Recipe: California Breakfast, OU Cafeteria Style!

When I was a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, I ate breakfast in the cafeteria two or three times a week.  I found that I really enjoyed taking my time, reading the paper, and eating a nice big breakfast before my 10:30am class.  And my favorite thing to eat for breakfast at the OU cafeteria was something called "California Breakfast".  It was a casserole made out of hash brown potatoes, strips of bacon, really runny fried eggs, and cheese.  Sooooo good.

Well, nearly 10 years later, I finally decided to try to make my own version of this.  I searched the OU Housing Services website to see if the ingredients were actually as simple as I remembered.  Well... yes and no.

Ugh.  (Insert montage of me lamenting the years and years of my life spent eating crap, clueless about its effects on my body and emotions.)  But essentially, yes.  Hash brown (shredded, fried) potatoes, bacon, fried egg, and shredded cheese.

So I followed Laura's hash brown instructions.  (You must let them cool in the fridge overnight.  I tried this once without letting the potatoes cool completely, and it was a miserable failure.)

I preheated my oven to 350 degrees (or somewhere around there).  I fried up a bunch of shredded potatoes and put them in the bottom of a greased casserole dish.  Then I fried strips of bacon and put them on top of the hash browns.  Then I fried some eggs until the whites were barely done and put them on top of the bacon.  (Undercook the eggs so that the yolks will run down into the hash browns.  That's the best part!)  Then I shredded some cheese on top and put it all in the oven just long enough to melt the cheese. 

It turned out awesome!  Just as I remembered it, but, of course, better.  And I forgot to take a photo until it was mostly gone.  That's how good it was.  (Reheat leftovers in a toaster oven, not a microwave. Soggy potatoes and rubbery eggs are really not what you're going for here.)