How To Build Breakfast Casserole With Ingredients You Have On Hand

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.