The Breakfast Skillet

If you couldn't tell by the picture above, I'm the kind of guy who adores a hearty breakfast with plenty of eggs and a big steaming cup of joe in one of my Cthulhu mugs (thanks Jaynebugs and Cristal!). Breakfast burritos are probably my favorite food in the world, and we'll be covering all the different varieties of those eggstrosities in greater detail down the line.

Lately for our morning meals we've been putting together "breakfast skillets" of the sort you mind at a diner. These "little bit of everything" skillets not only have all the traditional greats of breakfast - eggs, bell peppers, cheese, bacon - but they also give us another way to use up the end of veggies and meats that didn't make it into any dinners over the course of the week. A skillet uses less eggs (between 2 and 4) than individual omelets or breakfast burritos, as the eggs are more to hold together the vegetables than anything else. They also give us an opportunity to be a little creative in the kitchen, because just about anything can go in them, and a skillet can either be made firm and served like a quiche wedge, or mixed up and served like scrambled eggs.

Any traditional breakfast meat is a delicious base to work off, from breakfast sausage to bacon and even soy crumbles or veggie bacon. You don't even strictly need to use a meat if you don't have any handy. To start a skillet, slice up your meat and start cooking in a fry pan. If you are doing bacon there's no need to add any extra oil or butter, as the bacon grease provides everything you need.

Next up, dice whatever veggies you want to use. Anything goes here, but thinking of what you'd normally put in an omelet is a great starting point. Below you can see a fantastic array that went into our skillet yesterday morning, including poblano peppers, anaheim peppers, white onion, green onion, red bell pepper, orange bell pepper, and tomato.

You may have noticed we use a lot of peppers in our various meals, from bell peppers to the much spicier kind. We'll soon be running a new blog specifically comparing the different kinds of peppers and explaining how they can be used for the most flavor in a huge range of dishes, so keep your eyes peeled!

Here's all those colorful (and flavorful) vegetables cooking up for one skillet that was less meat focused.

For the egg base, whisk your eggs with a small amount of milk and sour cream in a bowl, adding in salt and pepper if desired.

Then pour the egg mixture into the pan over the vegetables and bacon or sausage. Fill the pan so the eggs surrounds the other ingredients and forms a hold, like you might if you were making an omelet.

Grate some cheddar on top now so it melts in, or if you prefer, wait until it's finished and then grate the cheese over the final product. Cover and let the skillet sit until the egg has firmed up around the vegetables if you want the end result to be solid so it can be cut into wedges or squares. Otherwise, leave uncovered and either stir every few minutes if you want something more approaching a scramble, or attempt to flip the whole thing over to cook both sides (this can be a messy experiment if it fails!).  Here's another look at a skillet, this time with mushrooms.

We're always trying to think of ways to use ingredients over multiple meals to save money, and inspiration struck one morning after we'd had a quick and easy pasta dish that's become a staple around our home. The dish consists of slices of beef or turkey sausage with pre-packaged and microwavable veggies that have their own butter sauce all tossed with bowtie pasta.  Since we still had half a jalapeno flavored sausage left, we used that instead of bacon, and mixed it with green onions and slices of tomato, along with our typical array of peppers.

Here you can find the end result for several different skillets, served up with a side of wheat toast and a dollop of cottage cheese.  I love to add on a variety of hot sauces as well, and to change up my toast with things like peanut butter.  You may have noticed we don't have any potatoes in these skillets, and either hash browns on the side or just simply cubed potato pieces in the skillet would work quite well. Generally we add potatoes to breakfast burritos instead, so you'll get to see plenty when we get on that upcoming entry to our breakfast adventures. For even more ideas on how to cook up an array of breakfast skillets, click here.

You've seen what our breakfasts are like lately, so what's next for Six-Seven-Eight? As mentioned before, soon we'll be diving deep into the hot and spicy world of peppers, and tomorrow night we'll be doing an experiment with some friends recreating Olive Garden recipes. Be on the lookout for our coverage of those fantastic Italian favorites over the next week, as well as a new project where we embark on a (culinary) travel of the globe, cooking up meals from a different country for each entry.

