Ready for a super easy, stupid simple low carb breakfast recipe? Me too.

Something happened in my first pregnancy that changed my life forever: I started eating protein for breakfast. Since my teenage years, I had sort of given up on breakfast or else eaten carb-heavy breakfasts that left me hungry an hour later. Usually I skipped breakfast altogether and ate my first meal about 1pm. When I was pregnant, skipping meals made me nauseated. I HAD to eat. And what I ate mattered more than ever. I realized without eggs or another form of protein to kick off my day, I really struggled through the morning.

If you’re like me, however, you might find that eggs are a little…egg-y. I love them, but I need to have them a certain way or at least hide that egg-y-ness. I love the yolks runny or having them mixed with something like sausage or cheese or—my favorite—in a breakfast sandwich. But as I’m doing Nutrisystem and generally trying to eat more naturally low carb food (as opposed to those processed “low carb” foods), I am trying to find alternatives to the breakfast sandwich.

Enter this low carb breakfast recipe: Egg Muffins.

I haven’t done a Stupid Simple recipe in a while, so let me remind you. These are recipes so simple that I’m not writing a recipe. So here is how you can make your own Low Carb Breakfast by way of Egg Muffins.

Get a muffin tin.

Spray with non-stick spray.

Put a slice of deli meat (I like ham) in each muffin space, pressed in like a cup.

Crack an egg in each.

Top with a little shredded cheese (I like swiss or sharp cheddar).

Bake in the oven at 400 for about 20 minutes.

BOOM.

The great thing about these is that they give you a lot of protein, aren’t super egg-y, and are ready in 20 minutes. Plus, if you make a whole batch, you can save them in the fridge and eat them as a great protein snack or every morning for breakfast. I zap them for 30 seconds in the microwave and they are good to go.

Do you have a favorite breakfast food? (If I’m not going low carb, I love crepes or belgian waffles or even kolaches.) Oh, and coffee. ALWAYS COFFEE. I’m linking up with Mouthwatering Mondays from A Southern Fairytale this week. Head over fore more goodness!

Check out some of my other Stupid Simple Recipes below!

Roasted Red Peppers

Dutch Baby

Roasted Garlic

Ham and Cheese Kolaches

Frozen Fruit Salad

Chicken Salad Apple Sandwiches

Bacon Wrapped Asparagus

Everyone needs a good chip now and again. Having access to great Mexican restaurants here in Texas, I’ve grown very picky about mine. Store-bought chips usually just don’t cut it. Enter these simple homemade tortilla chips. The upside is that they are easy to make, tasty, and healthier than the fried chips. The downside is that so far I haven’t found a way to preserve them. Which means that if you don’t eat them within an hour or two of making them, they get chewy. No bueno. But that simply means you need to eat them right out of the oven.

These fit into the Stupid Simple category because you don’t need a recipe. Just a few ingredients and an oven. You can snag soft CORN (not flour) tortillas wherever they sell tortillas in your grocery store. For me, it’s usually the bread aisle or sometimes with the Mexican food. The yellow work better than the white, but the white ones weren’t bad. They didn’t crisp up as well. Cut the tortillas into fourths, then put them in a bowl and gently hand mix with 1 Tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil. When they are evenly covered, spread in a single layer on a cookie sheet and sprinkle with kosher (or regular) salt. Bake at 350 between 12-15 minutes. You want them to be crispy, but not burnt or brown.

Serve these immediately while warm or within an hour or two. If I come up with a way to keep them crispy longer, I will tell you. The reality is that even if you use two cookie sheets at the same time, you will likely eat the whole batch in one sitting anyway. (Not that I did that or anything. Definitely not two nights in a row.) I paired these with my Hatch Chile Salsa. AMAZING.

Homemade tortilla chips are cheap, lower calorie, and delicious. You can’t go wrong. Oh! And they are simple. Stupid simple.

Want more Stupid Simple? Try these recipes on for size:
Roasted Red Peppers

Dutch Baby

Roasted Garlic

Ham and Cheese Kolaches

Frozen Fruit Salad

Chicken Salad Apple Sandwiches

Bacon Wrapped Asparagus
  I’m linking up with A Southern Fairytale’s Mouthwatering Mondays. Go check it out for lovely recipes. You might not want to go when you’re hungry…

In today’s episode of Stupid Simple, I’m going to tell you how to roast garlic. But first: a story. Stop me if you’ve heard it. Oh, wait! You can’t stop me. Read on, friends.

Once upon a visit to my parents’ house in Virginia, Rob and I made salsa. Our go-to homemade recipe actually came from someone in North Carolina, not Texas, which seems a little odd. As we both tend to do, we used it as a base and ran with it. This meant adding a lot (a LOT) of garlic. My mother swears that the next morning as she passed our closed door, she could smell the garlic seeping out of our skin. She still talks about this, shaking her head.

She found it gross. I find it kind of awesome.

To keep the garlic theme going (and to one-up any claims you might think you have on most garlic-y), when Rob and I went on vacation a few years ago to New Smyrna in Florida, we ate at a restaurant called The Garlic. Because people like us HAVE to eat in a restaurant called The Garlic.  It was a delicious experience, but the appetizer was the most memorable: whole heads of garlic, roasted and ready to be slathered on warm bread like butter. We absolutely asked for a second head of roasted garlic. I wonder if the people in the hotel where we were staying walked by our door in the morning and wondered, “What is that SMELL??” I can only hope.

So let’s talk how to roast garlic. It’s easy. So easy, in fact, that it falls into my Stupid Simple category.

