Black Bean and Butternut Squash Breakfast Tacos

Breakfast, it’s the most important meal of the day, but are you guilty of skipping it?

In my house, mornings are not pretty.  A full breakfast is a time management impossibility.  The snooze button usually takes up the ten minutes meant for the bowl of cereal and milk.  Breakfast bars and drinkable yogurts were the standard “eat this during your commute” routine.  But the downside of being a foodie is that your tastebuds get bored easily, and mine could not handle one more cereal bar as the first bite of the day.  In a moment of weakness, I found myself cheating on oatmeal bars with breakfast tacos from the campus coffee shop.  As I munched through the underseasoned potato chunks and greasy limp bacon, I knew I owed it to myself to do better.

The genius of breakfast tacos is their portability, enabling my mobile breakfast lifestyle.  But I want breakfast to be more nutrient rich than potatoes and bacon, and I need fillings that will freeze and reheat well because I’ll be making these on the weekends and eating them during the week.  Enter the weekly grocery store ad that inspired a mad weekend of breakfast taco assembling: it’s squash and gourd season.

Freezable/reheatable breakfast tacos with roasted butternut squash, black beans, and Hatch Chile Monterey Jack on a whole wheat tortilla made a nice change of pace from the usual dense square of dried fruit and granola.  I divided up the work load for this breakfast project over several meals over the weekend, so it didn’t feel like an overwhelming feat.  First, two Vitamin A rich butternut squashes diced into 1/2 inch cubes were roasted at 400 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes (lightly seasoned with salt and pepper and drizzled with olive oil).  Half served as a side dish to a grilled chicken dinner on Saturday, the other half reserved for the breakfast tacos.

You could use canned black beans for these tacos to save time.  Since I had the weekend, I dusted off my crockpot to for some tasty bacon-flavored black beans, which also served as a side dish to leftover BBQ brisket.

Crock Pot Black Beans

1/2 lb dried black beans, rinsed and soaked in water overnight (or at least 6 hours)
1 medium onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1-7 oz can salsa ranchera (you can use any kind of salsa, but I really like the smokey flavor of the ranchera in the beans)
4 cups vegetable broth
1 cup water
2 slices bacon, diced into 1/2 inch pieces

• Dump everything into crockpot, mix well (making sure beans are submerged entirely in liquids), and cook on low for 8 hours.  If you’re running short on time, 4 hours on high heat setting works, too.

By Sunday night, I had butternut squash and black beans ready to go in the breakfast tacos.  The Hatch Jack cheese added a “wake up” kick.  Wrapped in cling wrap and then placed in freezer safe ziplock bags, each taco (unwrapped from cling wrap and re-wrapped in paper towel) needs 1 to 1-1/2 minutes in the microwave to go from frozen to piping hot portable deliciousness.

Nutrition Facts
Per breakfast taco
as calculated by Sparkpeople Recipe Calculator

Calories 207 |Fat 6g |Cholesterol 8mg |Carbohydrate 34g
Dietary Fiber 7g |Sugars 1g | Protein 8g

Vitamin A 60% |Vitamin B-6 5% | Vitamin C 13%
Calcium 8% | Iron 12%

The following weekend, I made the tacos with mashed sweet potatoes, black beans, and cheddar on whole wheat tortillas.  I think I’ll try pumpkin and chorizo next.  With so many possibilities, breakfast is exciting again.