Spinach and Feta Egg Muffins or Frittata

Egg muffins are handy low-carb and keto munchies. You can grab one — or as many as you need — for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack. Egg muffins are also great while traveling, and you can pop them quickly in a lunchbox or snack box. Or, bake them as minim muffins for a perfect party snack.

And the best part is that you can vary them endlessly, using different ingredients – even leftovers – or seasonings. As you see, egg muffins are great for all occasions! And not only muffins: you can make a frittata in a skillet in case you are not into heating your oven.

This recipe uses the fabulous combo of spinach and feta cheese. With less than 0.5 grams net carbs per muffin, these goodies are a great fit even to the tightest keto. Grab one and enjoy!

How to make the Spinach and Feta Egg Muffins or Frittata

This is a very simple recipe, but taking a few things into account guarantees success. First, the key is to get as much liquid out of the frozen spinach as you can. Cooking the frozen spinach in a skillet is the best way to do that — draining wouldn’t do the job but leave too much moisture in the spinach. And that would make the egg muffins soggy. So, be sure to cook the spinach (and the onion powder) in a skillet as long as all the liquid has evaporated.

The onion powder is added with the spinach for a reason: it releases more flavor, and the flavor will also be distributed more evenly in the muffins when the onion powder is added in the very beginning.

It’s best to use real feta cheese. The copycats often have a rubbery texture and much milder flavor than the real deal.

As you see, even this recipe is very simple, everything is well thought!

Oh yes, still one point: this recipe makes a huge batch of muffins, 24 regular-sized muffins, so you might want to halve the recipe — or a better option is to bake the whole batch and freeze the leftover muffins so that you’ve always got a ready meal at hand when you need.

But let’s take a look at how to prepare these simple and satisfying egg muffins. (For the frittata variation — both in the skillet and in the oven — see the video in this post, or on YouTube.)

Place 10 oz (280 g) frozen spinach in a skillet.

Add 2 teaspoons onion powder.

Cook over medium-high heat, continuously stirring…

…until all the liquid has evaporated. Set aside for further preparations.

Take a mixing bowl and add 8 eggs…

…1 cup (240 ml) heavy cream…

…7 oz (200 g) feta cheese…

…and the spinach mixture.

Mix until well combined. Add salt and pepper to taste. Just note that feta is pretty salty, so you want to go on the light side with salt.

Ladle the mixture into silicone muffin cups or into a silicone muffin pan. You can naturally use paper liners, but silicone muffin cups or pan work best.

Here, I have plenty of leftovers — as I don’t have that many silicone muffin cups — so I make mini quiches from the rest of the batter. These heart-shaped mini quiches are perfect for Valentine’s Day (which is just around the corner, by the way!), so you might take this recipe to your repertoire of easy keto Valentine’s Day brunch recipes.

Bake at 350 °F (175 °C) for 20-25 minutes…

…or until completely set.

Let cool a bit.

This heart-shaped mini quiche looks adorable, doesn’t it!

Remove from the muffin cups or forms and serve.

How I came up with the Feta Egg Muffins or Frittata recipe

The combination of spinach and feta is admittedly the most famous in the Greek spinach pie, spanakopita. I think I actually have never eaten real spanakopita — but I have tried the combo of spinach and feta in several dishes, usually quiches. However, since the filo pastry that is an essential part of spanakopita and it (or other grain-filled pie crusts whatsoever) doesn’t belong to the keto kitchen, it’s several years since I’ve eaten a pie, quiche, or anything with spinach and feta. And though I’ve developed several keto pie crust recipes myself, I never really managed to bake any keto pie or quiche with spinach and feta. Anyway, I prefer preparing crustless quiches as they are so easy to make and you don’t have to hassle with any crust dough.

And that’s actually how I came up with this recipe as well: For my upcoming Finnish keto book, I’m developing several variations of crustless quiches, actually 5 recipes for different crustless quiches. As I was pondering over different variations on these quiches, I cognized the combination of spinach and feta is naturally low in carbs – just perfect for the keto diet. And it would undoubtedly make a wonderful crustless pie, too, I concluded.

No sooner said than done, I developed this Crustless Spinach and Feta Quiche recipe to my cookbook…

…and got so enthusiastic about the combination of spinach and feta that I thought I have to continue pondering over more ideas on how to use this tasty combo. The truth is that I do like spinach and I totally adore feta — but I really haven’t been a big friend of the combination of them. Until now! When you get the ratios right and figure out the other ingredients to support the flavors, you are up into a real treat! I think the problem in my experiments was always that that I didn’t use enough feta, and the flavor was bland. Now, when I added enough feta – the whole 7 oz (200 g) package – there was finally enough flavor.

