Now that our household is down to one income, I've been hellbent on using up all the food we have in the house before we do any major grocery shopping. So the past two weeks I've been coming up with random meals with whatever is in the kitchen, and some things have been great - others, not so much (how could someone screw up something as easy as CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP? Chicken in warm water is
not what I was going for. Blarg.)
Sunday mornings, Brian & I usually try to have breakfast together - either out or at home. This morning, with it being a holiday that I don't celebrate (I'm not religious, and I think the Easter Bunny idea is RI-DIC-U-LUUUS), I thought I'd search our fridge and cupboards for random crap to throw together to make something yummy.
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The Broke Woman's Strata
While a traditional strata uses alternating layers of bread and egg/meat/cheese, this is the broke woman's strata, utilizing whatever is in the fridge and freezer to achieve a hearty morning-after-partying meal. Potatoes have been touted to help cure hangovers (for reasons ranging from their mild taste being the easiest to down when you're nauseated, to their salty content helping you get electrolytes after being dehydrated, much like a sports drink), so using tater tots makes prep easy. If you're feeling frisky, go ahead and slice up a whole potato in place of the frozen tots.
Key Players
- Garlic
- Butter
- Frozen pork bacon
- Turkey bacon (didn't use because it was bad - not a fan of food poisoning on a Sunday morning)
- Onion
- Two bags of partially used frozen tater ROUNDS and tater TOTS
- A small, partially used bag of frozen mixed veggies that have been in our freezer for probably about 8 months.
- Eggs
- Shredded cheese
- Leftover spinach
Preheat the oven to 400 (which is usually my default temp when I'm putting whatever together).
Put some butter and garlic into the pan to heat up. Cut up your frozen bacon because you're too hungry to wait for it to thaw, and dethawing in the microwave creeps you out for whatever reason.
Toss that fatty pork goodness into your heated pan:
Scare the cats out of the kitchen with the sound of bacon hitting a hot pan:
Chop up some onion, and add those suckers to the pan with the bacon/garlic/butter amazeballsness, and fry up for a bit:
While that is frying up, put your tater combos into Pyrex dishes your mother so graciously let you steal from her when she moved to Idaho (LOVE YOU MOM!):
Divide the tater tots and tater rounds evenly into the two dishes, so that one Pyrex dish isn't jealous of the other. Then add in the half-used bag of frozen veggies that have been hanging out in your freezer for as long as it takes to grow a child in a woman's uterus:
Throw some eggs into a bowl (I added about 4 more to the bowl after I took the picture), add two fist-fulls of cheese, and whisk that somamabitch:
At this point, put your camera away because the battery died (whatever, CAMERA), and pour the egg & cheese mixture evenly into the two dishes with the taters, add in the bacon/onion mix, top with spinach, and mix thoroughly till ALL THE TATERS are covered in eggs and bacon and cheese and spinach.
Bake for about 30 minutes. 5 minutes before the time is up, add cheese on top and continue baking. Cut up into 4ths and serve it up all nice and warm. Feel free to top with the fanciest of tomato ketchup and Franks Red Hot sauce - since this is the classiest of meals, it deserves the best condiments known to man.
Brian and I ate one Pyrex dish of this stuff, and I'm letting the other dish cool down so I can wrap it up all nicely and freeze for future om nomings.
Next time I would probably remember to add some salt and pepper to the egg/cheese mixture, and maybe even add some sour cream to make it a little more like a tater tot casserole. But regardless, this was edible and my stomach is now happy!
Hope everyone enjoyed their weekend!
