In the Kitchen

Make sure to check our full list of recipes, ideas and tips in the kitchen!

I totally have to give my girls credit for this recipe. We have a rule in our house that we should and will modify recipes to fit our lifestyle and our budget. Essentially meaning that we try to substitute ingredients we have on hand so we don’t have to spend more money to buy the recipe needed items. Most of the time, the substitutions are to make a popular version a healthified version as I try to carry mostly healthy swaps in our pantry.

But you know, sometimes the sugar bug just bites and you got get rid of it by making something not so healthy. But hey, that what this time of year is notorious for, right?

With that, our 7-year old is the master of recipes and kitchen doings. She and her older sister love to be in the kitchen cooking and helping whenever they possibly can. I love it sometimes (and sometimes I have to bit my lower lip and let them be the little helpers even if it slows me down ).

So with that, our 7-year found a recipe in one of her coloring books. It was for a cookie with both chocolate and peanut butter chips. She is allergic to peanuts, but she quickly came up with a replacement which is dark chocolate chips and butterscotch chips and she wanted to add shredded coconut to the mix too. We had all of those on hand (like I said, I try to keep healthier swaps in the pantry – so the dark chocolate chips were 63% Cacao and umm… the butterscotch, well it is somehow healthier ) she also found a bag of organic coconut and thought that this would be good too! Coconut is good for you.

Well, we did this recipe with her replacements and it was a FABULOUS cookie! I mean, I am talking really good.

The two girls even gave this cookie a name: Haystacks and Harvest cookies as it looks like hay (coconut) and fall harvest (the chocolate and butterscotch chips make it look like pumpkins and squashes in the ground ) What a fun brilliant name too!

With that fun fall theme, our girls wanted to surprise daddy by displaying them on a pretty fall themed table scape, I thought I would share pictures of their beautiful creativity!

So if you want to make Haystacks and Harvest Cookies, here’s how to do it with a printable format to make it easy for you to print and use in the future.

Note: If you desire to print this recipe or are not reading this on our site please click here for a nicely formatted and printable recipe!

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Make sure to check our full list of recipes, ideas and tips on how to Build Better Breakfasts for Less!

We are heading into October quickly and we have a new theme next month to help you an your family save and be financially wise and share things that our family is doing personally.

Well, we have a few more breakfast posts to share before this month is over, including the featured picture this month – Breakfast In A Blanket! This is more commonly known as ham cups, but the name makes it even more fun to eat!

This is another one of our recipes that you can do several different ways to make it unique each time, a principle we have shared in many of our breakfast posts! With that, we will share the basics and then you can change-it up to fit whatever you have on hand!

The other nice thing about this breakfast is that it is low carb. It is an easy option to make a do that!

Each time I make it, it is also different, which makes it fun as well!

Here’s the ingredients that you will need/can use:

• Ham Slices
• Eggs
• Additional Meat such as sausage crumbles, bacon pieces, etc. Just like we have shared in our other breakfast posts,  we almost always use the Jimmy Dean Natural sausage.  Each roll of these from Sam’s Club/Costco costs around $6.93 and I cook it all in advance and freeze and have 7 breakfasts worth of sausage.  The other meat I use is the real bacon we mention HERE.
• Veggies – we use our frozen onions and peppers quite frequently, but other good veggies are spinach, mushrooms, Tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, etc.
• Cheese – classic cheddar or mozzarella, but honestly any cheese will work (even cream cheese!). One of our favorites is actually feta!

This list above probably looks familiar from our How to Build Breakfast Casseroles post HERE. But that is the beauty of our breakfasts, the ingredients are interchangeable to meet our family needs/desires for breakfast that day!

Once you have narrowed your ingredients down with the foods you have on hand, then you can quickly put this together! Again, having the pre-cooked sausage and bacon and the onions and peppers already diced makes putting these together super easy!

How to make Breakfast in a Blanket

First, lay out your ham slices in a greased muffin cups and make as many as you would like.  We usually make 6-8 depending on the morning.  You want to layer the ham to where it covers the muffin tin completely to form it’s own cup.  It takes two slices of the ham we like to do this.

Then add about 1-2 tablespoons of diced veggies in the bottom of the cup!

Then add a couple of tablespoons of cheese (I honestly don’t measure it, but it looks like about that much )

Then add the egg on top.  You can just crack the egg right on top. We like to sprinkle with pepper too.

Bake in a 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes or until egg on top reaches desired doneness.

We just showed you one way to make this, but there are thousands of ways and way more possible ingredients than what we just listed above. Just experiment with what you have already to put it all together!

One fun way is to way is to scramble the eggs before and even adding a soft cheese like cream cheese or even sour cream or mayo into the scrambled eggs and then pour in the cups for a different version!

