‘The Pioneer Woman’: Ree Drummond’s Make-Ahead Breakfast Casserole Uses 1 Genius Shortcut Ingredient

Ree Drummond has the perfect make-ahead breakfast casserole to feed a hungry crowd and it couldn’t be easier to pull together. The Pioneer Woman star shared how to make her simple breakfast comfort food favorite which features a quick shortcut ingredient.

Ree Drummond’s make-ahead breakfast casserole uses an easy shortcut ingredient

Drummond demonstrated how to make her tater tot casserole on an episode of The Pioneer Woman and couldn’t praise the easy recipe enough. “It is so wonderful. It’s an all-in-one main course, it’s got a great shortcut ingredient, and it’s make-ahead. Check, check, and check,” she said.

First, she browned breakfast sausage with diced onions in a skillet until the sausage was cooked through. Then she assembled the bottom crust of her casserole. Her shortcut ingredient makes this dish a snap — frozen tater tots. “So easy, all I need to do is get them into a buttered baking dish,” she explained. She lined the tots neatly along the bottom of the dish then put the sausage and onion mixture on top.

Drummond clued her viewers into how genius the tater tots are for this dish. “Once the casserole bakes, those tater tots just turn into potatoes. You would never know they were frozen,” she noted.

‘The Pioneer Woman’ star’s breakfast dish can be baked the next day

Drummond grated cheddar and pepper jack cheeses, then combined the cheese mixture with eggs, milk, half and half, cayenne pepper, diced bell peppers, and seasoned salt in a bowl. She poured the eggs over the sausage in the baking dish and topped it with more cheese.

The Pioneer Woman star covered the dish with foil to bake later, refrigerating it overnight. The next morning she baked it at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 minutes, removed the foil, and baked the casserole for another 20 minutes.

The full recipe is available on the Food Network website.

Ree Drummond learned how to make her husband’s favorite breakfast

Drummond’s easy breakfast dish may get rave reviews but her husband Ladd’s favorite childhood breakfast food is even easier to make.

She shared how to make her egg-in-a-hole recipe on an episode of The Pioneer Woman. “His grandmother used to make these for him when he was a little boy,” she explained. “I pretty much had to learn how to make them before we got married — it was part of the deal.”

Luckily for her, it wasn’t a difficult recipe to learn, with just bread, butter, and eggs on the list of ingredients. “They’re so simple and so delicious,” she said.

Drummond cut a circle from a slice of bread with a biscuit cutter, then she placed the bread and its punched out circle in a skillet with melted butter over medium-high heat. She toasted the bread by making sure it was well coated with butter, then flipped it to toast the other side before cracking an egg in the hole and giving it a sprinkle of salt and pepper.

“Honestly, I make egg-in-the-holes two or three times a week in my house and they really have some sort of gravitational pull,” she shared. “My husband and kids will be elsewhere, I’ll have no idea where they are. All I have to do is throw egg-in-the-holes on the skillet and they all just sort of appear around the stove. It’s kind of magical.”

In a 2008 Pioneer Woman blog post, Drummond shared the egg should be “still soft without feeling over jiggly,” writing, “Here’s the key: golden brown toast, white (not brown/burned) whites, soft, unbroken yolk.”