Breakfast Casseroles
We ran an AP recipe for "Savory Sausage-Apple Strata" on today's Food page (12/19/07). I've added the recipe to this blog.
This is a breakfast casserole, kind of like a savory bread pudding. There are a lot of these types of recipes around, especially the make-ahead type. A very common one that I find in those church fundraising cookbooks uses ham, cheddar or Swiss cheese, and white or wheat bread. Tres boring, IMHO.
Personally, I would probably use mild sausage rather than spicy (as the AP author uses), or even something like locally made chicken-apple sausages. (Since the casserole includes apples and cheese, I would think a spicy sausage might overwhelm the other main ingredients.)
The AP writer did something that always irks me. She assumed everyone who would read her recipe has access to a gourmet cheese shop; one of her ingredients is "Grana Padano" cheese.
I always have a problem with writers who list ingredients like "Grana Padano" cheese without telling you that it's just like Parmesan except it comes from a different part of Italy, and without telling you what you can substitute for it.
So, before adding this recipe to my blog, off I went to one of my favorite references: The Cook's Thesaurus.
If you can't find Grana Padano, substitute Parmesan or Asiago or Romano. "Grana," it turns out, is simply the term used to refer to hard or grating cheeses — like Parmesan or Asiago (sold by the chunk in the deli section, not in a green cardboard can!). I added this notation to her recipe.
I often find myself wishing we had a gourmet cheese shop here. Some of our local stores carry a nice assortment — I'm thinking of Eureka Natural Foods and Wildberries in particular — but they're nothing like the cheese shops I used to frequent in the Bay Area. That said, imagine my surprise to find one of my favorite cheeses, Mizithra, at Safeway of all places. But that's for another recipe, at another time.