Make Your Own: Egg Mugs

What could be easier or tastier than whipping up eggs in a mug for breakfast? It saves you money too. Let’s walk through this process.

Sure, you could buy this:

But please notice the price on it. It doesn’t sound too bad, right? The peppers, onions, potatoes and cheese are already in the cup. Just crack the egg and go. Seems simple, aside from any ethics you might or might not have about the disposable container and the environment.

However, let’s look at a different scenario, still embracing convenience. Say we buy the bag of frozen hash browns, a bag of shredded cheddar, and a bag of frozen peppers and onions. We’ll price everything out at Walmart for the consistency in general pricing.

But Momma! That $8.22 is so much more than the $2.28 for the single use cup! Sure. But with those ingredients, you can make 18 servings of egg mugs. If you bought 18 of those just crack egg cups, you’d spend…

$41.04

Another way to look at it, by buying the ingredients for the mug, you’re spending 45.6 cents each serving. (Before the egg, across the board, in all the mathing. I don’t know your eggs!)

And you can actually drive that price down further by chopping your own veggies and shredding your own cheese. But I worked on the assumption that if you’re grabbing the pre-packaged cup, convenience is an important factor to you.

On the subject of convenience, I understand that measuring out the ingredients in the morning might just be too much extra effort. In such a case, I do advise prepping them in advance. Snack-sized storage bags should more than accommodate the quantities of ingredients involved. Just dole them out into baggies when you get home with the groceries, then shove them in the freezer.

If it’s the convenience of being able to take the meal with you, then dispose of the container, I’ve got a better trick for you:

Load it in a tortilla.

Edible and tasty. Nothing to throw away because you’ve safely stowed it in your belly bowl. If you happen to eat out of the mug at home, there’s the added benefit of finding joy in using your fun and funky mugs rather than looking at corporate packaging. Or at the very least, you’ll have something nicer to look at while cooking it, before loading into your tortilla. You do have fun mugs, yeah?

Now for the math-y math numbers, I didn’t take into account added proteins like ham, bacon, or sausage. For those items, depending on the importance of convenience versus cost, I advise a package of diced ham, pre-cooked sausage links, or a baggie of bacon bits. Naturally you can chop and cook your own proteins if you want them and are driven by price. And if price is the deciding factor for you, getting the sausage and frozen peppers at Dollar Tree is absolutely the better price.

I’ve included a recipe below on how to cook the egg mugs with the base ingredients listed above.