Camping Trips & My Favorite Cheesy Breakfast Bake

I wake up slowly to my mom's hand patting my back.  For a split second I'm confused about where I am because this definitely isn't my bedroom.  I'm right next to a big window and I'm wrapped up in my American Girl sleeping bag.  When I turn my head, I realize I'm also in the middle of a tiny little kitchen.  Oh yeah!  It is one of the days I've waiting all year for!  My family is on our annual camping trip in northern PA and mom is waking me up because she needs to turn my bed back into a table so that she can make breakfast.  I lift the blind on the window to peek out and I see my cousins, aunts and uncles starting to gather around a big campfire.  This is going to be the best day!

Yes, I acknowledge that you may not consider driving a trailer into a campground and hooking up to electricity and running water "camping", but that is how my family did it.  The week would be filled with biking to town for ice cream, tubing down the Pine Creek, jumping off the "Big Rock", fishing at Rattlesnake Rock, searching for salamanders, and telling stories around the biggest campfire circle you've ever seen (most of my mom's family would come, and she is one of eleven, so this was no small gathering)..  but at the end of the day we showered and slept in a bed, and in the morning, mom turned on the coffee pot and cooked up breakfast in the oven.

And, like most things in my family, we spent a lot of time focused on the food.  We would park the trailer in our driveway the entire week leading up to this trip and slowly fill it with all of the groceries we would need.  Mom would also make a bunch of baked goods and we were allowed to splurge on some fun things, which we used to make our cousins think we were cool.  Things like individual boxes of cereal and Zebra Cakes and Yodels :) We learned some great negotiation skills too.  If I give you one Yodel, can I try those cookies your mom brought?  

I remember foil packs stuffed with meat, potatoes, and PA Dutch stuffing..  fire roasted fish that we had caught the same day..  mountain pies filled with pizza sauce and cheese (where I first experimented with pineapple pizza)..  whoopie pies..  blueberry cobbler made on the fire..  and tons of fresh fruit, peanuts in the shell, and bags of popcorn passed around the fire circle.  We even heated a cast iron of peanut oil one night and fried anything we could think of, which as a kid, was a culinary dream!  The only miss I can remember is when my Grandma got out her griddle and fried up some eggplant.  I'd eat that up today, but as I kid on a trip that felt like it didn't have rules.. eggplant was out of the question.  Sorry Grandma, i'm sure the face I made when I turned it down and ran for a brownie was less than grateful.

Somehow with all of that food, the thing I still looked forward to the most was mom's breakfast bake.  It was buttery and cheesy, full of ham (my favorite food as a kid ..  "Ham for Sam"), and it had the perfect crunch on the top.  I would make sure I knew which day we were going to have that for breakfast and I would even stick around to help make it before running out to plan the next adventure.

This week, I decided to revisit that breakfast bake and create my own version.  I don't have kids to give it a true test, but Asher had three servings and then was upset that I didn't make enough for breakfasts for the entire week.  So, I would say it's passes some kind of test! 

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
2. While the oven heats, melt half of the butter in a pan over low heat, add the panko and toast for a few minutes until lightly browned; set aside
3. Break the bread into bite size pieces and place them onto a baking sheet
4. Cover them with half of the butter cut into thin slices to melt over the top
5. Bake the bread for about 5 mins or until the butter melts and the bread is lightly toasted
6. Add the bread to a bowl with the milk, heavy cream, eggs, turkey bacon (cut into small pieces), and half of the cheese; set aside
7. Heat a pan over medium heat and cook the onions until they are soft
8. Add the garlic and continue to cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds to a minute
9. Add the onions to the bowl with the bread mixture, season with salt and pepper
10. Grease a small baking dish (mine is 10.5" by 7.5")
11. Pour the bread mixture into the dish 
12. Mix the remaining cheese with the toasted panko and sprinkle over the top
13. Shake some everything bagel seasoning over the top, if using
14. Bake covered with foil for 30 mins, remove the foil and bake for another 5-10 minutes until cheese is melted and top is slightly browned

I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I enjoyed reliving these memories :) As I am sure you noticed, most of these pictures are of my sister who may have loved these trips even more than I did..  I sent her a text asking if she had any pictures of the Pine and she immediately responded with 20 pictures!  (Young Sam apologizes for thinking it was cool to make a weird face for pictures)