Easy Breakfasts, Delicious Ham, and Egg-Hating Children

Both of my kids liked eggs when they were little.  I still remember my daughter's little fingers plucking chunks of scrambled egg from her high chair tray and at one point in time her love of deviled eggs rivaled my own- even my picky son would eat them snuck into a grilled cheese sandwich as a toddler.

I have no idea what went wrong, but they've both been turning their noses up at eggs for years now.

Me?

I'll take them scrambled, fried, hard-boiled, frittata-d, omelette-fied, poached, and pretty much any other way they can be prepared short of over-easy or sunny side up.

I had the chance to work with Smithfield again (I love working with Smithfield!  Such a fabulous brand and quality product.  Remember those Spicy Smoked Back Ribs with Maple Glaze I made with them a few years ago?  That sauce is still my go-to BBQ sauce recipe!) for Allrecipes last month and this time the recipes focused on their yummy ham and were more breakfast-oriented.

Sausage Balls and the Perfect Recipe

I was 22 when I ate my first sausage ball.

That's right- I spent over two decades of my life completely oblivious to these fantastic little balls of goodness that have been ever-present at every southern get-together I have attended in the intervening years.

That's 22 years of my life I'll just never recover.

Ugh.  That's a hard fact to swallow.

The first time I lived anywhere outside of California I was stationed in Mississippi- which was an eye-opening experience for sure.

I'll lead with the fact that Mississippi is lush and green and beautiful.

I'll close with the fact that Mississippi has the biggest bugs I've ever encountered and more means of preparing catfish than I'd ever considered.

(FYI- I despise catfish.)

So anyway, first I spent four years in Mississippi, then I moved to Tennessee.

There simply isn't a gathering or holiday that doesn't include the ubiquitous sausage ball.

Summer Mornings and Perfect Pancakes

I have always been an utter failure when it comes to making pancakes.

They don't seem that difficult, do they?

This shouldn't be something I can't do.

Yet I gave up on making pancakes years ago.  They just never turned out correctly no matter what recipe I used.

When my son turned seven a few weeks ago he asked me to make pancakes for breakfast.

What was I going to do, tell him "no"?

Of course not.  Especially not with this kiddo who is normally so picky about food.

Pancakes are something he was never open to eating until recently, so if pancakes were what he wanted, I was going to make pancakes.

Brunch Enchiladas And Lazy Breakfasts

I love a savory breakfast.

I mean...don't get me wrong.  I enjoy a few bites of syrupy pancake, french toast, maybe a jelly-filled donut, a stuffed crepe, a sticky bun...

Just in small quantities.

Nope, my breakfast weakness comes more in the form of savory dishes like Eggs Benedict (I like creative takes- check out my Tomatillo and Shredded Pork version!), quiche, crispy hash browns, and stratas.

Stratas tend to be my go-to breakfast dish when we have company visiting because I can do all of the prep work either before they arrive or at night before we all go to bed so everything just needs to be popped in the oven when I wake up in the morning.  I get to serve something more interesting than cereal with essentially no work when I'm just rolling out of bed and don't really feel like going full steam ahead into hostess mode.

Making Memories and Easy Breakfasts

My daughter sits on the counter, the light streaming through the window picking up the gold in her hair as her feet dangle below her gently tapping on the counter as she wiggles.

She picks up the spice jars one at a time, gently opening them and breathing in lightly to take in the aromas.

When she first began this ritual she would ask me questions from across the house.

"Mom, what does coriander smell like?"

"Why doesn't cream of tartar smell like anything?"

"What's dry mustard?"

Watching her, its hard not to draw parallels to the memories of time spent on the floor of my grandma's house in Wisconsin digging through her button jar, asking questions about all of the interesting pieces in her collection.

Sausage Breakfast Crescent Rolls

I know I just said yesterday that I was doing the low carb thing again.

I am.

In fact, that's the reason I found myself with extra breakfast sausage in the fridge that I didn't want to eat and didn't want to waste.

A couple of nights ago after a busy day of popcorn making and poor meal planning my husband and I decided to do breakfast for dinner.  We made up a big batch of thick cut bacon and breakfast sausage and he made me an omelet that would make most people weak in the knees.

Sadly, I'd take a scramble loaded with veggies over a heavy meat-loaded omelet any day of the week.  That's just me.

I just couldn't eat one more bite of breakfast meats and I spent the next two days staring at the leftovers and trying to figure out what I was going to do with them before I had to toss them.  My husband had moved on to other foods and neither of us really wanted to finish them off.

Tex-Mex Migas Go Low Carb

Every time I get off of a low carb diet I kick myself.

I would never endorse one diet or another but I can tell you that for me, personally, it works.

Well.

When I stop watching my carb intake it's never long before I regret my decision and I kick myself for ever stopping.  Once I hit my low carb stride it's easy for me to keep it up, it's just finding that stride that is so frustrating.

I want all the foods.

All of them.

