Hash brown casserole and French doughnuts

Well, it was just a triumph for Breakfast Team Six this morning at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tennessee. Just a triumph.

As you can tell from this photo, presentation is not one of our strong points. We’ll have to work on that. However. HOWEVER. Our menu was outstanding if I do say so myself. And I do. You can see the leftovers from Miss Paula Deen’s Hash Brown and Sausage Casserole with Caramelized Onions (recipe to follow, naturally – I can’t taunt you like that). In the foreground are Beignets with powered sugar, cinnamon sugar and honey. In the small pot is sawmill gravy I made myself and not out of a mix. And in the big pot are cheese grits made by my new apprentice, Matthew Horton.

He made the grits and after he added a hunk of Velveeta to the pot he tasted them and said, “More Velveeta.” That boy was raised right. His dad, Kirby, is our made-to-order egg man. I told Matthew he did such a good job on the grits he will now be known as the grits man.

So, I have told you about Mr. Greer Carlisle’s pathological competitiveness in this Breakfast Team Challenge. If you happened to miss that, here’s the post. He is very proud of his homemade blueberry waffles, and rightly so. But blueberry waffles are not going to win this contest for you, my friend. This morning he came to breakfast just to check out what we were doing. Mark insisted on taking a picture of us together, two friendly competitors. Except can’t you kind of see a little grimace on Greer’s face? Sort of? Maybe it’s just me.

Paula Deen’s Hash Brown and Sausage Casserole with Caramelized Onions

2 tablespoons butter

2 large sweet onions, thinly sliced

1 pound ground pork sausage (I prefer Tennessee Pride, naturally)

1 8-ounce package sliced baby bella mushrooms

1 30-ounce package frozen hash browns

2 cups shredded white Cheddar cheese, divided

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 8-ounce container of sour cream

Salt and pepper to taste

In a large skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring frequently, for ten minutes, or until tender. Increase heat to medium high and cook, stirring constantly until onions are brown and caramel colored. Remove and set aside.

Add sausage and mushrooms to the skillet. Cook over medium heat, breaking up sausage and mushrooms to small pieces until well browned and crumbly. (You don’t need to drain the sausage grease – it cooks the mushrooms).

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 13-by-9 baking dish with nonstick cooking spray.

In a large bowl, combine the onions, sausage mixture, hash browns, 1 cup of the cheese, soup and sour cream. Add salt and pepper to taste. Spoon mixture into the baking dish. Sprinkle with remaining cheese (I also sprinkle with cornflake crumbs). Bake for 30 minutes.

Smack talk at church

“You’re not going to serve those $8 sausages at breakfast are you?” Greer Carlisle asked suspiciously. We were standing in front of the West Wind Farms stand at the farmer’s market one Saturday morning and I was regaling Greer with the wondrous quality of Ralph Cole’s hot sage pork sausage.

Greer goes to church with me and he’s on one of the Men’s Club’s breakfast cooking teams. Ordinarily, breakfast at church is a pretty basic affair: scrambled eggs, sausage, grits, gravy and biscuits, all for a modest monetary donation. But Josh Sutherland, the president of the Men’s Club, has thrown down the gauntlet. He has announced a contest in which each team will try to raise the most money. The winning team will get aprons. Aprons! Well, we are all very excited about that.

I will modestly say that I put on a pretty good spread for church breakfast. Sometimes it’s Emeril’s Creole Bread Pudding. Sometimes Mark makes these delicious breakfast quesadillas oozing with melted cheese. We just try to add a little sparkle to the menu. It is a little unusual that I’m on a Men’s Club cooking team, but that’s probably a story for another day. Maybe I’ll tell that one when I tell you why I’m also the Men’s Club procurer of supplies for the kitchen. Or maybe I won’t. No need stirring up trouble.

At any rate, Greer’s team has stepped it up and he’s now on the prowl to see what we’re up to. Greer has started offering homemade blueberry waffles. And fresh fruit. Last Sunday, he stopped me in the hallway. “You’re not going to do fresh fruit, too, are you?” he probed. “So what are you making next Sunday?”

Ha! I’ve got him on the run now. “Oh,” I said casually, “I’m making Beignets to order.” He looked at me suspiciously. “What’s a Beignet?” I actually think he knew, but he was poking fun at me. “It’s a French doughnut,” I said. “Like the ones they have in New Orleans.” He just shook his head as though to say, “Why would you be making  French doughnuts for church breakfast?”

I am not going to tell Greer that they come out of a box, and don’t you either. He would never let me live that down.

But I’m telling you because you’ve got to try this. These things are so addictive Mark and I ate a whole batch ourselves. Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans makes the mix and if you can’t find it at the Publix or wherever you shop, you can order it online.

So I’m thinking Greer will just turn green when he gets to church on Sunday and finds me frying my Beignets, which he thinks I made from scratch, to order in my Fry Baby Deep Fat Fryer. I am proud to say Kirby Horton, another of our team members, invented the to order menu items when he volunteered to make eggs to order a few months ago. This has given our team a distinct advantage over the others.

I am sure that the Beignets will inch us towards victory, but I’m saving the coup de grace for our last breakfast of the year. I am going to digress here to say that coup de grace is French for “blow of mercy,” meaning a blow intended to end the suffering of a wounded creature. That’s not too ugly, is it?

For our last breakfast, I’m making Eggs Benedict. With homemade Hollandaise sauce. To order, naturally.