 I'm Tammy, and the cameraman is my husband, Chris, and this is Colored Valley Cooks, where we cook like our momma's did. Today we're getting a delicious, bubbly, cheesy, hash brown sausage casserole out of the oven, and I'm gonna show you how to make it. We're gonna start browning our hash browns in our sausage. Now, browning the hash browns is optional, but I think it's much tastier if you brown your hash browns. And why not brown these two things while you're prepping everything else? That's what we're gonna do today. And today we're using our favorite swaggered-y sausage. This is the All Natural Sage, and boy, is it delicious. Now, you can use a hot sausage if you like a little pep, and I'm gonna use a little pepper jack cheese today, which will give it a little bit of a kick. So you could do whatever you want. Now, we're using mostly cheddar, but we're also gonna use some pepper jack. Now, if you're wondering why I'm using this on the counter, it's because we're not getting our kitchen redone until September, and it is really hard to see and work over there, and it's easy for me to work on one counter. So until we get our kitchen remodeled, you may see me working out here. It's really dark over there on that side of the kitchen as well. At least we do have a light above this bar. Now, we're gonna use a stick of butter to brown our hash browns in. That's gonna make the casserole taste better as well. If you do not brown your hash browns first, then just melt some butter and pour into your hash browns when you put them in the bottom of the casserole dish. Now, I had a couple of people ask us about this electric eye. It is not an induction burner. It's just a regular electric burner, and it doesn't get real, real hot. You can see how big it is. It's not real big. So you can cook something in a really large pan on top of it. All right, so here we go. We're gonna start chopping this up with our meat chopper. And then once we drop those hash browns and salt and pepper those, we'll start chopping up some of our onion. We'll put a little onion in this. So for our hash browns, you need to thaw your hash browns. All I did saw them in the microwave, but you can thaw them overnight in the refrigerator if you want to. Now, these are still really cold, so it's gonna take these a while to cook. And I'm gonna put them probably in two batches. I'll butter these. They won't butter the other ones. We'll use oil for the other ones if we need to. You might can start your other bag of hash browns in your sausage skillet once that sausage is done too. All right, we're gonna chop a little onion. I'm just gonna chop this and I'm gonna chop it thin. So just chop up about, that's probably almost a half cup or so, at least a half cup of chopped onion. I'm just gonna slide this over right here and we're gonna grate our cheese while this is cooking. We'll go ahead and stir this again. I think I'm gonna get me a lid and put on my hash browns so they'll get hot quicker. We put a lid on these hash browns, trying to get them a little warmer quicker. And now we're gonna grate some delicious cheese. So I have got this cracked mild cheddar. We're gonna grate all of the eggs and then I'm just gonna grate a little bit of pepper jack as well. We love spaghetti sausage and there's nothing better than a good hash brown casserole with some good sausage in it. If you haven't tried it yet, I urge you to try it because it's just simply delicious. Now you can make this ahead of time and then bake it the next day. Now we're gonna grate a little bit of the pepper jack. So this is the pepper jack. We're just putting this in there for a little spice instead of putting peppers in here. Using a little pepper jack saves you a step. I'm gonna scoot it over a little bit, add the onion on this side and let it saute. You can see this is where the sausage doesn't have a lot of grease in it. It's not real greasy. And so most of the time I don't even drain it when I'm using it in a recipe because that's barely enough to brown or saute my onion. How many people you're feeding whether or not you would have used nine eggs or 12 eggs? Today we're using nine, okay? So we're gonna use nine eggs and a cup of milk. I'm gonna go ahead and crack the eggs one at a time. Fresh eggs from our own chickens. So some are smaller or bigger than others. There's nine eggs. I'm gonna add, this is half and half. If you don't have half and half, you can use half whipping cream, half regular milk. And if you don't have that, just use milk, okay? Still just use the cup, even if you're using 12 eggs. Now you're just gonna beat things up good. This is my blending for work I've used for my biscuits. I think these are good and brown and ready to go in the bottom of our dish. We're gonna go ahead and brown the rest up. But these with all