Breakfast Burritos/Breakfast Tacos (How to make your own Sonic Jr. Breakfast Burrito’s): Call them what you want, they are fast, cheap and easy. Simply cook the parts, combine and assemble. Load them up into the freezer voila, a home cooked breakfast a the drop of a hat, just minutes away in the microwave.

It’s really easy, I made a batch of 60 breakfast burritos, but I really had enough mix to make about 100 of them, I just ran out of tortilla’s. Total cost with everything ran me just under 18 dollars, so for the 60 pieces I made, they ran about 30 cents a piece. I bagged them up 2 o a baggie, so in the end, it’s breakfast for 60 cents.

Ingredients:

• 2 to 3 pounds of breakfast sausage (I bought 2 tubes of mild)
• 2.5 dozen eggs
• 2 pounds of hashbrowns
• 2 cans of diced tomatoes
• 60-100 tortilla’s
• salsa to top it if desired

Here’s how:

Step 1: Brown the breakfast sausage. I used my roaster since my oven was already hot from cooking dinner. Breakfast sausage can get kind of greasy, so I drained it and rinsed well under hot water to degrease it.

Step 2: While the sausage is cooking you need to cook the scrambled eggs and hashbrowns. For the eggs I just cooked them in a skillet and stirred and chopped feverishly. For the hashbrowns I just dumped them on 2 cookie sheets and baked them on the rack under the sausage. I didn’t get pics of this, but use your imagination… I am sure you have seen scrambled eggs before, LOL.

Step 3: Once the sausage is cooked and drained, dump your eggs, hashbrowns and if so desired diced tomatoes on top.

Other toppings you could add in:

• Green Peppers
• Red Peppers
• Celery
• Onions
• Mushrooms
• You name it!

Step 4: Mix it up.

Step 5: Assemble! I used an ice cream scooper for consistent portion sizes. These are pretty small breakfast tacos/breakfast burritos, so I sacked them up two to a baggie.

Step 6: Voila! A stack of 30 baggies.

As mentioned, with the ingredients, I could have made 100 if I had more tortillas, so we at a couple meals of breakfast burgers to use it up in the meantime. YUMMY. These really remind me of the Jr. Breakfast Burrito’s at Sonic, except theirs are a buck and mine are 30 cents. Take that Sonic!

Mama’s Vegetable Beef Soup: Great for the cool weather!

This is a basic foundation for a great winter/fall soup, ready to go out of the freezer. I will be making this in the near future and will update with more details, so stay tuned!

Ingredients:
-No set amounts of any one ingredient, portion to taste

• Ground Beef
• Spaghetti Sauce/Pasta Sauce for the base
• Picante Sauce (Pace or other) for some pizazz
• Vegetables as desired (canned, frozen or cans of veg-all even)

Instructions:
Cook and drain ground beef. Add in all other ingredients and mix thoroughly. Let simmer for a good 30 minutes to allow the flavors to meld together. Serve or freeze.

Mama’s Breakfast Quiches (Crustless): Delicious breakfast on the go… just waiting in your freezer!

Mama’s Lasagna Bake: A little slice of heaven, right out of the freezer!

Mama’s Stuffed Peppers: A delicious change from the ordinary!

Ingredients:

• 3lb ground beef
• 1 onion chopped fine
• 1 tsp chopped garlic
• 1 red pepper chopped fine
• 2 cups cooked white rice
• 1 can green chillies
• 1 can black beans
• 1 cup corn
• 1 pkg taco seasoning
• 4 Bell Peppers (Red, Yellow, Orange or Green – your choice)

Instructions:

Cook ground beef, drain fat, add taco seasoning. Let cool for a few min’s while you cut the tops of the peppers and remove the inner membranes (a melon baler works great for this). Coat the peppers in a bit of olive oil and roast upside down in a 450 oven for 10-15 min’s. While the peppers are roasting, mix the cooked ground beef with the rest of the ingredients. Let peppers cool for just a few so you can easily handle them. Turn peppers right side up place in a roasting pan and fill with 1 cup mix and top with shredded cheese. Bake for 15-20 min.

These freeze great stuffed as is or I often times make up the mix use a few peppers for dinner that night then freeze the rest of the mix in 1-2 cup portions and save for when peppers are on sale. This also works well for lettuce wraps, tacos or stuffed cabbage leaves.

Mama’s Meatloaf: Great for freezing, even better for eating!

