Green Chile Brunch Bake

Brandon golfed on Saturday and came home pleased with himself, which is the desired outcome of golf. The week was a spring week, the kind where the light through the kitchen window arrives at a particular angle and the freezer hums in a different register depending on the temperature in the garage. I made notes in my prep notebook on Sunday afternoon, the way I always do: meal name, ingredient list, cost per serving, prep time, freezer instructions. Twenty-eight bags. Two hours and eleven minutes. A little slow this week, by my standards, but Brandon was helping and the conversation was good, and I have learned, slowly and against my own grain, that the conversation is sometimes the point and the time is sometimes a courtesy I extend to my husband for being willing to chop onions on a Sunday afternoon.

The children are doing what they do, which is the central report of every week of my adult life. Ethan is 20, in Manila on his mission, and his last email mentioned a chicken adobo so good he is going to make me make it when he comes home. Olivia is 18, at BYU studying elementary education — the path she chose at age seven and has not deviated from once. Mason is 16, finishing high school, with calluses on his hands and a plan that does not yet have words. Lily is 14, in high school, asking the kind of questions in Sunday School that make the teachers uncomfortable, which I find difficult and also, secretly, admirable. Noah is 11, the comedian, the performer — the kid who does an impression of my disappointed face in front of company, and gets away with it. That is the family report. I do not have a system for these reports. I just listen and remember and call back when I said I would call back, which is most of the time and not all of the time, and the difference between most and all is the territory of motherhood.

I do not preach in this blog. I never have. My faith is in here the way air is in a room — invisible, essential, not discussed. I am still a Latter-day Saint. I am also a woman who has sat in front of a casket the size of a bread box. I do not see those two things as contradictions, but I do not pretend they sit easily together either. The bench in the chapel where I sit on Sunday is the same bench. The woman is not. The faith makes room for the woman. That is what I have learned to ask of it.

The recipe of the week was waffle batter, which I have made some specific number of times in my life and have refined to a system that I now hand to other people in printed form. The version I made this week fed eight, cost under fifteen dollars, and required twenty-six minutes of active prep, which is within my requirements and not a coincidence. I taught a freezer meal class this week and someone cried at the cost-per-serving column on the handout. I took the cry as a compliment. I have stopped explaining the freezer-meal philosophy to people who already follow my work, and I have stopped apologizing for it to people who do not. The philosophy is simple: tomorrow is coming whether you are ready or not. You can either be ready or not. I pick ready.

The week ends the way most of them do — with a labeled bag, a tomorrow, a kitchen light I leave on for no one in particular, and a quiet that holds.

The waffle batter got its own bag and its own label, but the recipe I keep coming back to — the one I put in the printed handout, the one I have made more Sunday mornings than I can count — is this brunch bake. It is the kind of thing that rewards being ready: you pull it from the freezer, you put it in the oven, and forty-five minutes later the kitchen smells like something deliberate happened in it. Brandon does not ask what is for breakfast when this is in the rotation. He just sets the table. That, too, is a form of conversation.

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 45 min | Total Time: 1 hr 5 min | Servings: 8

Ingredients

8 large eggs
1 cup whole milk
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp ground cumin
2 cans (4 oz each) diced green chiles, drained
3 cups shredded Monterey Jack cheese, divided
1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
1 cup cottage cheese

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a 9x13-inch baking dish with nonstick spray and set aside.
Mix the batter. In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, salt, garlic powder, and cumin until smooth. Whisk in the melted butter and cottage cheese until well combined.
Add the filling ingredients. Fold in the drained green chiles and 2 cups of the Monterey Jack cheese until evenly distributed throughout the egg mixture.
Assemble. Pour the mixture into the prepared baking dish. Scatter the remaining 1 cup of Monterey Jack and the full cup of cheddar evenly over the top.
Bake. Bake uncovered for 40–45 minutes, until the center is set and no longer jiggly and the top is golden at the edges. A knife inserted in the center should come out clean.
Rest and serve. Allow the bake to rest for 10 minutes before slicing. Cut into 8 portions and serve warm.
Freezer instructions. To freeze, cool completely, portion into individual servings or leave whole, wrap tightly in plastic wrap then foil, and label with date and reheating instructions. Freeze up to 3 months. Reheat individual portions in the microwave 2–3 minutes or reheat the whole dish, covered, at 325°F for 30–35 minutes.

Nutrition (per serving)

Green Chile Brunch Bake — The Week the Conversation Was the Point