Meals in a Jar: Breakfast Taquitos

Breakfast is a tricky meal to plan in your food storage.  Most people I know eat a variety of not storage friendly foods for breakfast, like cold cereal or fresh fruit smoothies.  My family really likes to eat eggs in the morning which is great for my food storage because I can absolutely store eggs.   We really love the scrambled egg mix (or the Ova egg crystals).

The recipe based on a fresh recipe from Our Best Bites, and it translates beautifully into a meal in a jar recipe.  You will need fresh tortillas to make it.  Tortillas can easily be made from scratch.

Breakfast Taquitos

Printable Recipe

 

·         9 T Scrambled Egg Mix

·         1/4 C Sour Cream powder

·         1/4 tsp kosher salt

·         1/8 tsp black pepper

·         1/4 tsp garlic powder

·         3/4 C Monterrey Jack cheese FD

·         2 T mixed bell peppers (dehydrated)

·         2 T onions FD

·         2 T Thrive chopped cilantro (optional)

 Needed for making

·         1 ½ cups cold water

·         8 6″ flour tortillas

·         cooking spray or olive oil

 Instructions:

·         To create a meal in a jar mix; layer ingredients in a quart sized mason jar.  Add an oxygen absorber and seal. 

When ready to make the meal

·         Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

·         Mix scrambled egg powder, sour cream powder, salt, pepper, and garlic powder and COLD water, let mixture sit to rehydrate about 10 minutes.

·         When skillet is hot, add egg mixture to pan. Using a rubber spatula, gently scrape bottom of pan and fold eggs over to scramble. Remove from heat when slightly undercooked.

·         Warm tortillas in microwave to ease rolling process or heat in skillet with butter or oil. Working with a few  tortillas at a time, place a scant 1/4 C egg mixture into the center of each one and roll up into a cylinder.

·         Place rolled tortillas on prepared baking sheet, seam-side down, so they are not touching each other. When all tortillas are rolled and filled, lightly spray tops with cooking spray, or lightly brush with olive oil. Bake for 15 minutes or until edges are golden brown and crisp.

Great Harvest Fruit Bars

I love a good bakery.  Sadly there isn’t one in the little town I live in.  There are a couple of great bakeries in the next town over.  My kids know that anytime we go to the nursery to get seeds or fertilizer that we can stop and buy a treat at Great Harvest Bakery.   My kids always choose the mint chocolate chip cookies, but Great Harvest has a variety of delightful baked goods.   One of the most beautiful is the Fruit Bars.   Fruit Bars have a delicious cookie crust and are topped with fruit.   

They always look amazing. 

I have been looking for a recipe for Great Harvest Fruit Bars and I found that the actual recipe from Great Harvest is a closely guarded secret.  But they do have to publish the Nutrition facts which contain a list of ingredients. 

So what is in the magical Fruit Bars?  Brown Sugar, Fresh Ground 100% Whole Wheat Flour, Blueberries, Marionberries, Butter, Raspberries, Rolled Oats, Coconut, Eggs, Water, Baking Soda, and Baking Powder.

They also have a 450 calories each.  That is pretty intense for a fruity dessert.   I decided my fruit bars were not going to have quite so many calories.  To reduce the calories I substituted applesauce for a lot of the fat in the recipe.  To be clear even with the reduced fat these are still a “sometimes” food.

In baking it is pretty common to substitute applesauce for fat.  It is a pretty straight forward switch.  Replace half the amount of butter in your recipe with plain unsweetened applesauce; if the recipe calls for one cup of butter, use half a cup of butter and ½ cup of apple sauce.  If you don’t mind a denser moister product you can replace all the butter with applesauce. 

I’ve been doing this for years but I never loved having just a little bit of applesauce hanging around in the fridge after I used part of the container for baking.  Enter dehydrated apples sauce.   Dehydrated apples sauce is tiny bits of apples, they are approximately the size of kosher salt, and when mixed with water they rehydrate into a chunky apple sauce.   So how do I do it?

How to substitute dehydrate apple sauce 

for butter in baked goods:

For 1 cup applesauce:  1 cup dehydrated apples sauce + 1 cup hot water. 

Combine and then let sit until water is absorbed.

Use to replace ½ the butter (or if your daring all the butter) in baked goods recipes.  

Great Harvest Fruit Bars (Lower Fat)

printable recipe

½ cup butter, softened

1/2 cup Apple Sauce, plain unsweetened.  (I use ½ dehydrated applesauce rehydrated in ½ cup hot water)

1/2 cup Brown Sugar

1 egg

1 tsp. vanilla

½ cup coconut

1/4 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cups rolled oat

1 cup or more frozen fruit (cherries, raspberries, rhubarb, black berries, peaches, etc.)

 *Note if you want you can use fresh fruit or Freeze Dried Fruit.   But know that the frozen fruit releases a lot of moisture as it cooks and makes the bars very moist. Whatever fruit you use be sure to use moist plump fruit.  If using freeze dried fruit rehydrate completely and add to the bars while still quite damp.

1.     Combine butter, sugar, apple sauce, vanilla and eggs.  Mix to combine.

2.     Add remaining ingredients, mix until combined.   The dough will be thick like cookie dough.

3.     Add ¾ of dough to an  8 x 8 pan. Pressing dough dough into the pan.  Sprinkle frozen fruit on the top and the sprinkle the remaining dough on top of that.  

4.     Bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes.

Mix and Match Muffin Mix

Most Sunday mornings I bake muffins.  There is something delicious about hot muffins with butter.    The only problem is that on Sunday morning I’m lazy.  I want to make something delicious but easy.  Mix and Match Muffins to the rescue.  I really love to be able to dump, mix and bake.  So during the week I make up a couple of these dry mixes and then on Sunday morning I can be a little lazy and still have wonderful muffins. 

This mix allows you to make whatever kind of muffin you want.  Just add the mix in’s you want and like magic you have blueberry, banana chocolate chip, or cranberry.  

FYI:  This muffin batter is thick, really thick.  don't worry and don't add extra water.  It is supposed to be thick and will bake up beautifully. 

Mix and Match Muffins

Printable Recipe

Recipe adapted from:  Good Cheap Eats

The Dry Ingredients (This is what goes in the mix):

3 cups all-purpose flour

½ cup whole wheat flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup brown sugar

3 Tablespoons Non Fat Dry Milk powder

½ cup sour cream powder

2 Tablespoons whole egg powder

If you are preparing the mix in advance combine all the dry ingredients in a zip top bag, label well, remove excess air, and seal.

 

The Wet Ingredients (Add these when you are ready to bake the muffins):

½ cup oil

1 ½ cup water

1 Teaspoon extract (I usually use vanilla)

1 ½ cups of the “mix ins” of your choice.   

Possible mix ins:   

• Mashed bananas
• Blueberries
• Chocolate chips
• Raspberries
• Chopped cranberries 

In a large mixing bowl combine flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugar, dry milk, sour cream powder, and egg powder.  

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Line a muffin tins with papers or spray with non stick cooking spray.  

Add the wet ingredients to the dry, gently mix until blended.  The batter will be thick and lumpy.   Gently fold in the mix-ins.  

For 12 large muffins, fill muffin cups completely, even mound up past the top of the muffin cup.  For 18 small muffins fill the muffin cups almost full. 

Bake 25-35 minutes, depending on how much you will them.