Recipe - Egg Cups with Ham and Bacon

Gotta give credit to where credit's due. Once again, the inspiration came from a casual conversation at work. Our senior associate was heating up these little egg bites and I couldn't help but ask. She then told me about this phenomenon called... egg cups?! For people who want to stay healthy/get rid of old food in their fridge, this was a marvelous idea! Two seconds later, I was back at my desk researching a new recipe. I couldn't settle on one recipe I really liked so I just decided to do them all and let's see how it turned out...

Sweet peppers, we had only three in our fridge and the boyfriend helped diced all of those. We also took our mozzarella cheese, using our grater, shredded as much cheese as we thought we wanted to consume. I'd suggest about four tablespoonfuls and more if needed. 

Next, mushrooms! Using any types of mushrooms (we prefer portbello), dice those up as finely as you can as well. Note for the bacon - you can do this as your last step of preparing, depending on what you want to do with it. If you're putting the bacon bites into the egg cup, you can go ahead and fry it first and then use a paper towel and absorb the oil - then dice. If you are aiming for a bacon slice to be the base of the egg cup, be sure to put it in your muffin pan after you absorbed the oil so the circular shape sticks.

Next, use a vegetable of your choice (we used kale here), you're free to use spinach if you'd like. Dice it up really fine, a dab of olive oil and stir fry it in a pan with your mushrooms as well.

Add that all together after the veggies are sauteed! A pinch of garlic salt and fresh grounded pepper to taste, you can always add more later if it's not salty enough.

On to assembling the base of your egg cups, using deli ham (I know, this is so neat!), create a little pocket at the bottom of the pan and it'll naturally fold itself over to create this awesome little cup. For the bacon, as mentioned before, go ahead and put it as a circle around each of the individual muffin holders. Don't worry, eventually it'll stick in place and will look awesome for your egg cups!

These are my variations using the different ingredients I had and the ones we decided to experiment with. We have several kinds ranging from:

1) Ham, peppers, chicken

2) Ham, peppers, mushrooms, bacon

3) Bacon, mushrooms, chicken 

4) Hot dog, mushrooms, mozzarella cheese, kale

5) Bacon, mushrooms, mozzarella cheese, kale, ham

So as you can see, you can tailor and adjust what you'd like according to your taste and your preferences for what veggies/meat. All of them came out great though!

Pre-heat your oven to 390, crank them in for 10-12 minutes, you can check if it's good using a toothpick. If the toothpick you stick in the middle comes out clean, it's done. Also, since most people do not have two muffin pans, you'd need to time it right to have one batch finished and to prepping for the next batch.

These were the first ones I created with bacon and ham as the base. Add some fresh ground pepper on top to season. They came out so good!

Baconnnn, these bad boys were the boyfriend's favorite. 

For me, I really enjoyed these because I was able to put them in the fridge and heat them up in the microwave for 30 seconds as a quick breakfast/afternoon snack.

DELICIOUS :) Have fun, they're the perfect breakfast treat or a potluck favor! I am really glad I made them and hope you'll enjoy these delicious egg cups as well.

Prep time: 30 minutes

Cook time: 10-12 minutes each per batch

Overall: 1 hour