Keeping Easter Going

After the Easter extravaganza this weekend, we still have quite a few leftovers waiting to get eaten. While all the casseroles and mashed potatoes are almost as fantastic reheated later as they were the day of, eventually by the fourth or fifth plate the time comes to mix things up a bit.  To use up some of our remaining chicken and colored eggs, I put together two fun meals that go in very different directions.

First up is a stellar salad the likes of which gets served at great steakhouses. To start out, I carved up some of the most tender cuts of chicken and sliced one of the hard boiled eggs that was colored for our Easter celebration. To take the salad up to the next level I then cut up a variety of flavorful and colorful vegetables that were leftover from various other salads and meals earlier that week.  Below you can see all the various ingredients: the green beans give the salad a snap, the tomato adds a beautiful color, the avocado is a necessity in any serious salad, and then finally the chilli peas, green onions, and poblano chili give just a hint of heat.

Everything is layered over a bed of Italian blend, which has the traditional romaine lettuce and the more colorful and slightly bitter radicchio.

I wanted a phenomenal dressing to go with my knockout salad, but didn't want to buy something at the store for only one meal. To make a dressing worthy of this mighty mound of lettuce, I mixed up regular Italian dressing with balsamic vinegar. If you're feeling a little adventurous, you can also throw in a splash of lime or lemon juice as well.  Besides using up leftovers we needed to get rid of, this was it's own complete meal on par with a $10 restaurant salad that ended up costing mere pennies.

But hey, what's up with all the healthy stuff?  We're usually cooking up things slathered in butter and oil, after all!  Fear not, our Easter chicken also got put to use as more fattening American fare as well.  When hunger struck at a late hour I didn't want to put together something huge, but still needed something that tasted great. My idea?  A spicy sandwich with horseradish instead of mayo.  Strips of chicken are layered one side of the bread, and thin slices of hot pepper cheese go on the other.

But how to make this more like a midnight snack?  Ah-ha - a mostly empty bag of barbecue chips in the back of the pantry!

Throw a couple tomato slices on there and (should the mood strike) perhaps some avocado, and viola - the perfect late night sandwich that also uses up the remainder of our delicious chicken.

Easter Dinner

Last we took a look specifically at how to make great food on a limited budget by stretching one main course into three different meals. This week we'll approach the same idea from a different angle: making one large holiday meal and then using the leftovers over the course of several days.  Easter gave us the perfect opportunity to shop for one large event and have enough food, and varieties of food, to make it last until the next shopping day.

Although we aren't religious at all, we still love to celebrate Easter, just without the pagan leanings of the holiday's origins or the Christian slant the day has taken in modern times.  As a fun nod to both, we color eggs and have a zombie movie marathon (this year we watched the first season of "The Walking Dead" and the zombie episode of comedy TV show "Community"). Here were our eggs, which were done with a tye-dye egg color kit. Later these will get turned into deviled eggs and egg salad sandwiches, which will be covered in a new blog entry down the line.

There a couple of staple items we enjoy making at most holidays that have become a sort of tradition for our family. One of the latest additions to that lineup is a casserole dish that takes this beautiful and healthy green veggie:

And mixes it with this very un-healthy block of equally beautiful Velveeta cheese:

Along with minced fresh garlic and crushed red pepper cooked up in a small amount of butter:

This is a layered dish, that starts out with the broccoli on the bottom, which is then mixed in with the cooked garlic and red pepper so that everything gets properly seasoned.

Then the Velveeta is cut into cubes and mixed throughout. Once the mixture has hit the right balance, the remaining cubes are thrown on top to form a cheese crust. Bread crumbs are then sprinkled on top.

After baking in the oven, here's the finished product with the golden brown bread crumb top. There a whole lot of ways to make broccoli casserole, and this is actually one of the more minimalist interpretations. You can get a good idea of how to make your own by checking out this collection of recipes here.

Green bean casserole is another favorite we love to put together, and as with many traditional dishes there are a lot of different ways to put it together. To start with, cut up strips of bacon into small pieces and pan fry them until they aren't quite crispy. To save yourself a lot of work, use the meat scissors that come with most knife sets and cut through most or all of the strips in the package at once. Toss the bacon in with the canned green beans.  We usually use one full package of bacon to eight or nine cans of green beans. Make sure to fully strain each can, as you don't want any added liquid in the casserole. To save money on this one, we wait to buy green beans until the local Smith's store has a "case lot" sale, in which cases of canned vegetables are sold together. By purchasing a whole case, each can ends up costing about 50 cents, and the remainder can be used as a side veggie for meals.

