Cheesy Sausage & Grit Casserole

Nov 15, 2015

Sorry, friends. There’s no way to make this dish look pretty in pictures. But it IS super yummy!

I’m always on the lookout for new breakfast casserole recipes for our Friday morning work breakfasts, particularly ones that don’t take a million different ingredients and a lot of assembly time (because let’s face it, I get home late).  This one is is simple, affordable, and comes together super quickly.

Funny story about this recipe though…the original recipe instructions just say “boil salted water, then add grits”.  Because my background is pasta, where you heavily salt the water (then, obviously, pour a lot of it out), I boiled the water and tossed a handful of salt in, and of course salted my sausage and added (salty) cheese.  The result?  So salty, it was almost inedible.  It WAS kind of inedible, in my opinion.  Lesson learned—follow the instructions on the package!

Mom’s Famous Lasagna

Jan 26, 2014

Lasagna is a very personal thing. In general, most people think their mom’s/grandma’s/wife’s/pick your relative’s lasagna is the absolute best thing in the world, and all other lasagnas are vastly inferior. I certainly fall into this camp. I’m don’t think I even ate any other lasagna except my mom’s until I was…in college? And then I was so disappointed by it that it only reinforced my opinion.

I stand by that opinion, though, and have had friends reinforce it over the years. When I make this, I often get exclamations of “This is so good! It’s even better than my mom’s…though don’t tell her I said that!”

This lasagna recipe is really easy to put together, and it gets its awesomeness from a couple ingredients that are outside the norm. Instead of a homemade marinara or a jarred tomato sauce, it uses a specific Hunt’s canned four-cheese sauce, which gives it a special flavor. And rather than the traditional ricotta, it uses cottage cheese. Yeah, I know it sounds weird. I think we started doing that when I was a kid and I didn’t like ricotta and my mom wasn’t too crazy about it either. But what we discovered is that the little curds in the cottage cheese end up melting and take this to a whole other level of gooeyness (instead of the graininess of ricotta).

The result? Tangy, cheesy, fragrant, spice-filled awesomeness. I love it fresh out of the oven, with the steam still coming off it. My dad loves it as leftovers, when the cheese and sauce have had a day or two to hang out and get married in the fridge. Either way, it’s out of this world. [My mom informs me that it was originally my Aunt Susan’s recipe that we tweaked over the years, so kudos to her as well!]

One-Hour Skillet Focaccia Bread

Jul 14, 2013

Some days I feel like I have tried all the different bread recipes I need to. I mean, I’ve found several different kinds that are totally awesome, so why bother trying new recipes?

And then I stumble across a recipe like this and remember why—because sometimes you find a completely new kind of awesome to add to your arsenal. And by arsenal, I mean arsenal of carbs.

I was making dinner the other day for myself and a friend, and was having decision issues. I finally decided to go with my pasta with goat cheese, roasted peppers, and chicken sausage since I could make that in my sleep, and also decided to try two new recipes—kohlrabi fries (recipe to come) and these delicious oat brown sugar strawberry shortcakes. Then, since I can’t seem to stop myself from overdoing it, I ran across this skillet focaccia bread and HAD to try it.

It was surprisingly easy and also very forgiving (considering I forgot to follow one of the instructions). The texture was awesome, and I loved the flavor of the spices and parmesan cheese.

But the best part was how fast it was. I’ve talked about how difficult it is to find a good bread recipe that I can make when I realize two hours before dinner that I forgot bread. Most of my great artisan recipes take at least 5 or 6 hours, and many of them are overnight. So to find something that can be on the table in 1-2 hours start to finish is pretty awesome.