Perfected Egg Cups (An On The Go Breakfast)

This is the best dang egg cup out there! Period. This delicious prosciutto egg cup makes breakfast quick and nutritious.

Finally!! I have found the right combination of Whole30 healthy ingredients to come up with the perfect on-the-go morning meal. I have been experimenting with egg cups over the past few months, each time thinking the new version was good but not THAT GOOD. You know the drill; bacon wrapped or sausage-filled, a variety of vegetables, nutritional yeast/no nutritional yeast, more egg/less egg. They have always turned out one note, salty. I was looking for a mostly savory egg cup elevated by a subtle sweetness and spice.

Perfected Egg Cup

Here are some of the problems and fixes that I came up with…

1. Bacon. We all love it. I tried it various ways; cooking and chopping it up and putting it in the egg cup, or placing raw bacon in the muffin tin so that it serves as the cup, or semi-cooking the bacon and placing it in the muffin tin so that it acts as the cup. When mixed in with the rest of the ingredients, the bacon flavor got lost. In the past, when I used it as the base for the cup (raw) it never came out crispy enough-there is nothing I hate more than undercooked bacon. In further past attempts, I semi-cooked the bacon and used as a base for the cup, but found it difficult to work with and I had to use more than one piece to hold the egg in. And it always seemed too thick. Enter prosciutto, a thinly sliced dry-cured Italian ham that packs a lot of flavor in a thin package. Since it is so thin, it crisps up perfectly when cooked in the muffin tin. My first attempt was a HUGE FAIL. I criss-crossed the prosciutto in the muffin tin and it came out WAY too salty. You have to use this cured meat sparingly. So I decided to just use one piece to wrap around the sides of the muffin tin. Although it did overlap onto the bottom, it was fine because it held the sweet potato round perfectly in place.
2. Sweet potatoes. I wanted to enhance the salty flavor of the prosciutto and I love serving eggs over sweet potatoes so it seemed like a no-brainer. I cut the sweet potato into rounds and seared the sides in a little ghee. I wanted them to be a bit crisp and cooked through. They served as the perfect counterpoint to the salt of the meat and held the cup’s base together. It also added just the right amount of heathy starch to keep you full for hours.
3. Greens. I try to include some sort of green in every dish I cook, whether they are in the dish itself or on the side. At first,  I was using spinach in EVERY egg cup but it seemed to weigh down the flavor. So I changed it up with some fresh watercress. This was the sharp and bright flavor that was missing in all of my other egg cups.
4. Veggies. In past variations, I used bell peppers, Italian frying peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, asparagus, and mushrooms (I like to try to sneak these in where I can because they decrease chances of breast cancer by 80%, according to Dr. Fuhrman). I think any of these would still work, except the tomatoes. I really don’t like the flavor of tomatoes when cooked in to egg cups, plus they make the cup messy to eat. Maybe use uncooked cherry tomatoes on the side. For my perfected egg cups, I decided to use brussel sprouts because I was looking for a solid, slightly nutty base. It worked out great! I also added some shallots for another layer of aromatic sweetness.
5. Spice. I hadn’t thought of using a spicy flavor profile in past cups which seems so counterintuitive because that is part of the formula for so many amazing dishes. Our garden is bursting with red serrano peppers so I threw some in to this concoction. Thankful for that decision because that layer of spice was EVERYTHING!!!
6. Salt. Watch the added salt in this recipe. The prosciutto is extremely salty so I only added a bit of salt and pepper to the veggies at they cooked on the stove. I did not add salt to the eggs at all.
   

   Layers of Perfected Egg Cup

Healthy additions…

I strongly recommend these little bundles of culinary joy! To make a complete Whole30 meal, you have to add a plated fat. I highly recommend topping these little bad boys with my modified No Crumbs Left Romesco Sauce. Otherwise, a side of avocado would fit the bill.