Preheat the oven to 400. Take a head of garlic. Chop off just the top, keeping the head together (as opposed to separating the cloves). Make a sort of cup out of foil and place the garlic in, the chopped part facing up. Pour 1 tsp olive oil over the top (I always use extra virgin) and seal up the foil. Place the foiled garlic in the oven for 40 or so minutes. My new gas oven cooks a little quicker and the garlic was totally done by 40 minutes. If you do too much, it starts to get crispy around the edges, so peek at it at around 40-45 minutes. It should look soft and darker than when you started, but you can see in my pictures that a little bit of mine was getting too done and chewy. (I still ate it, of course.)

BOOM. Roasted garlic.

What to do with this? Put it on bread. Put it on pizza. Put it in pasta or in sauces. Put it in mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving. Just put it in your mouth. I love garlic, but raw is a little too potent. (Read about what Sawyer said the first time he tried garlic.) Roasting brings out the sweetness of garlic without burning your face off. It will also make your house smell AMAZING.

Want to know where else you can use it? In my Hatch Chile Salsa (coming up this week). Yum! One recommendation I have: make more than one at a time.

Want more Stupid Simple ideas? Click below.

Roasted Red Peppers

Dutch Baby

Ham and Cheese Kolaches

Frozen Fruit Salad

Chicken Salad Apple Sandwiches

Bacon Wrapped Asparagus

Now that I have four kids (count ’em: FOUR), dinner is insane. Actually, dinner TIME is insane. Dinner itself is sad. We have been living on meals people have given us, frozen stuff, and meals that are just random things from the fridge. Look, everyone! Here is a dinner of cottage cheese, raspberries, some chicken, and a piece of cheese! Bon appetit! With this in mind, I need all the Stupid Simple I can get for the kitchen. If you’re new, Stupid Simple is my series on things that are just what the name sounds like. So simple you don’t even really need a recipe. Today I’m sharing Bacon Wrapped Asparagus.

Here’s the recipe: Wrap asparagus in bacon and bake it in the oven at 400 until the bacon is cooked. Sprinkle with pepper (and perhaps a little salt on the asparagus) and eat.

See? Stupid simple.

A few tips for prep: wash the asparagus and break off the ends, which are really tough. I usually break mine by hand and it’s about 1/4 to  1/3 of the way up the stalk. If you want your kids to eat the whole thing, you might want to spread the bacon so it wraps more of the asparagus than I did. My boys usually love asparagus, but in this case, just wanted to eat the bacon. Boo! I think if I had made more of a full wrap, they might have eaten everything.

Mine baked for about 30-40 minutes. I’m still getting used to my new gas oven, so I’m not sure what your cooking time will be. (I also tend to get distracted by those 4 kids and forget how long things actually cook.) Set a timer for 30 minutes and then keep checking after that to see when the bacon loses that translucent color and looks done. The asparagus gets a little more cooked than I like if I’m cooking on the stove top, but it’s WRAPPED IN BACON so who cares.

This also works really well with those fancy long green beans that are sold in the freezer section at my Kroger. I’ve found them in the private selection brand and they are a little shorter than the asparagus. Both are fabulous.

Does it get more Stupid Simple than bacon wrapped asparagus? I don’t think so.

Need more inspiration? Here are other ideas from my Stupid Simple series.

Roasted Red Peppers

Dutch Baby

Ham and Cheese Kolaches

Frozen Fruit Salad

Chicken Salad Apple Sandwiches

 

When Rob and I moved into our new house, one of the first things we did was to disable the smoke detector. I know, I know. Danger, right? But the reality is this: even when I”m NOT burning something (and honestly, I’m often burning something), an alarm two feet from my stove is a bad, bad idea. (You don’t need to worry, though—my very smart sister-in-law forced me to put batteries back in, even if I don’t keep it next to the stove anymore.) For my latest stupid simple post, I’m going to walk you through the process of roasted peppers. And you’re going to want to take the batteries out of your kitchen smoke detector first.

Roasted peppers have a sweetness to them that raw peppers don’t and that peppers cooked in another way don’t. It is my favorite way to cook them, actually. I either want them raw or roasted. The end. If you’re not sure how to use roasted peppers, there are so many ways! Sauces! On pizza! Dips! In hummus! On pasta! Straight up!

The best thing is how simple this is. Simple enough to fall in my stupid simple category. I feel especially qualified for this one because basically to roast peppers, you burn them. And you know how I like to burn things. This is the kind of burning that is a GOOD burning, unlike most of my burning, which tends to be of my own skin or accidental.

You can look up other people’s methods of roasting peppers, but here is mine. Heat the oven to broil on high. Put a piece of foil on a baking sheet, cut the pepper in half and broil it until the outside is charred and burned. Black, even.  Remove the pan (and turn off the oven, lest you burn something ACCIDENTALLY). Run a dishtowel under cold water, wring it out, and place it on top of the peppers for ten minutes. The skin will easily peel free. Discard the charred skin and use the soft insides of the pepper.

BOOM. Roasted peppers.

My favorite is red, but I’ve roasted orange and yellow too, especially when I find them on sale, since that’s how I shop. Do you have a favorite way to use roasted peppers? Or something you’re looking forward to making with them?

Want more Stupid Simple? You’re welcome.

Stupid Simple Frozen Fruit Salad 

Stupid Simple Dutch Baby

Stupid Simple Ham & Cheese Kolaches

Stupid Simple Chicken Salad Apple Sandwiches

Stupid Simple Bacon-Wrapped Asparagus