Currently cooking out of Make It Fast, Cook It Slow by Stephanie O’Dea
Watching this dish cook was sort of like watching an alien egg grow. It just kept getting bigger and bigger. I was skeptical about cooking eggs in the slow cooker, but it seemed to do the job.
You start off by spreading a package of frozen hash browns in the bottom of the slow cooker. O’Dea doesn’t specify frozen or thawed, but as my hash browns were frozen in one big lump, I couldn’t spread them around so much. So I ended up thawing them in the microwave just a bit. Next, you whisk together a whole bunch of eggs with milk, salt and pepper, shredded cheese, diced onion, diced bell pepper and some sort of diced meat. I used ham. This mixture gets poured over the hashbrowns. The whole thing gets cooked for 6 to 8 hours on low, or 3 to 4 hours on high.
I hated this dish. Bryan manfully ate about half of what I put on his plate before he gave up and trashed the rest. The only word I can think of to describe this dish is wet. Don’t get me wrong, everything was cooked, it was just wet. Oh, and bland as well. Okay, there’s two words to describe it.
In an effort to salvage the leftovers, I tried frying them in some olive oil. This helped with the wetness, some, but they were still really, really bland. I kept adding salt, then pepper and finally drowned the whole thing in salsa. At that point, all I could taste was wet salsa. Not pretty.
In reading through the comments left on O’Dea’s blog about this dish, it seems other people had problems with it being wet (but, to be fair, there were a lot of people who really liked the dish). I did end up with a lot of extra liquid floating around the top of my slow cooker, so I soaked it up with paper towels and then cooked the casserole for another 30 minutes or so with the lid off. Also, my hashbrowns were still partly frozen, so that could have been a factor.
If anybody tries it, let me know if you had the same problems I did.
Here’s the recipe on O’Dea’s blog:
http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/2008/08/crockpot-hash-brown-breakfast-casserole.html
This is the last recipe out of this cookbook. As Bryan said a few days ago, he’s ready for food that isn’t so soft. I have mixed feelings about Make It Fast, Cook It Slow. The garlic baked potatoes and the cajun turkey breast recipes were really good, and probably my favorite out of the bunch. But there were some real bombs as well. Orange honey tofu, anyone?
My sister makes a great breakfast casserole and that is what I thought of as I read the title of this recipe. It’s one of my favorites that she makes. I would like to try this but I too would have issues with it if it’s too wet. My eggs have to be very done! I’ll have to add this to my list and let you know how it goes.