Making ahead and freezing can help with meal planning and saves time in the long run.

I made a lot of breakfast this morning: 16 giant breakfast cookies and a double batch of chocolate chip muffins. Not that we ate all of it this morning. No, I just thought I'd stock up the freezer with breakfast choices for the next couple weeks.

Tomorrow I hope to make both pancakes and waffles and store them away in the freezer as well so there's a wider variety to choose from

I've wondered about the nutritional information for these breakfast foods, so I logged onto SparkRecipes and calculated the information for the recipes as I had made them. This is what the recipe calculator came up with for the breakfast cookies and the muffins.

Giant Breakfast Cookies

I made some changes to Laura's recipe, using stick margarine and 2% milk soured with 1 1/2 tsp vinegar instead of butter and buttermilk. I also made 16 large cookies with this recipe, so the nutritional information is for 1/16 of the recipe. As you can see below, each giant cookie has around 340 calories, 15g of fat, 4.5g dietary fiber, and 7.4g protein.

Nutrition Facts   Giant Breakfast Cookies

Serving Size: 1 serving

Amount Per Serving

Calories339.0 Total Fat14.9 g  Saturated Fat4.6 g  Polyunsaturated Fat2.6 g  Monounsaturated Fat4.2 g Cholesterol27.2 mg Sodium346.1 mg Potassium160.5 mg Total Carbohydrate47.6 g  Dietary Fiber4.5 g  Sugars22.4 g Protein7.4 g

Vitamin A	1.1 %
Vitamin B-12	1.1 %
Vitamin B-6	1.8 %
Vitamin C	0.2 %
Vitamin D	0.8 %
Vitamin E	1.0 %
Calcium	2.5 %
Copper	6.5 %
Folate	3.6 %
Iron	12.3 %
Magnesium	8.9 %
Manganese	49.9 %
Niacin	1.1 %
Pantothenic Acid	3.5 %
Phosphorus	11.4 %
Riboflavin	3.8 %
Selenium	2.9 %
Thiamin	10.2 %
Zinc	5.9 %

Chocolate Chip Muffins

As with the giant breakfast cookies, I made these with soured 2% milk. Each muffin ends up having 265 calories, 15g fat, and 4.7g protein.

Calories265.5 Total Fat14.8 g  Saturated Fat3.7 g  Polyunsaturated Fat2.8 g  Monounsaturated Fat7.0 g Cholesterol19.3 mg Sodium360.0 mg Potassium105.6 mg Total Carbohydrate30.3 g  Dietary Fiber1.6 g  Sugars13.0 g Protein4.7 g

Vitamin A	1.3 %
Vitamin B-12	0.7 %
Vitamin B-6	0.7 %
Vitamin C	0.2 %
Vitamin D	0.5 %
Vitamin E	9.7 %
Calcium	9.7 %
Copper	1.4 %
Folate	7.5 %
Iron	13.7 %
Magnesium	1.2 %
Manganese	7.9 %
Niacin	5.4 %
Pantothenic Acid	1.3 %
Phosphorus	3.6 %
Riboflavin	6.6 %
Selenium	1.8 %
Thiamin	9.7 %
Zinc	1.2 %

As I was writing up this post, our pastor called. The first thing he said when I answered the phone was, "Joy, let's talk fried corn."

That's not quite the usual greeting he gives when he calls, so I asked him to explain.

Apparently when Jeff went into work today (he's the music minister of our church) he told our pastor about the skillet corn I made last night to go along with our taco salad. Actually, according to our pastor, Jeff "raved" about it, going on and on about how good it tasted.

So our pastor wanted to know how I made it.

Our church eats supper together on Wednesday nights and our pastor often prepares the side dishes, and since enchiladas are on the menu for this week, he though that the skillet corn would be a great side dish.

It's funny how recipes spread. First Kate posted it on her blog, then I tried it at home, and now our entire church is going to be having it tomorrow. Totally cool!

Make sure you check out Kate’s and Toni’s blogs and see what’s going on in their kitchens for our “3 Moms, 3 Kitchens, 31 Days” adventure. Toni's off to Sea World today, so I doubt she's going to be cooking much today, but I'm sure she'll tell us how much fun they had!