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One of my planned dinners for last week was Breakfast for Dinner, which is one of the girls’ favorites. Though I like it well enough, I hate babysitting the bacon, the eggs, and the griddle of hash browns. By accident I came upon a recipe for a crockpot egg bake and was thrilled to find that I had everything on hand because I was going to use them all for our regular meal.

But I have a confession: I’m not a fan of baked eggs. I’ll eat quiche or frittata but I prefer the quicker and less-drying methods of scrambled or over-easy.

I decided to give it a shot, and thankfully it was early enough in the day that I had plenty of time to get it going in the crockpot.

I ended up combining several different recipes, and all of them called for an overnight baking. Since ours was going to be for dinner, I started at around 10:30 AM, and it was perfect by about 6:00 PM on low. It turned out well enough that I’m going to use it overnight next week for Christmas breakfast.

I did have to fiddle with it a bit since I really wanted to make sure it turned out right. The basic recipe I went with is below, and my notes are under that:

Crockpot Breakfast Bake
makes 8 generous servings

12 eggs
1 cup of milk
1 tsp ground mustard
1/2 tsp garlic powder
Salt and pepper

1 28 oz bag Potatoes O’Brien
1 cup chopped onion
1 lb bacon, cooked and chopped
1-1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese

Mix eggs with the milk, ground mustard and garlic powder and season with salt and pepper. Set aside.

Spray your crockpot with nonstick cooking spray. Pour 1/3 of the bag of potatoes into the bottom. Layer 1/3 of the onion, 1/3 of the cooked bacon, and 1/3 of the cheese. Repeat these layers two more times.

Pour the eggs over top and cook on low for 6-8 hours.

~ I used the Ore Ida Potatoes O’Brien, with the potato chunks and not the shredded hash browns.

~ I baked my bacon in the oven instead of on the stove top. Cram the strips of bacon on a foil-lined baking sheet (make sure it has a lip so grease doesn’t go everywhere). Place the bacon in a cold oven, and start heating to 400 degrees and continue baking. Keep an eye on it and when it’s done, remove from the oven and place the bacon on paper towels to drain.

~ After about four hours I started to get a bit nervous because the center of the bake was still really watery. I got a big spoon and gently started lifting the liquid out and redistributing it around the top of the rest of the eggs. This created a crater in the middle, but I think that helped it cook that much more evenly.

~ It was also at this point that I realized the steam accumulating on the lid was falling back down onto the eggs, which were trying to bake. I draped a clean kitchen towel over the top of the crockpot, and nestled the lid on top of the towel. Any steam that accumulated on the lid now hit the towel instead of the food.

~ I used my beloved Slow Cooker Liners with this, just spray the liner with the nonstick spray.

~ I served these with a side of popovers — they were just as big of a hit.

~ I’m not a huge Cholula fan, but these were absolutely delicious with some on top.

~ My fall-back in case this wasn’t that great was to wrap it up in tortillas and make breakfast burritos out of it. We all liked it just fine on its own, so we did the breakfast burritos the next morning with the leftovers. They were delicious and by far the easiest I’ve ever made!

I am once again needing to take a pass on this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie.

Here’s how brilliant I am: We have a small dry-erase board on the fridge so that everyone can write down the things that they need, or if something has run out, etc.

I went grocery shopping last week. I always bring a detailed list of what I’ll need for two weeks’ worth of food and meals, but then I walked out the door without even looking at the dry erase board and briefly wondered how it was that my shopping trip was so much shorter than usual. Well, I’d left half of what I needed still scrawled on the fridge door.

Anyway, I haven’t made it back out for Shopping Trip Round 2 yet, so I don’t have the pumpkin or cranberries for the Dorie bread. But I will definitely be doing the next one in two weeks because I just discovered that I get to host it! I’m very excited.

So to make up for my lack of participation, I’m going to share with you a new trick I learned last week.

Bacon weaving.

One of our dinners last week was BLTs. However, instead of just frying up bacon in the pan, I came across the idea to kind of weave it together and bake it in the oven. This way, you get bacon in every bite of sandwich, and you’re not pulling out entire strips of bacon in one bite, either.

I cut the package of bacon in half first.

Lay three of the strips side by side on a baking sheet (preferably a pan with edges so the bacon grease doesn’t run off into the oven). Weave three more strips into the first strips. Put in a cold oven and then heat the oven to 400°.

My one package of bacon gave me five woven squares, which was perfect for the five of us. It took about 20-25 minutes for them to all be perfectly cooked, and I kept a close eye on them and took out the ones that looked like they were finished cooking before the others.

I can understand not wanting to go through trouble of doing this, but honestly, it only took a few extra minutes and the rest of the prep was so easy that I didn’t mind at all. The bacon cooks nice and flat, and you don’t get splatters all over your stove top, either.

The only drawback is having to turn on the oven in the first place and heat up the kitchen, but I think it was worth it!

So, we’ve established how much I love salad and sugar cookies (not together), and if there’s one thing that I will choose over a good salad at a restaurant, it’s a bowl of chili. I adore chili.

I’m really not picky about it and will try anything from vegetarian to all-meat, or a nice all-day crockpot chili to something quick in a can (that one’s more nostalgia than anything, though). Really, I have yet to try one that I haven’t liked. Read More