That first week or so of low carb I get a little hangry.  I think it's even more difficult for me then a lot of people because I'm quite content not eating meat at all most of the time.  I don't get excited about a steak or a thick pork chop or whatever like most people do and until I get in the swing of things I get pretty frustrated.

I found myself craving migas pretty hardcore a few days ago and I just couldn't get the craving out of my mind.  Eggs, peppers, onions, jalapeños...oh, and tortilla chips.  All served on warm tortillas- personally I like nice corn tortillas best, but that's kind of beside the point.

Migas are heaven on a plate.  A Tex-Mex meal that I could eat any time of day or night.

I didn't just want them, I needed them.

Eggs Benedict Casserole Makes Breakfast Easy

When we have company stay with us I almost always try to make an overnight casserole for breakfast.  It's so much easier to throw something together before going to bed and then pop it in the oven in the morning than it is to prep and cook a decent breakfast first thing in the morning with a house full of guests.

Of course, sometimes I convince my husband to make his famous biscuits and gravy and I'm off the hook when it comes to breakfast, but more often than not I make a strata of some sort the night before.  Most of those "overnight casserole" type recipes tend to be stratas- basically dry bread of some type covered in an egg and cheese mixture with other items added.  They can be sweet- like the Overnight Blueberry French Toast I had on my latest Allrecipes trip- or they can be savory, like the super easy Christmas Breakfast Sausage Casserole I keep meaning to write about.  

Regardless of which direction you take them, they all tend to be fairly tasty and extremely easy to put together.

English Muffins, Mastered

There are two types of bread I've tried to make over the years that have failed miserably: pita bread and English muffins.

It doesn't help my pride that every time I read a recipe for either one of those it's being touted as the absolute easiest kind of fail-proof bread to make.

Sadly, that hadn't held true for me.

Well, a month or so ago I started noticing regular (read: daily) charges from McDonald's.  Obviously my husband had developed a new habit on his way to work!

Turns out two Sausage McMuffins and a Diet Coke had become his latest go-to breakfast.

Setting aside the obvious issue of how unhealthy it is to eat a breakfast like that every single day, I immediately decided that if he was going to eat sausage breakfast sandwiches every morning I would at the very least save some money and make them at home for him to take with him.

I'm frugal.

Transform Your Morning With Fruity Fun

I remember the very first time I ever tried Fruity PEBBLES™.  I was around 5 years old and my mom decided to make marshmallow cereal bars with them.  This was totally out of the ordinary, since I was definitely raised in a house full of boring breakfast cereal.  I was hooked immediately.  Those little colorful morsels were pure magic.

 Now that I have kids of my own  I'm always looking for new ways to make food fun- and what are Fruity PEBBLES™ if not fun?  They're a super easy way to inspire a little playfulness at the start of the day.

Mornings are crazy now that school is back in session and I just don't have time to make a big crazy breakfast most days.  Thankfully I have the perfect easy breakfast for kids right here- and honestly, they can even make it themselves, which frees me up for lunch making, homework signing, and missing shoe finding.

It's so easy- are you ready for this?

Blackberry Muffins and Weird Coincidences

I was lucky enough to be gifted a couple of quarts of homegrown blackberries recently that have been hanging out in my freezer, patiently waiting for me to do something with them.

I was itching to make something with those little gems (blackberries are my absolute favorite berry!) but there were so many choices.  I thought about making blackberry BBQ sauce, pie, cobbler...eventually I settled on muffins.  I'd never actually made blackberry muffins before, but when I saw this recipe I knew I needed to give it a try.  :-) That may have had something to do with the fact that I already had all of the ingredients on hand and I love being the first to photograph a new recipe on Allrecipes, but whatever.  I went with muffins.

Do you know who else went with muffins, I would later find out?  My dad, in a completely different state, also made blackberry muffins- also for the first time- on the same day that I did.

Tasty Cheesy Tots

One of our favorite fast food items in this family is Cheddar Rounds from Pal's, a small but wonderful chain of fast food restaurants in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia.  They're on the breakfast menu and they can best be described as bites of golden goodness- fried round hash browns stuffed with gooey cheese inside.

 They're delicious.  So delicious.  

Anyway, the other day my daughter and I were discussing whether or not we might be able to recreate them at home.  Spoiler alert: we didn't.  We did, however, make some pretty amazing cheesy tater tots that everyone loved and come up with a recipe that we will be making again and again!

To be fair, It think with a couple small modifications to the recipe we could have come close to the Cheddar Rounds we love- I think maybe a mix of American and cheddar cheeses mixed and stuffed inside of the shredded potatoes would have come closer to the original.  Rather than stuffing the hash browns with cheese we ended up mixing the cheese in with the potato and seasonings- so there was delicious cheese throughout.

Quick and Easy Home Fries

When I think of fried potatoes I think of Saturday mornings with my dad.

 Every Saturday morning my mom would stay in bed reading her book and my dad would get up, watch cartoons with us, and then make pancakes and- often- fried potatoes.

