Egg Night

One of the biggest challenges I face as a mom is figuring out a decent, inexpensive and quick meal to prepare when my husband is out of town. Usually these meals consist of pizza, cheese tortellinis with sauce, or frozen store bought foods. Being that I'm on a diet of late- that carby, carb, carb stuff is NOT what I need to be eating. So, while we still do it once a week usually, I learned a new meal trick thanks to one of my friends from church.

Many of you know my struggle with the Incredible Edible Egg. Ever since I started my lifestyle change in January, I have struggled with forcing down the recommended protein provided by eggs. I can honestly say, I've not been a fan since I was about five. Thanks to my husband's tutelage, I've been able to learn to cook a decent omelet, and I find that if I throw enough interesting stuff in there with the egg, I can handle it.

So, my friend said that she occasionally uses eggs as her "go to" meal. She serves her family a scrambled egg, with steamed organic frozen broccoli and frozen mango pieces on the side. I tried this, and it was actually a hit in my house. The fact that it took about 10 minutes (with minimal clean up) to prepare was a hit with me. Ever since then, I've added egg night to our menu about once a week when Martin is out of town. Sometimes we'll make egg tacos- basically scrambled eggs with salsa and cheese on a tortilla, other times it's just omelets.

Tonight, I decided to use this go to meal with a little variation based on what I had on hand in the fridge.

Here's what I used:
2 cukes from the garden
Homemade dressing (cider vinegar, honey, and oil with herbs)
feta cheese
3 eggs
leftover cooked sausage (you don't have to have a ton of it- I just used about 1-2 Tbsp per omelet)
1/3 bunch of kale, washed and torn
olive oil, salt, pepper
Parmesan cheese
Grapes

I sliced up the cukes from the garden, and added the leftover salad dressing I had made a while back, along with a shake of feta cheese. Meanwhile, I grabbed the kale that I had leftover that was washed, and torn into bite size pieces, coated it with Olive oil from my Misto sprayer, sprinkled it with pepper and parmesan cheese, and popped it in the oven at 375 degrees for 14 minutes. Then I made the boys omelets out of the sausage and cheese we have left over from breakfast the other day (I made my omelet sans sausage). Forget 30 minute meals- this was about a 15 minute meal. I have a pan, a bowl, and a cookie sheet to clean up.

My kids gobbled it down, because they love it all (they adore kale chips). Not pictured- we added some grapes for fruit, and topped the meal off with a scoop of low calorie vanilla ice cream on a cone (Coen had a home-made smoothie pop instead- more on that later) for dessert.

So, I didn't actually write down the prices on everything here because I didn't know I'd be writing this blog, but by my estimation, I fed the three of us tonight for approximately $2.50-3.00 at most (not including dessert). That would be less than $1.00 per person in less time than it would probably take me to run through the drive thru.

I'm full, they're full, and I don't feel really guilty for what we ate. For my money, this rocks. And the egg's not half bad either.