Sometimes I wake up and I just want a big breakfast, and my housemate has been talking about a specific craving. Particularly he'd been remembering a bacon hash brown quesadilla he used to be able to get. I didn't have bacon, and didn't feel up to making hash browns from scratch, but I did have hot links and potatoes. So I did some experimenting and made a hecking awesome skillet breakfast! Wowed the heck out of my house mate so I must have done something right! I'll put what I did to make this after the read more thingy as a half recipe half ramble of my process thing.
Ingredients:
- 2 hot links, sliced into coins.
- 2 potatoes (Mine were russets, good sized for baked potatoes), chopped into bite sized pieces
- 1/2 a yellow onion, sliced thinly
- 1/2 a green pepper, medium dice
- 1 rib celery, chopped
- 1 large green onion, chopped with whites and greens separate
- 2 cloves of garlic, minced. (I heartily endorse using the short cut of using jarred garlic here if you need to, or even just extra garlic powder at the end.)
- 1 oz chopped cilantro (estimated, I just chopped a few sprigs)
- 1 cup of vegetable scrap stock to de-glaze the pan with. Any other stock or even just water should be fine here too.
- 3 tbsp-ish of a spice mix I made awhile ago to dry rub a pork shoulder? And I forgot what was in it? Probably a mix of black pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne pepper, smoked paprika and oregano. Knowing my usual go to spices for that sort of thing, and what was probably in my pantry at the time. Important thing is it's 'seasoned to taste' with spices.
I started by heating about a tablespoon of cooking oil in skillet on medium heat (house mate later said it could have had less oil in the end dish). Fried hot link coins until lightly browned, and removed them to a paper towel lined plate to drain some of the grease off.
I added the onions next, followed by the green pepper, celery and the whites of the green onion after. In hindsight, I feel like the potatoes should have gone in with the onions first to brown some and then the other veggies. It turned out fine the way I did it, but I recommend anyone trying this to brown up the potatoes some with a bit of salt and pepper first before adding the other veggies. Onions are really good caramelized in this so should definitely cook down a bit first.
Garlic fries up in the pan next and gets stirred in. This is where I noticed my pan was getting dry and stuff was sticking, but my potatoes weren't done yet. So I started adding some of the veggie stock I made to de-glaze the pan with, and ultimately ended up pouring enough in to coat the bottom of the pan. Followed by covering the pan, and letting everything cook down in the stock. The result I didn't expect but loved is that the stock reduced along with the sugars from the veggies into a sort of savory gravy that coated everything.
Once the potatoes were getting tender I added the spices and cilantro and stirred to coat evenly. Next the hot links went back in, the whole thing got stirred and heated together to blend all the flavors and platted up.
Housemate loves cheese, but can't have eggs like I like. So his portion got smothered in cheese topped with the green onion and since he was asleep at the time put in a container for him to reheat later.
I'm actually allergic to milk, but eggs go great with this so I fried up a couple of eggs in a little more of the veggie stock to top my portion with. Got those nice and runny, so they blending with everything else to make a really nice sauce I ended up getting a piece of bread to mop up when I was done. Pickled radishes on the side made a nice compliment to cut through the weightiness of the rest of the dish. I also just seem to want something pickled with every meal.
Definitely will be awhile again before I feel up to making a breakfast this good. But damn, this was a really really good way to start the day.