Breakfast Burritos

This is a brunch, lunch or late afternoon filler-upper when you need that classic comfort food to get you through the day. It’s filling and yet surprisingly light as it gives you just enough fuel to get you through that afternoon hike, but doesn’t leave you feeling sluggish or bloated. It’s the meal we rush home to make after a weekend morning soccer match. It has all of the wholesome breakfast foods wrapped in a burrito and made from fresh, whole foods; it never disappoints. Classic, simple, satisfying.

A cast iron skillet is my tool of choice for this recipe, but a wok works too. Set that baby on the stove at medium heat. Full disclosure, the potatoes are what takes the longest to cook and you want to make sure they get a crust which means I usually end up using a cast iron skillet and a wok and spreading the potatoes out in two cooking vessels. So, set two of those babies on the stove at medium heat and put 2 pieces of bacon in each vessel. While the bacon is cooking, dice potatoes. Halfway through dicing your potatoes, flip the bacon so it cooks evenly on both sides. When bacon is fully cooked (3-4 minutes), take them out of the cooking vessels and put them on a plate with a paper towel, but not before letting every last drop of the bacon fat drip off the bacon and back into the skillet. Bacon fat is cooking gold. It will infuse flavor into the potatoes as they cook.

Once you’ve removed the bacon from the cooking vessels, add half of the potatoes to each of them. You should hear a sizzle right as the potatoes hit the bacon fat if you’ve kept the bacon fat at medium heat. In order to brown the potatoes and thus create a nice flavorful crust, you’ll want to use a wooden spoon to spread the tiny potato pieces evenly across each cooking vessel and then . . . let them sit and cook. Wait 3-5 minutes before scraping the bottom of the pan, mixing them up a bit and spreading them out again. Repeat this step several times, adding olive oil if the potatoes are sticking too much. I season potatoes with seasoning salt 2-3 times as they are cooking because seasoning salt is very flavorful and potatoes are hard to flavor. That’s why I cook them in bacon fat and season them with seasoning salt — a double whammy of flavor coating! This step requires patience. The potatoes take about 15-20 minutes on the stove before they are fully cooked all the way through and flavorful. So, while you are letting them sit and in between stirrings, prepare the other burrito add-ins.

Get the eggs ready to crack, chop the green onions. Get the cheese, hot sauce of choice (in my house it’s Tapatio), tortilla and sour cream. A healthy replacement we use a lot of the time for sour cream is Greek yogurt. It’s healthier and you really can’t taste a whole lot of difference.

After 15-20 minutes of repeatedly letting the potatoes sit for 3-5 minutes at a time and mixing them up again, you’re ready to add the eggs. Move the potatoes to the side of each cooking vessel to make space for the eggs. Because I don’t want to add more clean-up time, I crack the eggs straight into the cooking vessels after adding a little bit of olive oil. Once you’ve added two eggs to each vessel, season each with a pinch of salt and pepper. Stir eggs in each vessel until they’re a little wet still, but mostly cooked.

Mix eggs and potatoes together, and then add bacon, breaking into little bits, a handful of Mexican blend cheese and green onion. Turn off heat so as not to overcook.

Push the vessels to the back burners and use the front burners for warming the tortillas. No pan needed to warm tortillas because if you’re a busy mom like me, the less clean-up, the better. Have plates ready so that you can quickly put the warm tortillas on each plate and distribute the potato/egg mix in a thin (or thick depending on how hungry you are!) row in the middle of the tortilla. Add a row of sour cream (or Greek yogurt) on top of the mix, and sprinkle a bit more cheese for good measure! Fold the edges on either side of the row of the potato/egg mix, and then tuck one of the big flaps over and then under the mix and roll into a burrito! Voila! And there you have a hearty, warm bundle of goodness to enjoy!