Normally condensed soup isn't something we get excited about, but green bean casserole is one of the few places where it's actually the best option to use. Instead of making your own filling, throw in three to four cans of condensed cream of mushroom soup and mix thoroughly.

In this case three wasn't quite enough, so we threw in a fourth can to make sure the casserole had the same consistency throughout.

Here is the fully prepped and ready casserole, which we make the day before and place in the refrigerator so there's less to do the day of the holiday feast.

If there's going to be green bean and broccoli casserole, of course there also has to be mashed potatoes! We didn't go nearly as crazy for Easter as happens on Thanksgiving, in which we usually use between 5 to 10 pounds of potatoes. Here's the peeled and boiled potatoes, seasoned with salt and pepper. For a different texture, leave the peels on and consider throwing in some cheese or minced garlic.

To get the creamiest mashed potatoes, use sour cream, milk, and butter when whipping them together.

Pre-packaged gravy or packet mix gravy is usually fairly cheap, but we prefer to fully use all our ingredients and get a better flavor by making gravy from the pan drippings of the bird. For Easter we made chicken instead of turkey. After baking the chicken (covered more fully below), we drain out the drippings into a pan on the stove and start at a low heat.

Slowly add in milk and flour until the drippings start to thicken up and look more like gravy. Throw in whatever seasonings strike your fancy, but definitely use salt and pepper at the least.

Here's the finished thickened gravy and the rolls coming out of the oven. While making our own rolls is always a fun time, for a big meal like this we usually buy the cheapest brown 'n serve rolls at the supermarket and jazz them up by putting slices of butter on top before they go into the oven.

Since we had guests and lots of extra canned veggies for Easter, this year Megan also made a creamy corn casserole. Here you can see all three casseroles in the oven together. To get some inspiration on how to make corn casserole, check out this list of recipes.

Here are some of the finished casseroles and a pan of stuffing. This is another staple that can be made on the cheap by buying boxed stuffing mix, but you don't have to leave it plain Jane and bland. Remember that fantastic chicken stock we made last week? That gets cooked with the stuffing instead of water for a much more robust flavor. You can also pan fry up your own veggies beforehand, like onion and celery, and throw them in with the box mix.

These are the two whole chickens we made, which we found on sale for 89 cents a pound at Albertsons. Because they are much smaller than turkeys, the cooking time is greatly reduced. To prepare these, mix up butter with any of the traditional turkey seasonings, like sage and pepper. Press your fingers under the skin and pull the skin up slightly around the chicken. Use your hands to spread the butter mixture in-between the skin and the meat, which results in a highly flavored bird with a perfect crispy skin. It's messy, but well worth the trouble!

 

And now we've got one heaping plateful with a little bit of everything! After all this we needed to take a nap on the couch of course :)  And there's tons of leftovers, meaning we have plenty more to look forward to throughout the week. Since there were so many different dishes made, it's easy to customize each plate so it never gets boring, and the leftover chicken is great for sandwiches. We'll also again turn the chicken bones into stock for a future meal.

Great food on a budget

Although we love making crazy or gourmet meals, there's always been a focus on food that fits well in a smaller budget at Six-Seven-Eight. Lately we've had to ramp up our budget constraints and stretch food out across multiple meals due to very large, unexpected medical bills. Eating on the cheap doesn't have to mean Ramen noodles and frozen pizzas though. As we'll show below, you can be frugal at the grocery store and still eat exciting meals that please the whole family.

While experimenting with making less food last longer, we came upon a way to stretch one main meal into three dinners based on what meat happened to be on sale at the time.  We've now done this two different ways, both involving chicken. For the first week, we started with a whole chicken on sale for $4, then turned the bones into stock for a delicious soup, and finally used the leftover meat for a restaurant-worthy pasta. We've already gone over a couple of great ways to make whole chicken in previous blogs, like our lemon chicken baked in dough or the "Beer Butt" chicken, or even just simply mixing butter and seasonings and rubbing them under the chicken's skin.

