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.

Lonley Island Chocolate Banana Pie

A bit of a warning before we begin. The Lonely Island Pie is intended to be almost tangy in its bitterness. If you would like to alter the recipe to sweeten it, I would suggest adding either sugar or condensed milk to your melted chocolate before adding that to the bananas. You can also try lightening the chocolate with 2% milk. If you would like to keep the recipe as-is, I would suggest enjoying a slice along with a glass of Merlot, or any similar red wine which goes well alongside bitter, dark chocolate.

Now that we have that out of the way...

Recipe for Lonely Island Pie

--Ingredients

- 1 unbaked pie crust

- 4 ripe bananas

- 4 units of unsweetened baking chocolate (1 oz each)

- 2 separate tablespoons of sugar

- 1 dollop of dark corn syrup

- about 30 Nilla Wafers or so

- 2 tablespoons of almond extract

--Directions

- Peel all four bananas and mash them together well in a large mixing bowl. Melt the chocolate in a double-boiler saucepan and mix in the corn syrup. Immediately upon removing the chocolate from heat, pour it into the bananas and mix thoroughly. Add almond extract to mixture and stir.

- In another mixing bowl, crush the Nilla Wafers to large crumbs and then mix in the first tablespoon of sugar.

- Line the inside of the pie crust with the second tablespoon of sugar and then pour the chocolate-banana mixture into the crust, using a spatula to make the surface even. Top the pie with the crushed cookies. Bake the pie in the oven at 350 degrees for 40 minutes. Cool on rack.

Remember what I said about the wine. Enjoy.

Let's Bake A Pie

One of the most talked about events on the Weekly Delicious calendar, Night of 1,000 Pies, will be upon us in only a few days! For my part, I had, until last night, never before made a from-scratch pie in my life. After the tuna hot dish that I made for last semester's, Night of 1,000 Casseroles, I didn't want to be one of the people who will show up to next Tuesday's event offering only money for supplies rather than a finished product. As a disclaimer, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG WITH THOSE PEOPLE. We welcome them with open arms full of pie. I saw this however as a chance to learn a new skill and so decided last night to start looking up online pie recipes and make my first attempt so that I wouldn't end up with only hours to go next week and no idea what I'm doing!

For novices such as myself, I've decided to post here the easy pie-crust recipe which was sent to me by my wonderful friend Michelle. Hopefully this will sway even one person who had not intended to bring something of their own to our little get-together to give it their best shot.

Simple and Deliciously Flaky Pie Crust Recipe

--Ingredients
- 1&1/4 cups of all-purpose flour
- 1/4 teaspoon of salt
- 1/2 cup of butter (half a stick)
- 1/4 cup of chilled water

--Directions
- In a large bowl, combine flour and salt. Cut in butter until mixture resembles course crumbles. Stir in water, a tablespoon at a time, until mixture forms a ball. Chill the ball in plastic wrap in the refrigerator while you prepare the innards of your pie.

- Using a rolling pin, or kneading if one is not available, roll dough out to fit over a 9'' pie plate. Place crust in pie plate and press evenly into the bottom and sides of the plate. Cut off overhanging edges.

...and it's that easy! Now that you have the crust of your pie ready, you can use it for nearly any type of filling that you desire. I myself made a tasty and simple egg custard pie (recipe can be found here: Grandma's Egg Custard Pie).

...but what you make is up to you! For some suggestions, here is a recipe for blackberry pie and one for apple pie which also tells you how to give your pie a really neat lattice top.

Before I finish, here is a list of tips I gathered during my crust-forming experience.

• When they tell you to "cut in the butter," they really mean it. Try freezing the stick of butter and then using the finest side of your cheese grater to create a "butter powder" which will be much easier to fold into your flour.
• I found that after adding in all of the water called for in the recipe, my mixture was still to dry to stick together and form a ball. What I did was to measure out another 4th of a cup (the smallest measurement that my cup would count) of water and then add half of that, discarding the other half. I then kneaded the mixture into the ball I wanted, making sure to fold the inside of the ball out many times, soaking up all of the extra water.
• Not wanting to have my dough tear as I was pressing it into the plate, I accidentally made the crust a bit too thick and thus the sides slightly lower than I wanted. The pie still came out fine, but just a heads up that if you want a thinner crust, you will have to make sure that you work it into the pan thoroughly.
• When you are rolling the ball of dough into a flat "circle, " you want to make sure that EVERYTHING has some flour on it so that your dough will stick to nothing but itself. You want flour on your hands, your rolling pin and the surface you are rolling it on. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

Hope that helps. If I think of anything that I missed, I'll edit it in later. Happy baking!