Coffee Breakfast

Christmas. It seems like every family has their own traditions when it comes to meals around the Christmas holiday. For my family one of our favorite ones is our Christmas morning breakfast. We’ve been enjoying basically the same menu since I was a little kid. Some new things come and go, but the bulk of our menu is rooted deep in tradition. Since I’ve been married and spent some Christmases in new places I’ve often re-created this same meal and all of the warm memories of childhood come flooding back. Food is pretty amazing that way. One of the neat things about our Christmas breakfast is that the entire thing is prepared the night before. That way on Christmas morning all we have to do is pull things out of the fridge or pop them in the oven and as soon as we start smelling breakfast we know it’s time to take a break from presents and eat! At the heart of the meal is this breakfast casserole- and I’ll tell you right now it’s not the only one that will ever appear here. I have a lot of yummy overnight breakfast dishes (and I know Kate does too), some very similar to this recipe, but this is our official Christmas morning one. Hope you enjoy it!

You’ll need all of this stuff (see my notes about cheese and bread below the ingredient list). And note that I show a large can of green chiles in this photo, but the recipe calls for a small one. I really love green so I double it.

and a bunch of spices…

It seems like there are always a lot of questions when we have recipes that call for sausage of any kind. It’s probably because there are so many different types: breakfast sausage, Italian sausage, sausage in links, sausage in castings, sausage in tubes, sausage in 8 different sections of the supermarket… so I thought I’d just show you. That’s the beauty of a blog, right? This is the kind of sausage that I use, always. It’s Jimmy Dean, and it’s found in the section of the supermarket near the hot dogs, bacon, etc. I always get the reduced fat kind but not because it has anything to do with cutting calories in any way. More on that later, but the reduced fat is wonderful because it still tastes just the same as the regular stuff, but you don’t have to mess with draining it after cooking so it’s a lot less work. Just brown it up and toss it in. So take a mental picture (and please don’t accidentally buy anything maple flavored):