4 AM Letters and Mexican Breakfast Scramble

3:45 AM wake up

Have you ever woke up from a dream and instantly, your mind was racing and full of thoughts? That happened to me this morning… at 3:45am. It was too early to get up, so I lay in bed for another 15 minutes or so trying to fall back asleep. It was no use. I was awake.

I decided to take that time and empty out some of the thoughts racing through my head. I needed to pray.

I don’t know how you like to pray, but I really struggled with traditional prayers for most of my life. I’m not an auditory person, I’m visual. For this reason, everytime I would sit down to pray (as I was told that I should), I couldn’t. Or at least, it was never meaningful to me because I would get distracted mid-thought, or it would come out sounding scripted in my mind. Some people tried to help me by telling me it didn’t have to be fancy, I should just “talk to God.” That didn’t really work either. For a long time, I continued my spiritual journey with no clue as to what prayer could really be like for me.

Until…

One day when I was really frustrated with God and I decided to write him a letter. I may not be able to “talk to God” outloud or in my head, but when they’re words on a paper I have NO problems. Man! Have we had some good correspondances!

With restless thoughts swimming around in my head this morning, I decided God and I needed to talk – on paper. I wrote out my prayers for an hour. You know what’s funny? I surprised myself this morning. I would have never known how many things were bothering me or WHY they were bothering me if I hadn’t sat down to write it all out.

Writing is therapeutic for me. (That’s why I like the blog. :)

This morning, while you were still asleep, I was praying for you, my readers. I prayed for the blog, and that God might continue to teach me so that I could teach you. I prayed for my friend Matt. I prayed for my sister, Bri, and my brother, Jeremiah. I prayed for my parents.

And you know what? After an hour of praying/writing. I felt better. My mind was cleared. God and I had talked and He was going to take care of it for me. It’s off my shoulders.

With that relief, I decided to make some breakfast. This morning I woke up hungry for potatoes (for some unknown reason), so I decided to make Mexican Breakfast Scramble. It’s like scrambled eggs with hashbrowns, green chilis, tomatoes, and cheese. Nom nom.

Mexican Breakfast Scramble

First things first, in order to make delicious hashbrowns that are NOT from the freezer section of the grocery store and NOT full of grease, you need to par boil the potatoes first. For this I cut a medium (45gram carbohydrate) potato into 8 sections and boiled it until it was firm, but soft when I pierced it with a fork.

After this step, I took the potatoes and cubed them. Pretty easy, stuff… it looked like this.

With the potatoes cubed, I added 1 Tbsp peanut oil to a hot skillet. I used peanut oil because it has the highest smoke point – so you can get it pretty hot before it burns. I like my hashbrowns crispy, so I went with the hotter oil. After I added the potatoes to the pan, I also added 1/2 Tbsp of butter, right in the center of the pile of potatoes. From this point it’s very important that you DO NOT MOVE THE POTATOES. If you’re one of those people that gets an itching to stir everything, WALK AWAY. You don’t want to flip them or move them until they start to look like this on the bottom…

Once you’ve acheived this level of greatness, take them out of the skillet and move on to your eggs. I started with 4 eggs, but in order to drop the fat and cholesterol, I seperated two of them and threw away the yolks. All in all, I had 2 whole eggs and 2 egg whites. Add a splash of milk, some salt, and scramble it together in a bowl.

Pour the eggs into the hot skillet and add your chopped tomatoes and green chilis. My tomatoes consisted of one small Roma tomato, medium dice. My green chilis were just out of a little 4oz can, drained.

Once your eggs are mostly cooked, add the hashbrowns back in and top with 1 oz of sharp cheddar cheese. I like to use the sharp cheddar because I can use less for the same amount of flavor.

Top with some fresh cilantro and you are ready to eat!

A Note to my Diabetics: Observe the fact that every ingredient I used besides the potatoes, was a carb-free food. That way it makes counting carbohdyrates easy. If you know how much carbohydrate was in your potato, then you know the amount for the entire dish. I had a small/medium potato, so I would count that at 45 grams. If you’re trying to get 60 grams of carbohydrate per meal, add a serving of fruit. I had some watermelon, so that’s what you’ll see below.

After breakfast, it was still only 5:20 am… So, I went for a 45 minute walk and watched the sunrise. It was a great way to start the morning. Not to mention, I got to blog to all of you happy people, took a shower, got ready for work, and I’ll be out the door all before 7:45am.

Goooooood Morning. :)