Baked Oatmeal and Breakfast Casserole, by Em

Today's menu: Baked Oatmeal and Breakfast Casserole

I love breakfast foods I could pretty much eat them all day, every day.  I'm cooking dinner today; I skipped breakfast today; we're having breakfast for dinner today.  Yum!

Baked Oatmeal

When looking up baked oatmeal recipes I found a few variations, I've tried to distill these into their oat-y essence.  If you've never had baked oatmeal, it is a delicious, slightly chewy alternative to oatmeal in a bowl.  Baked oatmeal tastes kind of like an oatmeal cookie and is wonderful with a little milk poured over it.

Basic ingredients:

3 cups rolled oats/oatmeal/instant oatmeal

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 tsp baking powder

2 eggs

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter or margarine

1 cup milk

Basic recipe:

Mix all ingredients together and bake at 375° in a 9x13 inch pan for 25 minutes.  Serves eight.

Simplest thing ever, right?

Variations:

• You can also add vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and other similar flavors.  I would probably start with no more than a teaspoon of each, then you can change it up as you see fit.
• Top the oatmeal with fruit and milk.  Try raisins or bananas.

Money savers:

• Use powdered milk.  Now I'm not a huge fan of drinking powdered milk, so my personal rule is this: I never use powdered milk when it will greatly influence the texture of a dish.  This means it's fine for baking, because it will get baked into the final dish, but I don't use it in soups or sauces.  Powdered milk should be stored in an airtight container as soon as it is opened and used ASAP.  Reconstituted powdered milk costs less than $2 a gallon.
• If you don't have a set of measuring cups and spoons, don't rush out and buy some.  You can measure ingredients using the silverware you have around the house.  One standard-sized coffee mug is approximately 1 1/2 cups.  In any full set of silverware, the smaller sized spoon (this would be the same size as a plastic spoon) is a teaspoon.  The larger sized spoon is a tablespoon.

Time savers:

• Mix ingredients in the baking dish.  This not only saves transferring from one dish to another, it saves time cleaning up afterwards.  I made this recipe using a coffee mug, a teaspoon, and a baking pan.

Breakfast Casserole:

I got this recipe from my friend, K.  I used TVP sausage, because I am a vegetarian, but she had originally made it with regular sausage.

Ingredients:

6 eggs

2 cups milk

1 squirt (Tbs) mustard

4 servings of sausage, cut into bite-sized pieces

6 thick slices bread, crumbled/torn

1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar

4 oz chopped mushrooms

1 tsp salt

pepper to taste

Recipe:

Beat eggs, milk, mustard, and salt.  Stir in other ingredients.  Bake at 350° in 9x13 inch pan for 45 minutes.  Serves eight.

Money savers:

• This recipe could also use powder milk as it ends up being a part of the scrambled eggs anyways.
• Make your own bread.  I used a loaf of frozen bread dough I happened to have lying around.  This won't take too much time if you start thawing the dough the night before.  It bakes for about 20 minutes and I had half a loaf left over which we used for toast.  Making your own bread from scratch saves even more money, but takes more time.
• Use TVP (textured vegetable protein) for sausage.  TVP costs approx. 45 cents per pound, rehydrated  as compared to $1.50 for a pound of sausage.  You can find recipes to make your own TVP sausage, then freeze it and save it for later.
• Shred your own cheese.  I bought an 8 oz. (half a pound) block for almost half the price of a bag of pre-shredded cheese.
• Chop your own mushrooms.

Time savers:

• Once again, I mixed the ingredients in the baking dish.
• Using frozen bread dough was a quick, cheap alternative to buying bread at the store.
• 8 oz. cheese equals approximately 2 cups shredded cheese.  This recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups, so you would use 3/4 an 8 oz. block of cheese.  No measuring necessary!