Through my pondering, I got the idea of using spinach and feta in egg muffins — a wonderful, easy and most importantly, transportable keto dish. I was expecting my spinach and feta quiche recipe doesn’t need too many changes to work as egg muffins as well. I supposed I mainly need to increase the number of eggs.

As I wanted to use a whole bag of 10 oz (280 g) frozen spinach, it meant that I would need to use plenty of other ingredients so that the spinach wouldn’t be overpowering (or likely to make the taste too bland…), the size of the batch was going to be substantial.

Oh yes, when developing the quiche version, I realized cooking the spinach in a skillet was the best way to remove the excess fluid. Many recipes ask you just squeeze out the excess liquid of the thawed spinach, but in my opinion, this is not enough — the result will be soggy. When you cook the spinach, you’ll get all the fluid easily out, and the muffins will be succulent but not mushy.

After a few experiments, I was happy with my muffins — so was my family. Here’s the recipe also for you to enjoy:

Nutrition information	In total	Per serving if 24 servings in total
Protein	106.4 g	4.4 g
Fat	178.9 g	7.5 g
Net carbs	10.9 g	0.5 g
kcal	2074 kcal	86 kcal

 

How to vary the Spinach and Feta Egg Muffins or Frittata recipe

This basic recipe is tasty, but you can naturally add some other stuff in addition to spinach and feta. Add, for example, a handful of sun-dried tomatoes, 1/4 cup (60 ml) freshly grated Parmesan — or maybe chopped ham or cooked chicken for even heartier variation.

Herbs are a wonderful jazz-up to any savory food. To keep the style Greekish here, add chopped fresh oregano, dill, mint, parsley, arugula, or marjoram to the egg and cream mixture. Or, you can use dried herbs — in that case, it’s good to add them to the spinach and onion powder mixture before cooking so that they release their flavors properly.

Talking about onions: you can use different types of chopped onions in this dish. Try scallions, spring onions, or leek. Naturally, garlic is always a perfect match with spinach or feta. You can add a couple of cloves of crushed garlic to the egg and cream mixture.

General prattling

As you see from this recipe, I’m very into Greece nowadays — I’ve actually booked my next trip to Greece for March, and I also completed a course in the Greek language. When traveling, it’s safer to understand the language at least a little bit — more than from the language technology point of view! When I was in Greece last December, I didn’t understand too much so I thought it would be a good idea to learn some Greek. Previously, I’ve traveled to other Mediterranean countries like Spain (also Galicia and the Basque Country), Italy, and Portugal, and I do understand those languages quite well — at least better than Greek. And, it never hurts to learn a new language.

But I think the highlight of the week was that I managed to develop a super-easy and tasty recipe for homemade beef jerky. The thing is that I’ve never tried to make beef jerky at home — I just have been planning it for years. The biggest obstacle for my beef jerky experiments has been that I have thought the preparation is very time-consuming and complicated. However, for my Finnish cookbook (and maybe also later to this blog), I wanted to develop an easy beef jerky recipe that everybody can make at home — in a regular oven, not in a dehydrator.

I was prepared to shed lots of sweat and tears — and use a considerable amount of meat before getting things right — to my experiments, but encouraged by the first successful experiment, I learned getting the meat dried but still tender and tasty was much easier than I had thought. And the best part is, that as my son loves beef jerky (especially now my beef jerky creations!), I can safely offer him my homemade jerky instead of preservative and soy-filled commercial monstrosities.

Oh, but now I remember! The absolute highlight of the week is related to a competition and a possible TV appearance. Unfortunately, everything is still secret, but hopefully, I can reveal more soon. Like you might guess, there is food and cooking involved in that project.

You might have read about our trip to Lieksa to develop a creamy berry mousse product a couple of weeks ago. This week, we asked the manufacturer to prepare us another test batch, this time with strawberry, as they now had it. Well, none of our team was able to go to Lieksa to help the manufacturer, so we tried to give them as clear instructions as we could. But it’s interesting how difficult it is to get things really working: the company had ordered heavy cream with carrageenan, even we said we absolutely want heavy cream without carrageenan! And, to simplify things, as they didn’t run the creamy mixture through the whipping machine — as far as I saw from the photos they sent — the result looked more like sherbet (!) rather than mousse. Our CEO Olli will fetch the product during the weekend, and I hope to get my part on Monday. I’m thrilled to see how it actually turned out!

Meanwhile, I’ve eaten lots of our first creamy berry mousse experiment, as you can see from the empty containers in the photo below. The mousse has stayed in proper condition for a few weeks now. No changes in color, consistency, taste, or smell — that’s very encouraging, considering we didn’t use any preservatives or food additives, or actually just natural preservatives like real lingonberry: it contains natural benzoic acid to preserve food.