Food Friday - Eggstravaganza

from Kris B.

When me girls were little and we had all of those dyed hard-boiled Easter eggs, I remember being so happy when I had eaten the final deviled egg and egg salad sandwich!  Those were the only things that I knew to do with the eggs once they had been hunted and were no longer  of interest to the kids and I didn’t want them to go to waste.  I wish that I had discovered Scotch eggs back then!  They would have provided me with another alternative and my non-vegetarian child would have enjoyed them.

What I’m sharing with you is more of a process than a specific recipe.  The process involves cooking eggs somewhere between soft and hard boiled, covering them in sausage seasoned somehow, then coating them in some crispy carbohydrate, and then cooking them somehow.  I’ll tell you how I did them, but know that there are variations that you may want to try.

INGREDIENTS

5 eggs

1 pound bulk sausage

1/2 finely diced yellow onion

3/4 tsp salt

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup fine bread, cracker, or corn flake crumbs

1/2 panko

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Hard boil four of the eggs.

Finely dice the onion and in a medium combine with the sausage.  Add salt and pepper to taste.  Divide into 4 equal parts and flatten into patties.

Carefully peel the cooked eggs.  Pat them dry with a paper towel.  Dredge the eggs in the flour, then place each one on a sausage patty.  Wrap the sausage around the eggs, completely closing the seams.  

Whisk the fifth egg.   Dip each sausage covered egg in the beaten egg and then dredge them in the bread crumbs covering completely.  Then again dip them in the egg and this time coat them in the panko.

Place the eggs on a baking sheet and bake for 35-40 minutes, until the sausage is cooked through and contains no pink.  Turn the eggs over two or three times during the cooking process to achieve crisping on all sides.  Traditional Scotch eggs are deep fried.  I’m not a fan of deep fat frying anything so I baked mine.  This is one of the reasons that I double dipped the coating.  I wanted them to be as crispy as if they had been fried.

Serve immediately.  Or, let the eggs cool to room temperature and then freeze them in a plastic freezer bag.  To reheat, place on a baking sheet in a 375 degree oven or toaster oven for 25 minutes.  I would not advise reheating in the microwave.  

Scotch eggs are delicious served with your favorite mustard or mustard mixed with a bit of mayonnaise.

You may wish to season your sausage with a little thyme or rosemary.  You can also use this same recipe and deep fry your Scotch eggs if you wish.

from Tracey G

I love breakfast/brunch casseroles. I love the idea of preparing something the night before, throwing it into the fridge to sit overnight and it comes out ready to be baked the next morning. Talk about making a morning easy with just a small amount of effort the night before! So, these things are always popular with me for holidays. Especially the big ones, Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Those are the mornings when there is so much going on, it's a nice convenience to be able to just throw breakfast (or brunch) in the oven and let it cook while you attend to other things, be it hunting Easter Eggs, prepping turkeys for the oven or opening Christmas presents. These kinds of things help take one more thing off your to-do list!

I have run across a lot of recipes through the years, and I'm always willing to try a new one, generally the combination of ingredients are ones you know you can't go wrong with. I found the original recipe for this at Taste Of Home, which can be found here: Farmer's Strata, and used it as a basic guide for my own twists.

Some of my tweaks were for convenience - as in I had a certain ingredient I wanted to use up AND it was already prepped, then some were for my tastes and preferences - for example I don't like soggy bacon, so instead of adding to cook in the strata, I decided to use it as a topping. It worked wonderfully, and kept it's integrity! But I was really pleased with what I ended up with by the time I got to eat it! There was only one thing I'd do differently, add more potatoes, I used 2 cups, but they could easily have been increased to 3 or 4!

Breakfast Strata

1 lb sliced bacon, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1 c chopped fully cooked ham (I used Smithfield brand fully cooked ham cubes for convenience)

1 small onion, chopped

1 clove of garlic, finely minced

10 slices white bread, cubed

2 c cubed frozen hashbrown potatoes, thawed

3 c (12 ounces) shredded cheddar cheese

8 large eggs

3 c milk

1 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 1/2 tsp ground mustard

dash of salt and pepper

1) In a large skillet, cook bacon until crisp. Remove from pan and set aside. Add onions, ham and garlic, and cook until onions are tender. Remove from pan and set aside. Add hashbrown potatoes and cook until tender, set aside.

2) In a greased 13x9-inch baking dish, layer half of the bread cubes, potatoes and cheese. Top with all of the ham/onion/garlic mixture. Repeat layers of bread, potatoes and cheese.

3) In a large bowl, beat the eggs; add milk, Worcestershire sauce, ground mustard, salt and pepper. Pour over all. Cover the pan and chill it and the cooked bacon overnight.

4) Remove from the refrigerator about 30 minutes before baking. Preheat oven to 350°F. Bake uncovered for about 65-70 minutes or until a knife inserted near center comes out clean. About the last 10 minutes of cooking, top with the reserved cooked bacon to reheat and re-crisp.