For the second week (focused on in the pictures below), we started with clearance drumsticks ($2.87) at the grocer's meat department that needed to be used that day. First we had a fantastic grilling experience, then turned the leftovers into an impromptu rice dinner, and finally ended with more flavorful stock.

Below you can see us marinating the drumsticks in three different bags as we wanted to try a couple different versions. One had buffalo sauce, one had barbecue sauce (when these sauces aren't on sale at the grocery store they can frequently be found at the Dollar Tree), and one was a new "Firecracker" recipe we found in a Guy Fieri cookbook down at the local library.  You can find the full recipe here. This is a recipe that's easy to use substitutions for, as we discovered while we were cooking that we were all out of honey and didn't have the garlic-chilli sauce, so in their place we went with light corn syrup and our own blend of seasonings.

After marinating for the afternoon, they went onto the hot grill and started the delicious process of blackening.

To round out this particular meal we decided to also grill our vegetables. Taking a page from a fun meal my mom used to make, we put together "potato packets" that consist of sliced potato wedges, red bell pepper, and onions (although you can use any veggies you'd like in here). They are then tossed with a small amount of olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

The entire mixture is spooned out onto tin foil, which is then wrapped up tightly and placed onto the grill.  Because of the potatoes these take a good deal longer to cook through fully than most meats, so I recommend putting them on the grill immediately once the fire starts and before the charcoals turn white.

Here's our amazing finished meal of grilled drumsticks and potato packets.  Because a 10 pound bag of potatoes was on sale that week for $2, the whole meal ended up costing only a couple of dollars, tasted as good as anything you'd eat at a barbecue joint, and was able to be stretched out with the leftovers across two more meals.  For a more authentic barbecue style meal, adding corn on the cob would also be a great way to go.

Here's a picture of the early stages of the stock we made with the whole chicken. If you haven't made stock before, it's incredibly easy and can be frozen to pull out on the fly for a delicious range of soups.  For stock, simply cook up whatever veggies strike your fancy (typically carrots, onions, and garlic) and then throw in the leftover bones and fill the pot with water.  Let it simmer for several hours and then strain out the veggies and bones.  For our whole chicken, we covered the chicken in tin foil but left it in the pan when we put in the fridge. That way by the next morning all the fat and grease had congealed at the bottom of the pan and went into the stock with the bones, resulting in an amazingly flavorful stock that was essentially a soup on it's own.

The first week we turned the stock into a unique cheese soup, also taken from a Guy Fieri cookbook. What was great about the soup is that it didn't end up tasting (or looking!) like a bowl of nacho cheese soup, and instead had an earthy taste and texture that pairs great with beer and pretzels.  We of course made our own pretzels at home, which always end up both less expensive and more flavorful than store bought. You can check out our previous blog covering the amazing pretzels here. Unfortunately we somehow missed out taking pictures of the soup creation, but you can check out a video of a similar soup being made below. For the second week, the stock had a much spicier flavor, having been made with the bones of the grilled drumsticks, so we used it like the sauce that would go with a French dip and dipped bagel sandwiches into it.



So that covers the chicken itself and the stock, but what about the third meal?  Well, we still had plenty of meat leftover after the first night of eating, so the leftover meat got shredded off the bones before the stock was made. For the whole chicken, we sliced the meat into strips along with veggies leftover from other meals that week to create a colorful pasta dish.

Here's the peppers, onions, and chicken all being sauteed together in a skillet over medium heat.

Everything then got spooned on top of spaghetti (although this would be fantastic with fettuccine or any other pasta) with a home-made alfredo sauce.  There are dozens of great alfredo recipes available online, but we've found that alfredo is best when it's done simply with no more than four or five ingredients.  We'll be getting into the aflredo recipe in greater detail in a later blog, when we cover a clone cooking night as we try to make our own versions of Olive Garden favorites.

For the leftover meat from the drumsticks, we tossed the meat with the remaining firecracker sauce, soy sauce, and a few veggies and then spooned it all out over rice for a fun Asian themed meal (sorry about the lack of a picture, I was having so much fun with that night I somehow forgot to pull out the camera!)