SPAM fried casserole?

I don't know what to call it. I thought of the idea last night and realized I had nowhere good to post it that would do it justice. I posted a picture on Facebook, but it's not one of those cases where the picture is worth 1,000 words. It doesn't give the back-story. Thus here I am on my second official but first real blog post to describe my delicious breakfast. I think it's rather clever, but I'm biased.

First things first, start with a clean pan. I hear some of you out there saying that's a lot of work, but I think it's important to have clean pans and utensils when preparing food. It prevents contamination of flavors as well as bacteria that may be harmful.


That's my clean pan and ingredient list. Ignore the cashews; they're just holding up the cheese.

Plan slightly for pan heating time. I like to use the cast iron pan, and it takes a bit of time to get hot. You want to make sure your pan is hot evenly. Do not try to cook in a cold pan!


If you have a power tool (food processor) or other advanced tool like a mandolin, it's a good time to use it. Otherwise, you can get the old school grater out for the potatoes like I did. Be careful not to grate your fingers; it's a monotonous process.

I'm not the planning ahead type, so I actually prepared all my ingredients in advance then heated the plan. If you can figure out how long it will take to perform each action, you can do better than I did. The great thing about cooking is the versatility. This isn't about precise actions - it's about what you want. Sure, there's chemistry and a bit of physics involved, but I'm not Alton Brown. I want something to eat.



Next, finely dice your SPAM (I chose Bacon SPAM!), and slice the garlic. I thought it might be nice to cook the garlic with the potatoes, but I forgot... You'll see that later. Anyway, back to the "do what you want" philosophy, you can slice, dice, mince, crush, whatever your garlic. I put about 3 cloves on my one serving because I love garlic.



Next is the eggs. The food experts say you should let your eggs warm up to room temperature before cooking them. Of course, the science experts say that will encourage bacterial growth, and you shouldn't do it. Whatever. Do what you want. You're going to cook the eggs, right?


I added cayenne pepper and a touch of garlic powder to my eggs.




Next I "whisked" the eggs. Now, I only had 2 eggs left, hence two yolks you see. That means with the rest of the ingredients you see, I have leftovers waiting for more eggs. Perfect, I say. All the prep is done; all I have to do is toss the eggs into the pan with . . . I'm ahead of myself again. You'll see when I do that and be able to pick up from there.






Oil the hot pan - I like olive oil, use what you like. Be sure the oil is hot before adding the potatoes. The key to hash browns is a medium-hot pan with even heat. Pack the potatoes in, sprinkle some salt and black pepper, drizzle a little oil over the top, then ignore them until the bottom is crispy. When you flip them, add a little more salt and pepper. Don't mush them around, or they'll be a mess.


Now that I have my potatoes really crispy (maybe a little too crispy, but they're hard to judge), it's time to cook the SPAM. My original plan was to just dump ingredients on top of each other, but I think it worked out better pulling the potatoes out of the pan, cooking the SPAM, then adding back what I wanted to finish off.





Place the desired portion of potatoes in the hot, oiled pan. (This is where you should be if you wondered where I was ahead of myself. Start here for repeat servings - potatoes and SPAM are cooked, just add eggs and cheese.)

Add SPAM onto potatoes. Pour eggs on top. Now the trick - the egg will run off and cook in the hot pan. Flip the whole mess, allowing the raw egg on top of the SPAM/potato part to cook. Top with cheese and fold the runoff egg over the cheese to let it melt. Add more cheese because cheese is good.





This is when I realized I forgot the garlic, so I just put the slices on top of my finished product. I didn't want to leave it at that, so I added some Hot Pace salsa to complete the dish.

It would probably be good with some mushrooms or sliced, fried onions as well.

First blog post and why you shouldn't read it

I'm not going to go back and read Wil Wheaton's post to get ideas of what to say, but it's a very similar thing. Basically, this is mostly for me. There will be little organization, few posts, and probably not much of interest. I wanted a blog for a while but didn't have enough to say to motivate me to create a blog. That hasn't really changed, but it's a lot easier to create a blog now than when I first considered it.

Of the little I'll post, it's likely to pertain to food, computers, firearms, my dog, or whatever else I feel like posting. I don't expect to post all the trivial stuff I do - that's what Facebook is for. This will mostly be things that don't fit well in other places, like the food I created and didn't want to describe in 140 characters to fit on Twitter.