Things you can get away with when the wife's out of town.

I am a breakfast fiend.  While I enjoy steak, or a good pasta or pork tenderloin meal, to me, nothing matches the 'feel good' factor of what we call breakfast food, whether it's pancakes, french toast, bacon and eggs, or something more complex(chicken fired steak and eggs being the Unlimited Category Breakfast Champion).  A few weeks ago, I had been talking to one of my buddies about breakfast, and he told me about a casserole he made, and with the wife not being quite as big a fan of breakfast as I am, I seized on her absence as a sign to make it.

First things first are cooking up half a pound of sausage, and half a pound of diced bacon.  Place a layer(although two is better) of not quite all the way cooked tater tots in the bottom of the casserole dish, and then dump the bacon and sausage on top.  Scramble up about 8 eggs, and dump that over the top, and then throw it all in the oven at about 325.  The eggs will take a while to set all the way through...my experience shows about 35-40 minutes.  As Alton Brown would say, running scrambled eggs are not good eats.  About 5 minutes before it's done, dump some cheese of your preference on top.

Since older daughter is not a huge cheese fan, and I am bound and determined to be Cool Dad right now, I only covered half of the dish with cheese.

Before anyone starts calling CPS because I am trying to give my children heart attacks, the girls meal was served with skim milk(grabbed the wrong jug, again...it has blue writing just like the 2%) AND I resisted the urge to make sausage gravy to pour over the whole thing...a little bit of Chipotle Cholula made everything better though. 

Oh, and did I mention only the girls had skim milk?  Daddy broke out a bottle of Ninkasi Brewing Oatis Oatmeal Stout.

What?  It's got oatmeal in it, and oatmeal is a breakfast food!

It was yummy.