Single-Serving Mini Breakfast Casseroles

Single-serving mini breakfast casseroles, version 1.0

When I throw a large dinner party, I prefer not to rest on an old standby recipe. My guests are my test subjects. That brings us to today's (slightly delayed) Night of 1000 Casseroles edition of Weekly Delicious with mini breakfast casseroles.

This recipe is scalable, reheatable, and completely flexible. It's easily adapted to be vegetarian or gluten-free as well.

The scalable part of this recipe didn't come easy, since I don't usually cook small. But since I was more or less making this up by scribbling the steps out on a piece of construction paper as I went along, I tried to make as small of a batch here as I could so that if something was amiss, not much was wasted. 

The photo above is from the first trial of these casseroles. Though still tasty, they didn't come out cleanly and a lot of the bottom layer of the casserole came off on the papers. Now, I don't normally advocate support of a certain widely-known domestic personality, but I have to say that "Marthawrap" was pretty much exactly what I needed for this recipe. If you can find something else with the powers of parchment paper on one side and foil on the other, more power to you. Parchment paper is almost a necessity here, and the foil aspect allows it to keep it's shape.

You can still try for high-quality, self-supported, grease-proof cupcake papers, but if you're going the route of parchment paper (magically foiled or not), you'll have a bit more prep ahead of you, but a cleaner casserole. Skip ahead to the ingredients if you're not doing this.

Grab a muffin tin or whatever mold you want your casserole to be in the shape of. Cut your parchment paper/wrap into 5"-6" squares, depending on the size of the mold you're using. There might be some trial and error if you're using a non-standard shape. Press the paper evenly into the mold, making sure creases are tight and you have a rim of uniform height going all the way around so that none of the filling leaks out. Trust me on that one. You can use a glass or something to help with that.

What I did is shown below. I put my square of paper/foil over the muffin tin mold, then pressed down on it with a similarly shaped quarter cup measuring cup, making sure that the creases were tight.

Loose creases are the enemy.

Repeat as needed and start getting everything else you need together.

Ingredients (for 6 casseroles):

• 3 large eggs
• 1/3 cup half and half
• 1/2 heaping cup of frozen hash browns
• Salt and pepper
• 1/2 cup of your choice of filling
• For example, this time I roasted some minced mushrooms, green pepper, leek, and zucchini, then tossed that with some fresh wilted baby spinach and some cooked, chopped bacon. Just what I had on hand. Roasted veggies were made ahead of time by baking them at 425°F for about 15 to 20 minutes... which can also be done at the same time as step #3 below.
• 1/4 cup cheese (cheddar was used this time)
• 1/4 cup panko bread crumbs (enough to sprinkle on top of casseroles)

Pre-preparations:

• Preheat oven to 425°F
• Lay out all of your casserole papers on a baking sheet

Directions:

1. Lightly spray the inside of your casserole papers with non-stick spray. Seriously, it's not as good if they stick.
2. Divide the hash browns evenly amongst the casserole papers, then salt and pepper the hash browns to taste.
3. Bake the hash brown-filled casserole papers for about 15-20 minutes in the 425°F oven. The edges of the hash browns should just start getting some color by the end of that. Remove and set aside.
4. Reduce the oven temperature to 350°F.
5. Evenly distribute the filling into each casserole, on top of the hash browns. On my batch, it came up most of the way to the top of each casserole.
6. Beat the eggs and half and half together and evenly distribute the mixture into each casserole. It should mostly cover the hash browns and filling.
7. Top the casseroles with the cheese, again, evenly distributed across every casserole.
8. Sprinkle on panko bread crumbs on top of the cheese for each casserole. You won't be completely covering the cheese with a layer of bread crumbs; this is just to add a bit of a crunch when they're fresh from the oven.
9. Bake the casseroles in the 350°F oven for 20-25 minutes, or until the cheese starts to brown.

If your casserole papers were non-stick enough, you should have a great eggy casserole that's lightly browned on the bottom, firm in the middle, and both gooey and crunchy on top. Serve immediately out of the oven or allow them to cool and store them in the fridge for up to a week.

Notes:

• This recipe is all about ratios, however, as you scale it up, you might be able to cut the number of eggs you use. When I made 42 casseroles, math would tell you I would have needed 21 eggs, but I did just fine with 18. Your milage may vary depending on the size of your eggs.
• Have fun with the filling. My filling above was great, but change it according to your tastes. Sausage would be pretty good too, or maybe you want to use up some of your leftovers.
• When reheating these, either remove the outer metal cupcake liner or pop the casseroles out of the paper/wrap before putting them into the microwave.
• These panko isn't essential to this recipe, so if you want to make it gluten-free, just keep it out. Ditto with meat if you want to make it vegetarian.
• These are also a great size for breakfast sandwiches.

When I did my final version for my casserole dinner party, I took advantage of the flexibility of this recipe and made half vegetarian. Then, I made half of the vegetarian ones and half of the ones with bacon gluten-free as well, giving me four similar casseroles in one round of cooking.