If you’ve read some of my past posts, then you know I’m not a morning person. Not. At. All. And although my coffee consumption has gone down, I just can’t give up breakfast. Even though I’m a morning zombie, I am always hungry at that time of day. The result is normally finding the fastest and easiest thing I can to make or, more often, reheat. Until today. I love trying new things, and a breakfast dish that requires a recipe is unheard of in this house. I’m very excited to try out this breakfast casserole, albeit it will be served late morning. Closer to lunch, but we can always say brunch-ish.
A light, healthy and tasty summer breakfast casserole with asparagus, artichokes and plenty of cheese!
The Ingredients
Eggs for breakfast are pretty standard if I decide to actually cook in the morning. Even adding cheese to them isn’t unusual. What makes this recipe so different for me is adding multiple kinds of cheese and vegetables. I absolutely love both, and I’m always down for learning how to work vegetables into a meal.
Fortunately, the list of ingredients for this recipe isn’t long, full expensive items, or anything that was hard to find. The most expensive item was the shredded parmesan cheese at $4.19. Everything else was around $1-$2.
The Process
There really wasn’t a whole lot of work to make my breakfast casserole, and it was ready to bake with just 8 minutes of prep work. I bought shredded parmesan cheese, so no work there besides measuring it. Then it was a matter of shopping a few things like the asparagus, artichoke hearts, and cream cheese. From there all I had to do was mix it all up, pour it into a baking dish, and pop it into the oven.
First, I have to tell you that I used an 8″ x 8″ baking dish instead of the 9″ x 9″ the author listed. I think this caused me some issues with the baking time. I started out timing my casserole for the lowest time, 20 minutes. The recipe says to bake until the “eggs have set and the top is a light golden brown”. None of that happened, so I added 5 minutes as listed. No joy. The top was definitely not browned, and the center still seemed like liquid.
I wasn’t going to take the chance of undercooking my breakfast casserole, so I moved the oven rack up one level from the middle where it was initially placed. Then I added 10 minutes, checked the casserole, and add 10 more minutes. The total cooking time more or less doubled from 20-25 minutes to 45 minutes, but I ended up with a golden brown breakfast casserole that was pretty well set in the middle.
Note: I added pepper but no salt to my egg mixture. The marinated artichoke hearts and cheeses were all salty, so I didn’t want to overdo it. I’m glad I waited because I found the casserole to be perfectly seasoned without the extra salt. That’s saying a lot since I usually add salt to everything!
