At one time I counted all my cookbooks and I had over 70.

#youhavehowmanycookbooks.

I have since giving some away, sold some, and bought more. I haven’t counted since then, but it is safe to assume that I am still close to that many cookbooks. I did not go to college so these books are my schooling. With the way I change my mind, I am pretty sure college would have been a huge waste of money. First, when I was around 13 I told everyone I wanted to be a Mortician. Thank the sweet Lord Jesus I didn’t go down that path. I moved out the day after high school and for awhile I said I wanted to be a Physical Therapist.  To this day I have zero idea what made me want to do that. I have done photography for years now and have thought about going to school for that. If you’re counting, this makes at least the 3rd degree I could have gotten. The photography would be a good use of money but it is not something I want to do full time. I now have my Real Estate license and love that. To help people transition from one season to the next with their homes is amazing to be part of. But back to the year 2010. It is where I found my passion for food. I was just scratching the surface of cooking when my twin posted something on Facebook from The Pioneer Woman. I went to her blog and immediately fell in love with the step by step pictures that Ree had for each recipe. I have 5 kids and wanted to cook a whole chicken. The whole stinking bird.

This scared me.

I had never seen it done and had no idea how to go about doing this. Ree’s blog took me through every. single. step. You can find that post  here  It was glorious. Her book was my first real cookbook. A friend got me it as a gift and I cooked out of it for a full solid month. I now own all of hers and a ton of others ones that I love. Some books I have gotten and still haven’t cooked from them. I made the decisions a year or so ago to cook through them and for whatever reason failed at that. You know how it goes, child gets sick, vacation throws you off, summer starts and boom you are just surviving and not really thriving at your goals. Recently I thought about it again but to be honest, the thought of this adventure actually intimidated me. I think it was a combination of things. I failed last time and did not want to start again and quit. Also, the food budget scares me. We have a family of 8 (7 normally with an exchange student here for the year) We choose to have a tight food budget so we can use the money in other areas and I just am not sure I can stay in that set budget with all the different cooking. Lastly, I am gluten and dairy free and so many of the books are not geared toward that. I later realized that the challenge of cooking those meals to fit my eating could be part of the fun.

So, here I am, blogging about the 1st of approximately 120 recipes.

 

I chose an easy recipe so that I could get the wheels rolling. I have seen this recipe a billion different ways in a billion different cookbooks and yet, have never cooked it. It is the Mini Sausage Casserole on page 20 of this book. The ingredients are simple and I chose to leave out the cheese to make it dairy free. Please, if  you are not dairy free, add the cheese, for me. It will be divine.

 

I decided to do half sausage and half hamburger meat. I like this combination and did not want to use all sausage. Maybe one day I will even use different meat but for now this sausage is gluten free so it fits my needs. I am sure you could use whatever ground meat you have on hand.

 

First you simply cook up the meat and when it is almost done you add in the diced onion. I used the full amount of a small onion. When it is fully cooked, you set it aside to cool. You will later be added this meat mixture to the egg mixture and you do not want the hot sausage to cook the eggs.

 

I cracked 15 eggs into a bowl and added the spices.  A dash of salt, 1/4 tsp of pepper, 1/4 tsp of chili power and one diced green bell pepper gets thrown into the eggs and mix to combine. You can add any color bell pepper you have on hand but green is usually the cheapest. Using a spicy sausage would also be a fun change to this recipe.  If you are added in cheese, now would be the time.

Oh my goodness…adding pepper jack cheese would be so perfect. Please do this. But if you don’t like spicy I guess any cheese would come to a close second in perfection.

When the meat mixture has cooled, add it to the eggs and mix to combine.

This will make about 18 “muffins” I used my 12 cup stone muffin pan and my 6 cup silicone one. I greased both of them but still had trouble with the food sticking the stone one. Now, granted it doens’t get used enough so maybe over time it will not stick as well. They did come out perfectly in the silicone ones.

 

If you are using the silicone one, I recommend putting a cookie sheet under it for support. Actually, I recommend you do that for the sturdy one too. I found that grease was about to spill over the edge to the bottom of the stove and we do not want that.

“No officer, everything is fine here. Yes, I know the fire alarm was going off forever. Nope, I was just cooking. There is no fire here. We are all ok”

Over all, this was super simple to make and it tasted awesome. I am looking forward to heating this up for breakfast tomorrow.  It might just make its self a regular appearance in my home.