Traditional Middle Class Breakfast Casserole

     When I moved to central Illinois, I was greeted with an entirely new menu of middle class food. One of the more ubiquitous dishes was the Breakfast Casserole. You'd find these gastric bludgeons lurking at most potluck breakfasts or brunches. Boasting anywhere from twelve to six hundred eggs and upwards of fifteen hundred pounds of sausage and cheese, a single slice could meet your caloric needs for the next two days. However, they are crazy good. There's a bunch of different ways to make these. You can use potatoes instead of bread, change up the sausage with ham or bacon, use different cheeses or veggies. I have yet to have a bad one. This particular version is pretty basic and is intended to give you a starting point for your own personal breakfast powerhouse. As always, notes are in blue.

Traditional Middle Class
Breakfast Casserole

Ingredients

• 1 pound pork sausage
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 yellow bell pepper, chopped
• 1/2 loaf Herbed Swirl Bread, cut into 1" cubes (in the event you don't feel like making bread especially for this, you can sub in 1/2 loaf of any hearty bread)
• 12 eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 2 teaspoons Frank's Hot Sauce
• 8 slices American cheese

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375F (190C, Gasmark 5)
2. In a pan, cook onion, peppers and sausage until sausage is browned. Drain excess grease and set pan aside.
3. Spray a 13"x9" baking dish with nonstick cooking spray. Put down a layer of bread cubes in the dish.
4. Spread the sausage and veggie mixture in an even layer over the bread.
5. In a large bowl, lightly beat 12 eggs (make sure you take them out of the shells first. That's critical), with the milk and hot sauce. Pour over everything in the baking dish, ensuring that you have an even layer of egg covering everything.
6. Lay the slices of cheese over the top (next time I think I may put the cheese in between the bread and sausage layer and then sprinkle some cheddar over the top. Live and learn).
7. Bake for 40 minutes or until egg is completely set.

BONUS VIDEO:

A generation of chickens headed to the casserole
Good times!

Middle Class Bartending: Pumpkin Cocktails

     The holiday season is fast approaching, and that can mean only one thing: Heavy Drinking. There is going to be a lot of interaction with all sorts of relatives and friends and booze can make that interaction go smoothly. At the very least you won't remember if it didn't. In honor of the arrival of fall, I present to you two pumpkin themed cocktails that are very popular in my home.

Pumpkin Nog

Ingredients

• 1.5 parts Vanilla Vodka
• .5 parts Pumpkin Schnapps
• 2 parts Pumpkin Liqueur
• Nutmeg (optional)

Directions

1. Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker with ice
2. Shake and drain into an Old Fashioned glass
3. Float a small dusting of ground nutmeg on the surface (optional)

The VanPelt*

Ingredients

• 1 part Vanilla Vodka
• 1 part Pumpkin Schnapps
• Cinnamon (optional)

Directions

1. Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker with ice
2. Shake and drain into a martini glass
3. Float a very small dusting of of cinnamon on the surface (optional)

*I absolutely refuse to tag the suffix "-tini" onto any cocktail. No, I can't tag it on "Martini" because then it would be "Martinitini." If you are drinking some neon drink with a slab of fruit hanging off of it, and a cutesy name and "-tini" slapped on to it, you likely belong to a demographic I do not.

Good times!

Middle aged, single and desperate? That's what I'm talking about!

Good times!

Welcome to the Middle Class Kitchen

     I notice that there's a proliferation of food blogs on the internet. I also notice that the economy is tanking and that things do not appear to be getting better any time soon. Food and the economy are linked like sausages. That's where the problem lies for the average middle class kitchen. I see wonderful recipes in magazines, television shows and on the internet. Unfortunately, many of these recipes use ingredients I can't pronounce, let alone afford. I'd love to use Gruyere in my cooking, but not when a pound of it is almost 30% of what we spend in a month for groceries.

Delicious and $20 a pound.

     I love to cook. I love to present large, fancy meals for my family and friends. It pleases me to no end to have that moment at the table where everybody stops talking because they are too focused on the food. I want to do this thing that I love and not go broke doing it. Will I eventually do a recipe that's pricey? Yes, it can't be helped. Unless it's absolutely required, I will do what I can to keep costs down.

     So what's my goal here? I want to talk about food and drink for the Middle Class. You may ask, "what is the Middle Class Kitchen?" Statistically, it's a kitchen in a house with an average income of around $30K per wage earner. There's two of us in my house, so that's easy math. I'll touch on more specifics later on.

There will be no molecular gastronomy or degustation menus in our home. If I can't get the ingredients at a local market or at a reasonable price, I'm going to start substituting. I don't need to break the bank to cook well.

   I simply want more people to sit at a table where the primary sounds are those of clinking silverware and happy diners.

“Oh, do you like it? I'm not partial to desserts myself, but this is excellent.”