Bake Sausage In A Muffin Tin For A Bite-Sized Breakfast Bowl

Breakfast bowls come in all varieties, from the healthy kind made with oatmeal (here's a recipe using ingredients sourced from Trader Joe's) or fruit and yogurt (another one of our breakfast bowl recipes highlights the trendy superfruit açaí) and the perhaps slightly less nutritious but very tasty fast food kind like this sausage, egg, potato, and biscuit extravaganza from Wendy's. If you prefer a less carby, more meaty option, though, we've got a great idea for you -– and no, you won't have to go to Arby's since it's not the only one that has the meats. Instead, you can head for your supermarket freezer aisle and pick up a tube of ground sausage meat as this ingredient can be used to form the basis of a mini breakfast bowl.

Once you have the sausage, the other important component of this breakfast recipe is a muffin pan. Take your sausage (thawed, of course) and divide it up into as many balls as you have muffin cups (12, for a standard pan). Press each ball into the cup so it covers the bottom and comes up the sides, making sure to leave a generous indent in the middle. Depending on what you want in your sausage bowl, you can now either blind bake the cups (in this case, it's not a mistake if you don't add weights to this non-pastry crust) or else add the fillings before they go into the oven.

Eggs make a great filling for these sausage cups, and they can bake in the oven at the same time as the sausages cook. You can go one of two ways with the baked eggs -– either scramble them first or crack a whole egg into each cup. The latter will only work if you are using standard or larger-sized muffin pans, but scrambled eggs can be used to fill even mini sausage muffin cups. Add cheese and maybe some cooked potatoes, onions, or peppers (or any combination thereof), then bake the cups (or mini bowls, if you will) until the eggs are set and the sausage is completely cooked. This may take as long as half an hour at 350 F or as little as 10 minutes at 400 F, but you'll probably need to do some checking and adjust the time as necessary to determine exactly how long it will take for your particular oven, size of pan, and thickness of sausage layer.

If you decide to go eggless, you can just bake the empty sausage cups until the meat is cooked. Start checking at around 10 minutes, tacking on additional cooking time as necessary. Once the sausage is cooked, you can fill the bowls with cheese and/or cooked vegetables. The residual heat may be enough to melt the cheese, or you could put the pan back in the oven for another minute or so to help speed things along.