It’s been almost two years since I made Breakfast Pies and swore that I would be adding them to my “Cook a bunch on Sunday and eat for the rest of the week” routine. Yesterday, I made them again for the second time. Twice in nearly as many years! This may be a personal procrastination record.

But I need to wean myself off my (multigrain-)waffles-with-peanut-butter habit and get back to the Second Breakfast model that served me so well during my last running phase. Breakfast 1: Le smoothie (which I’ve decided gets the male pronoun because of the frightful amount of spinach in it. As with most other nouns, I cannot explain why French spinach is male.). Please don’t assign any particular vegetarian virtue to the amount of spinach in my smoothie — you can disguise the taste and color of nearly any amount of spinach with a handful of frozen blueberries and a squirt of honey.

Breakfast 2: Oatmeal. Booooring.

Enter the Breakfast Pies. Or, Breakfast Cups. (Or, “Breakfast Yum-Yums,” if, instead of a Pie/Cup, you get a buttermilk biscuit with meat and cheese pressed into it.) (Which looks like a Pie. Whatevs.)

Looking back, that Breakfast Pie recipe seems ever so much more complicated than it needs to be. Here’s the quick version:

• Buy a roll of pre-made buttermilk biscuits.
• Gather together stuff that sounds like it’d be good with a biscuit. Bell peppers, sweet italian chicken sausage, minced onion, shrimp, mushrooms, pepperoni, leftover chicken…the world is your oyster! (Hmmm, oysters…?) If you’re trying to balance the fact that you’re shoving it all into a buttermilk biscuit, stick to lean protein and veggies.
• Chop and brown/saute whatever you’ve selected. Set aside to cool.
• Press each biscuit into a muffin pan and spread the dough up the sides to create the cup. If you have 8 biscuits in the roll and only 6 muffin cups (curse that fancy silicone pan!), generously decide to split the biscuits evenly with your partner, because 4 and 4* on the counter looks less stingy than 6 and 2, even though you’re pretty sure that screws with your “Eat for the rest of the week” plan. (Note to self: Buy more biscuits.)
• Spoon your mixture evenly into the muffin cups…about 3/4 full.  (Got some leftover sautéed stuff? Who needs biscuits? NOMNOMNOM.)
• Sprinkle a little shredded cheese on top of the mixture en biscuit.
• Drizzle a little egg substitute (or basic omelet mix) over each. Even just a tablespoon or so will help hold all your sautéed stuff in.
• Bake using biscuit directions + 2 minutes or until “egg” looks set.

For anyone worried that Buttermilk Biscuit = Diet Buster, these things net out somewhere between 250 and 300 calories each, depending on what you stuff into ’em (1 biscuit from the Trader Joe’s roll is 190 calories). I’m pretty sure you could cut and reshape the pre-made biscuits and double the batch pretty easily, too — the biscuits are more substantial than they really need to be for this “recipe” — but I haven’t tried it yet.

Actually, I should do that next time. It’s only Monday, and I’m out of Breakfast Cups. Back to oatmeal…

* It was brunch. I was lazy. Also, he’s allergic to eggs and we don’t know yet what that means for fakey eggs. The formula for Graham’s 4 is this:

• Set biscuits on airbake pan.
• Press browned + cooled sweet Italian chicken sausage chunks into biscuit…estimate at least one chunk per bite.
• Sprinkle with cheese (low-fat mozz, in this case).
• Bake according to biscuit directions.
• Think to self, “Hey, it’s got to be a little better than a McDonald’s sausage biscuit, right?”