakfast Potatoes (also in The Pioneer Woman Cooks) as a way to kill two birds with one stones, but failed miserably at frying them perfectly. Since the breakfast bowls only call for baked potatoes fried with onions, I decided they would still work to finish this recipe that I had only just started.

The process of simply frying bacon and crumbling sausage when balanced with attempting to chop and slice ninety-two* other ingredients wore me out.

But eventually I had my prep bowls in order and was ready to assemble the breakfast bowls.

*Perhaps, I exaggerate.

Here is the essence of the breakfast bowl:

Bottom---potato/onion mixture---sausage---bacon---Monterey Jack cheese---

egg mixture---tomato/green onion/basil mixture---Top

It all sounds so wonderful, doesn't it? The thought of double meats...that's what really did it for me.

I really want some of the cute oven safe bowls Pioneer Woman has pictured in the book, because my basic ramekins just weren't cutting it.

Pioneer Woman tells us to place the ramekins on a rimmed baking sheet and bake for 10 to 15 minutes.

Apparently, her cute little oven safe bowls must be made of much thinner material than the average ramekin causing her time estimate to be absolutely horrible.

I took our yummy breakfast bowls out, expecting perfection, and the eggs weren't fully cooked.

You can slightly see in the above picture a little wet in the bottom left corner. Yes, that should be fluffy egg at this point. I made sure to include King Kong on my coffee mug so you could imagine what my face looked like as I realized we had to wait longer for our food to be done.

I was confused because the recipe said: "It's better for the eggs to come out of the oven slightly runny, as they'll continue to set after they're removed from the oven."

See, to me, that means that I want to favor runny eggs. So I assumed, since I didn't have browned eggs as she warns against, that my breakfast bowls were ready to go.

They so were not.

Our breakfast companions, Joel and Mallory, first tried the bowls. Mallory was so hungry that I'm pretty sure she was willing to eat the eggs on the runnier side, but both Hubby and Joel shoved their bowls back at me for a longer cooking time, leaving Mallory to jump on the bandwagon.