Mealtime with Meredith: The 3-minute breakfast sandwich

As school gets busier, my breakfasts get… well, creative.

In the past few weeks, my breakfast has largely consisted of a few rushed spoonfuls of vanilla Greek yogurt straight from my 32-oz carton and chugging a mug of Keurig black coffee.

This lackluster combination is the direct result of me choosing 10 minutes of extra sleep over 10 minutes of preparing breakfast.

On days where I might not get lunch until the mid-afternoon, the rushed Greek yogurt and black coffee combo is seldom enough to be filling.

While I can buy a Starbucks breakfast sandwich on campus, I often enjoy eating my breakfast as I’m getting ready in my apartment.

Thus, for this week’s food column, I challenged myself to come up with a breakfast option that is filling, delicious and easy to cook up.

When deciding what to meal prep, I gave myself three criteria points.

First, whatever dish I make must take up limited fridge space, as I share a fridge with three other people who also need space for their meals.

Second, the dish must use only one pan and take less than five minutes from start to finish to clean up.

Third, it must be high-protein and enough calories to sustain me through my morning classes without needing a snack break.

With this criteria, I decided to create a spicy fried-egg sandwich with brown sugar and honey turkey bacon on white bread.

Although it is possible to meal-prep the eggs in advance, I prefer the taste of freshly-cooked eggs to reheated eggs, so I decided the only element I would prepare in advance would be the bacon.

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I bought 1 pound of turkey bacon and cut each piece in half. In a large pan over medium-high heat, I added the bacon and drizzled a tablespoon of honey and another tablespoon of brown sugar to add some depth to its flavor.

When the turkey bacon reached a crispy consistency, I removed it from the heat and refrigerated it in an airtight container. Thus, in the morning, the only thing I would need to do is toast my bread, heat the bacon and fry my egg.

To fry my eggs, I heated 1 tbsp of butter over high heat and cracked one medium egg. I let the egg cook until the edges were solidified — usually about a minute — and then flipped it. Once flipped, I added jalapeno-flavored everything bagel seasoning, salt and pepper. Then, I put two half-strips of bacon in the microwave for 30 seconds.

When the microwave was done, I grabbed my toast from the toaster, added the fried egg, drizzle Cholula hot sauce on top and then the turkey bacon. To add variance day-by-day, I would switch up the hot sauce, add different cheeses, or add strawberry jam.

In total, the breakfast sandwich took me three minutes to prepare.

I find that cooking the bacon in advance incentivizes me to cook in the mornings because I know that I already have the most complicated ingredient pre-cooked.

Additionally, I find the taste of the sandwich to be far superior to a Starbucks double-smoked bacon breakfast sandwich, as mine has more seasonings and extra flavor from the everything bagel seasoning, brown sugar, honey and Cholula sauce.

For someone looking to pre-make a batch of breakfast sandwiches and have no cooking required in the mornings, opting for English muffins or tortillas instead of toast and cutting squares out of scrambled eggs cooked in a sheet pan can make this meal easily freezable and reheatable.

Overall, by pre-making breakfast ingredients, I have found a delicious breakfast solution that offers a much more filling meal than my Greek yogurt scoops.

perkin16@miamioh.edu