Looking back from the perspective of a mother myself now I'm pretty sure they must have had some kind of a deal about Saturday mornings where my dad did the heavy lifting and my mom got to relax.

This is a deal I want in on.  I must speak with my husband about this ASAP.

Saturday mornings were dad time and healthy food was not on the menu.  This was time from Zack Morris and syrupy pancakes.  I miss the 80's.  :-)

Baked Bacon: Perfect Every Time

The first time I saw my husband cook bacon I thought he was crazy.  He put it...in the oven.

Not the frying pan.  The oven.

Who does that?

Well...he did.  And I'm sure lots of other people do to, but I'd never heard of such a thing.

There was no denying the results, though- it was as perfectly cooked as I could imagine bacon being and he was able to cook it in one big batch while attending to whatever else he was cooking at the time.

Knowing him, it was probably a stovetop full of sausage gravy.  :-)

Needless to say, it changed the way I make bacon forever.  No more small batches.  No more grease splatters.  No more burned bacon strips.  Possibly the biggest bonus of all?  No messy pan to clean up.

That's right.  No mess AND perfectly cooked bacon.  Intrigued yet?

Mom's Potato Pancakes

My mom's potato pancakes were one of my favorite breakfasts when I was growing up.  She didn't make them often (I'm sure if she'd had a food processor to speed things up I might have enjoyed them more frequently!) but when she did make them I'd absolutely stuff myself on those golden, crispy little pancakes.

When I got a little older I realized that her "potato pancakes" were also called latkes and are often served during Hanukkah.  Apparently they're often served with sour cream or applesauce, though we always just ate them plain.  My daughter even likes to eat them with ketchup- they are kind of like a hash brown's tasty cousin.  :-)

Mastering The Perfect Southern Breakfast Gravy

Once upon a time, 14 years ago, there was a girl in California that had never heard of biscuits and gravy.

In fact, she didn't even know gravy existed in any shade other than brown, and generally only ate it on Thanksgiving over mashed potatoes.

I know, crazy, right?

When I was 18 my best friend and I got our first apartment.  Literally two weeks after my 18th birthday we were out on our own.  It was then that I was first introduced to the idea of biscuits and gravy.

Sometimes she would make them for us on Saturday mornings.  Goodness we felt so grown up back then...we were babies!  But when we would have "the guys" grill for us on our itty bitty balcony, get dressed up and make lasagna and drink Arbor Mist (ugh), or sit around in our pajamas eating a real meal of biscuits and gravy on a Saturday morning we felt SOOOO grown up.

Grandma Martin's Breakfast Muffins

This morning was not a stellar moment for me as a parent.

Mornings sometimes just stink, and not just when you're a kid.

I was tired and didn't really want to get up, so I probably wasn't in the best of moods when I tried to wake my daughter.

She didn't want to wake up either, big surprise, right?

She also didn't have her clothes picked out.

Or know where they were.

Or have an organized closet.

Or dresser.

I was...frustrated.

Garden's Bounty: Bell Pepper Frittata Cups

In the six years that my husband and I have been together I have made stuffed peppers exactly twice.

The first time was early on in our relationship...well, at least early enough that he dutifully downed his entire pepper, trying not to show his displeasure, before kindly telling me that- while it wasn't my fault- he really didn't like stuffed peppers.  At all.  Of any kind.

They have been on the "do not make under any circumstances" list ever since.

Until about a week ago, that is.

You see, the yellow bell peppers in my garden are finally ripe.  They are HUGE, firm, sweet, lovely, specimens.  

I have approximately 5 million of them that I'm working through at the moment- it's all peppers all the time.  Good thing he likes fajitas!  I said something offhand to my husband along the lines of, "too bad you won't eat stuffed peppers, that would sure help get rid of some of these!"

Garden's Bounty: Zucchini Scallion Frittata Cups

I have absolutely no idea why I continue, year after year, to plant zucchini in my garden.

I don't really like zucchini.  My family doesn't like zucchini.

Yet- until this year- I continued to plant it.  Makes no sense, right?

Perhaps it's the enjoyment I get out of watching those plants grow to outlandish sizes.  Perhaps it's the fun of seeing the squash (that is what they are, right?) grow- seemingly overnight- to the size of my calf.  Perhaps it's those gorgeous, big, leaves that I love (until they're inevitably attacked by squash bugs sometime over the summer...).

Amazing Muffin Cups with Zucchini Crust

This time last year I was swamped.

Overwhelmed.

Trying to keep my head above the flood of zucchini my garden was throwing at me.

Boy am I glad I didn't plant four zucchini plants this year!  What was I thinking last year??

Anyway, even if you were smart enough to only plant one, you're most likely a little overwhelmed yourself right about now- those can be some CRAZY prolific plants.

There are only so many ways you can fix zucchini before you're just done, you know?

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to work Johnsonville again.  We were asked to make their popular recipe for Amazing Muffin Cups.