Egg “Muffins”
From Mollie Katzen’s excellent Sunlight Cafe, which has several other really good recipes too. In general you can’t go wrong with a Mollie Katzen cookbook.
You (and the children in your life) will love these neat little egg “packages.” Eat them on a plate with a fork, or just pick one up and take a bite. They’re highly portable.
=Use non-stick pans, generously greased, to be sure that these don’t stick.
=Whole-milk ricotta is best for these, though the lowfat kind will also work.
=You can store these up to 2 days in a tightly-covered container in the refrigerator and reheat them in the microwave.
Yield: 8 muffins
Prep time: 10 minutes, plus 20 to bake
Ingredients:
Nonstick spray
4 T butter
1/3 cup bread crumbs
9 large eggs
1 C ricotta
scant 1/2 t salt
1/2 C minced scallion (both white and green parts)
black pepper
2 T parmesan
1. Preheat to 350. Spray the bottoms & sides of 8 muffin cups & put 1.5 t butter in each cup. Put the pans in the oven until the butter is melted, then remove the pans and divide the breadcrumbs between them.
2. Combine eggs, ricotta, and salt in a blender, whip until smooth. Stir in scallion and “a generous amount” of freshly-grated black pepper.
3. Pour into the prepared cups, filling to the rim. Bake 10 minutes, then sprinkle with parmesan and bake another 10 minutes (“until the tops are puffy, golden, and just barely firm to the touch.”
4. Let cool in the pans for 5 minutes, while they deflate a little. Run a knife around the edges and lift or invert each muffin onto a coling rack or plate. Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature.
Variations: Augmented Egg Muffins
Add up to 1/2 cup of any of the following when you stir in the scallions:
=halved cherry tomatoes
=minced red and/or green bell pepper
=crumbled bacon, veggie bacon, or bacon bits.
My comments: We never, but never, use the amount of butter it calls for. Maybe half, if that. Yeah, they’re harder to get out of the tins that way, but that’s okay. We prefer fresh breadcrumbs, with interesting flavor/texture (wheat berries, flavored foccacia, whatever), and larger than the conventional processed breadcrumbs. We also use more than called for. Unless we’re making the muffins for the kids, we always augment them; tomatoes and bacon are good, green chile is excellent, peppers add color and flavor, pesto is an interesting treat, etc. These are our travel standby; we make a (double or triple) batch before each trip and grab a muffin at each rest stop. Yeah, it’s a lot of egg, but it’s only once in a while that it happens. 🙂