I’ve always enjoyed breakfast casseroles and have made, and posted about, many of them over the years and lately I decided I really, really like them as they can be made then eaten on for several days. For this one, I used the recipe for Easy Vegetable Cheese Sausage Breakfast Casserole from Serious Eats and I made it as shown below.
Bev and I wish you the best for the coming year and we are looking forward to another year together - since 2025 was a good year for us, we will be eating black eyed peas again for good luck today.
We did our usual New Year's Eve - Watched a little football, had a glass of champagne about 10pm then I went to bed and Bev was shortly behind me.
And here is the list of my New Year's Resolutions
1.
We hope you had a wonderful Christmas and we had a nice, albeit warm, one that required opening up the house to avoid using the AC.
I love, and have made, smoked prime rib for Christmas dinner
several times but Bev does not like all of the fat in the ribeye so an idea hit
me. Her favorite beef cut is tenderloin
so I decided to try smoking a whole tenderloin roast for this year’s Christmas
meal.
Have A Very Merry Christmas
I’d like to dream of a White Christmas and a toasty fire but it’s predicted to be 70F here.
I’ve ordered carnitas in a restaurant a couple of times and was always disappointed with the dry overcooked meat so I’ve not made them at home. But when daughter, Wende, advised her great success making then, I had to give them a try and used the same recipe that she did. The recipe for Reverse Carnita’s comes from famous chef Rick Bayless – not sure why they all called Reverse Carnitas but I followed the recipe as written using all of the optional flavorings.
While I’ve previously used a couple of their recipes, I recently added “Serious Eats” as one of my regular blog reads and I’ve been learning a lot from the site such how to make the perfect beef stew. I normally would not make another beef stew blog post if it were not for what I learned from this one. The recipe along with a lot of how-to’s came from their All-American Beef Stew post and I’ll let you visit the site for the details but here are their 13 rules: Select your meat wisely, Sear your beef before cubing, Go easy on the flour, Separate your vegetables, Booze makes it better, Use chicken stock, not beef, Break out the umami bombs, Don’t waste flavor, Powdered gelatin FTW, Yukon golds make for cleaner stew, Use the oven, not the stove, Don’t overcook it, Don’t eat it today, eat it tomorrow, it doesn’t matter.
Cindy had a birthday while Bev was in Florida so we finally were able to take her out to lunch this day and as a seafood lover, we took her to Chesapeake’s Seafood House in West Knoxville. They are one of the Copper Cellar Family of Restaurants, which is a local chain that, in addition to Chesapeake’s, includes Calhoun’s, Copper Cellar, Cappuccino’s, Cherokee Grill, Corner 16, and Smoky Mountain Brewery with locations around the Knoxville area and in Gatlinburg.