You can add the sausage crumbles or bacon pieces for more meaty fun.  Try a spinach and feta cheese combo! Think of this as like a pizza and you can let everyone make their own with the ingredients you have on hand! Have fun with it and have more fun eating them

Here’s the printable version of Breakfast in a Blanket (a.k.a Ham Cups)!

Note: If you desire to print this recipe or are not reading this on our site please click here for a nicely formatted and printable recipe!

 Don’t forget to check out our growing list of Building Better Breakfasts for Less.

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Make sure to check our full list of recipes, ideas and tips on how to Build Better Breakfasts for Less!

Here’s another one of our breakfast favorites and common breakfast meal at our house.  That meal is Breakfast Casseroles! Our kids LOVE it! Our son even asked grandma to make him breakfast casserole on his birthday Now even though I said it is a common breakfast in our home, it is rarely the same breakfast each time we make it.

You see one thing that we have been focusing on this month is not just recipes for breakfast, but the tools needed to make hearty, healthy breakfasts out of what you have on hand.

I use to rarely make breakfast casserole as the original recipe I had called for Pillsbury crescent rolls rolled out flat on the bottom of the pan for the crust, and then eggs, cheese, sausage, etc.  Well, that meant that we only had this breakfast favorite only every three to four months when the Pillsbury rock bottom sale hit the grocery store.  You can’t really freeze them, so it only worked then as I wasn’t willing, nor would our budget allow me to buy them at other times unless we REALLY needed them!

So after kids would ask for this breakfast and I kept having to say “we don’t have crescent rolls, so we can’t.” I thought that this was silly reason to not figure something out.

With that, I started making breakfast casseroles out of many things I had on hand.  It worked beautifully and now we can enjoy this once a week, twice a week or really as often as we wanted now! It is always a nice treat to make it with those buttery, flaky crescent rolls, but that isn’t the only time to enjoy it.

Each time I make it, it is also different, which makes it fun as well!

Here’s the ingredients that you will need:

• Crust of some sort.  Here’s what works: slices of bread, flour or corn tortillas, canned biscuits, canned crescent rolls, dough, biscuits, english muffins, etc.  Probably anything will work! Just lay on the bottom or make dough flat and smooth and spread on the bottom of the pan.
• Eggs.  We use about 8 eggs for a 9×13 pan, you can use more or less depending on how thick you want the eggs.
• Meat – we almost always use the Jimmy Dean Natural sausage.  Each roll of these from Sam’s Club/Costco costs around $6.93 and I cook it all in advance and freeze and have 7 breakfasts worth of sausage.  The other meat I use is the real bacon we mention HERE.  You can also use cubed ham, ham slices cut up, etc. Anything you want, including beef or chicken (they can be eaten at breakfast too!)
• Veggies – we use our frozen onions and peppers quite frequently, but other good veggies are spinach, mushrooms, asparagus, Tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, etc.
• Cheese – classic cheddar or mozzarella, but honestly any cheese will work (even cream cheese!). One of our favorites is actually feta!

Once you have narrowed your ingredients down with the items you have on hand, let’s get busy building.  I will tell you, having pre-cooked sausage and bacon and the onions and peppers already diced makes putting these together super easy!

Line the bottom of your pan with your bread (tummy filler) item.  You will want to spray your pan with cooking spray. This example shows us using white corn tortilla shells.

Then layer the meat over the bread crust.

 Then pile on your veggies and cheeses!

In a separate bowl, mix the eggs with a couple of tablespoons of milk and add any salt, pepper or other spices you want to your egg mixture.

Then pour the egg mixture over the top and sprinkle with a bit more of the cheese of choice!

Bake in the oven at 400 degrees for 25-35 minutes.  The cooking time will depend on how thick the crust and how thick the egg mixture. You want to cook it until the crust is brown and egg is cooked through by sticking a knife or fork through the middle.

The top picture shows the results of this Spinach, Sausage and Feta casserole!

With that, we showed the steps with the spinach and feta, but we though we would show pictures of other versions following the same steps.

This one was sausage, peppers and many different varieties of tomatoes that we picked up at the Farmer’s Market for cheap!

Egg mixture poured over the top!

The final result of the pepper and tomato casserole!

Also, a simple one is just sausage egg and cheese!

They are all simple, yummy and unique each time with using our steps to building your own breakfast casserole!

Here’s the printable version of How to Build Breakfast Casseroles!

Note: If you desire to print this recipe or are not reading this on our site please click here for a nicely formatted and printable recipe!

 Don’t forget to check out our growing list of Building Better Breakfasts for Less.

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