Ingredients:

• 2lb ground turkey/chicken (I wait till this goes on sale – some times for .99 per pound as a managers special at my local Frys)
• 3lb ground beef – I use 80/20 if mixing it with the turkey, if I use all ground beef I use a leaner ground
• 2 lg onions chopped
• 1 tablespoon garlic
• 2 tsp black pepper
• 2 tsp salt or salt substitute (we prefer Lawry’s seasoning salt)
• 2 cups frozen corn
• 1 cup ketchup
• ¼ cup Worcestershire sauce
• 1 ½ cup bread crumbs (I make my own from the crusts off our loaves of bread – just freeze them till your ready to use them then spritz with a bit of Pam, bake at 375 till crispy, place in a food processer and pulse till they are finely ground)
• 2 eggs

Instructions:

Mix all ingredients then portion into mini loafs (about 2 cups per loaf)

Once you have the loaves portioned out use the bowl to mix up 2 cups Ketchup, ½ cup brown sugar, ¼ tsp black pepper and a dash or two of hot sauce (optional). Spoon sauce over the top of the loaves and bake in a 350 oven for 20-30 min’s till the internal temp is 150 degrees. Let rest then freeze in individual Ziplocs. They make great meals or thawed and cut into slices for sandwiches!

Grilled Fajita Chicken Strips:

These are easy to make and great to have around for fajita’s, salads, taco’s, bbq sandwiches… you name it. They thaw quick and taste like they came right off the BBQ.

For Fajita’s I like to have a plate of peppers and tomatoes ready to load up on.

I forgot to get pics on the grill, but it is really simple. Put all he chicken on the grill and sprinkle with seasoning of your choice (we use salt free chili seasoning for a nice taste). Cook it through and plate it up. We use 5 pounds of boneless skinless chicken breasts that were on sale this week. You should be starting with something like this:

Simply let rest a while to solidify better. Slice up each chicken breast into fajita size pieces and plate out of the way. You should end up with something like this:

At this point it is ready to eat: We dined off it right away with fajita’s. They were so tasty!

All the rest of the chicken can be bagged up into portion sized bags. I used about 1 cup as a rule per bag. This is perfect for fajitas for two or for a couple salads for lunches.

The perfect salad topping. This is so much tastier and cheaper than the store bought variety.

Grilled Pork Chops With Cranberry Teriyaki Marinade: This was an idea I had and I had hoped these would turn out good, but instead they turned out awesome!

Our local grocer had these great pork chops on sale in family packs, so we cooked up 18 chops at once and froze them. These freeze great and taste like they came off the grill.

For the marinate I just used about 1 cup of Teriyaki sauce and about 4 cups of cranberry juice.

Dump them in and let soak for as long as desired: a couple hours would be best though.

Drop them on the grill until cooked through.

Lastly, sack them up into freezer bags as desired. We put 4 in for the two of us because they are so good we don’t eat just one. The cranberry juice really helps give the pork chops a great taste and keeps them juicy. I bet you’ll love them too!

Chopped BBQ Beef sandwiches:

These are a great favorite here in our house, but we don’t always have left over roast or brisket sitting around, so I came up with this… ready to go dinner for 2 size baggies of chopped beef. Just heat and eat.

Step 1: Fire up the old crock pot.

Step 2: Add roast, seasonings and veggies as desired. We just use onions and carrots and it gives a really tasty flavor.

Step 3: Go about your day… come back in 8 hours. This is the easy part. After 8 hours you should have something like this:

Step 4: Remove roast and let rest and cool.

Step 5: Slice, chop, dice and shred as desired. In the end you should have something like this:

Step 6: Put into serving size containers. We were all out so I used freezer bags. For us, 1 cup of chopped beef does about 4 hamburger buns ~approx dinner for two).

Step 7: Freeze.

Step 8: Once removed from freezer for use, just warm the beef slightly. Then add a squirt of BBQ sauce as desired and finish warming.

You should end up with something like this:

Step 9: Serve on some buns (any buns) and eat.

The best part is that this is so easy in the front end, how much easier can it get but dumping everything in the crock pot and walking away. Yet it is so awesome on the dinner table, tastes like a BBQ joint.

In the end one 4 pound roast yielded us 9 baggies (or 9 dinners).

Home Made Bread:

Warm home made bread… It doesn’t get any better than that. We recently got a new breadmaker. This got me started on a quest for a great white bread recipe both on and off the internet.

A couple weeks in and about a half a dozen loaves of bread and I finally found a great all purpose recipe. Whether using a bread maker or the oven, the recipe is the same… it just depends on whether or not you want to hand knead for 10 minutes or let the machine do it. I choose the machine.

Here’s the recipe:

Makes a 2 pound loaf on regular bread setting:

• 4 cups bread flour
• 2 tbsp dry milk
• 2 tbsp butter (we used margarine)
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 packet of breadmaker yeast – about 2 tsp
• 1.25 cups of room temp water

Very simple, put the water in the bottom, add the dry goods on top. Dimple the dry goods with your finger and dump the yeast in the dimple. Press start and walk away… or if you prefer to make it manually… knead away!

Stay tuned… More great bread recipes to come!