the butter are gonna go on the bottom in that way. They sure won't stick. When you go to lift out a piece of casserole for somebody. I could have done a half a stick of butter for each section that I fried. Or if you've got a big skillet, you could have fried all of them at one time with a stick of butter. Either way, the stick of butter's in there and the hash browns are in there. We're gonna brown some more. All right, this set of hash browns, the second part, we didn't have the butter too. So they look different. You could tell they're not as greasy as these. And they don't brown quite as good either. I put in just a little bit of olive oil. So you can use cooking oil, olive oil, whatever you wanna use. And then we're just gonna move these around until they're about evenly spaced in our casserole. So just get them kinda even. Looks good. Now, one thing that me and Chris were talking about a few minutes ago is I'm not really going by recipe. I'm just putting this together this morning. And we're not gonna add any more salt to this because I salted the first set of potatoes and that was salted butter. Our sausage will already be salty and the cheese is super salty. So I'm not gonna salt the eggs. I think it's gonna be good just like this without any more salt, okay? You can always add a little pepper if you want to. Now, the next thing I'm gonna put in is my onion. Because to me, onion's super delicious with potatoes. So you just wanna sprinkle your onion across your potatoes. Well, it smells so good. All ready. And then we're gonna go ahead and get our sausage in here and spread it out. I'm gonna pour it in and spread it out. So here's our sausage layer. Y'all tell me if you put something special in your hash brown breakfast casserole. Our most special ingredient, of course, is the swirky sausage. All right. And our farm fresh eggs. Now, what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the eggs and cream and we're gonna pour these over the top. And that's what's gonna bind it all together. So you're gonna wanna really make sure that it's in there about equal. And now we're gonna add the cheese, pepper jack and the great thing about cooking your hash browns the way we did it is everything in here is already done except for the eggs. So it really just needs to cook long enough to set these eggs and that way it doesn't have to stay in the stove as long as it would have if we had not cooked our hash browns. So our cooking time instead of it being 40 minutes, like most of these casserole would take, our cooking time will easily be 30 minutes. So it's gonna take at least 10 minutes off of the cooking. All right, there's our casserole. We're gonna get it in the oven, cook it at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. If you don't brown your hash browns first and you're gonna let them cook in the stove, I personally would lay the butter down in the bottom of the pan, then the hash browns and that way that butter will help them get brown a little bit on the bottom. And then I would cook them 40 minutes and that's what I'd do differently. You might wanna check on it and make sure your cheese isn't gonna get too brown too. I don't think it will. All right, so we'll see you in a little while when this is done, it's gonna be delicious. All right, we're gonna get out this delicious breakfast casserole. It looks amazing and smells so good. The whole house smells so good, y'all. Looks really delicious, y'all. Now, you can tell that it's nice and crispy on the edges and it's gonna taste real toasty, the cheese and the sausage and stuff and hash browns. It's gonna be really delicious. So we'll get me a fork and dig into this. Chris is gonna have it for lunch today. All right, we're gonna give it a try, y'all. It's nice and tall. I'm gonna be honest with you. We did a fireman's breakfast casserole that was really popular. This one's better because of the hash browns. The fireman's casserole was more like an omelette because it didn't have potatoes in it. This one is more like just a good breakfast on a plate. I love it. It's delicious. It'd be good with some good homemade white gravy poured over the top. Mm-mm, mm. If you wanna make this, you can always make it a day ahead, put it in the refrigerator, stick it in the oven and just make a little white gravy to pour on top of it before you serve it to everybody. Ooh, they would be in hog heaven. Hog heaven with swaggered sausage. That's what that'd be. And that pepper jack cheese gives it just the right amount of heat. It's just a little bit of cheese, not much, but it's just so delicious, y'all. You're gonna love this casserole. We thank you so much for watching Collard Valley Cooks, where we cook like our mama's did. Y'all come back and see us and hit that like and subscribe button. Love ya, bye.