Mike’s Breakfast “Garbage Plate”

Yes, you read that correctly.

Garbage Plate.

Breakfast in all its porky glory.

My lovely brother-in-law Mike made this concoction after eating at Frank’s Diner near Milwaukee that was featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives on the Food Network.

Apparently, they served something similar that was basically all things breakfasty on one plate.

Normally I try to be a fairly healthy eater – bourbon and chocolate aside -but every now and then, you need some good old, down home comfort food.

Garbage plate certainly qualifies.

Here’s what you need:

Eggs, Sausage, Bacon, Onion, Mushrooms, Potatoes, Cheese, Milk, Butter, Lawry’s Seasoning Salt.

Click HERE for a Garbage Plate Shopping List

Bacon. Cut it in half or even in quarters.

Cook the bacon in an extremely large pan until crisp.

Mike clearly doesn’t have issues with crowding the pan. He just layers the bacon right on in there and somehow it all cooks up over medium heat.

Sausage. Preferably Maple or Brown Sugar flavored Sausage — according to Mike. Put 1 Tablespoon of butter in another large pan and brown up the links of sausage over medium heat.

While the meat starts cooking, chop one large onion.

Cut small red skin potatoes into small cubes. You’ll need about 4 potatoes per person. We used about 3 pounds for our mega serving.

These are not my hands.

Slice up 1/2 pound of clean mushrooms.

Check in on the meat.

As the bacon starts to cook and shrivel up, stir it around in the pan to rotate it from top to bottom. Honestly, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed that you could cook bacon like this. Learn something new everyday.

When the sausage is brown on all sides and cooked through, remove it to drain on a paper towel lined plate.

Put the diced potatoes in the pan used to cook the sausage.

Season the potatoes with about 1 Tablespoon of Lawry’s Seasoned Salt.

Cover the potato pan with a lid and cook for about 10 – 15 minutes over medium heat until the potatoes start to soften.

About halfway through the cooking, stir the potatoes, add 2 Tablespoons of butter, and season them again with about 1 more Tablespoon of Lawry’s.

Look in on the bacon, it’s almost done. When it’s crispy, remove it to drain on a paper towel lined plate.

After about 15 minutes, the potatoes should have started to get quite tender. Add the mushrooms…

and the chopped onions.

Stir the vegetables all together and continue to cook (with the lid off this time) for about 10 more minutes until the onions and mushrooms soften and the potatoes are no longer firm.

If you have managed to not eat all the sausage while it was draining and cooling, cut it into bite sized pieces.

Crumble up the bacon into bite sized pieces too.

Add the bacon and sausage to the pan of potatoes and veggies.

At this point, you have the world’s most ridiculous but best hashbrowns or breakfast potatoes in the world.

Since I can’t eat eggs, I pulled some of the porky potatoes out of the pan and set them aside for my breakfast.

But for the real, true Garbage Plate aficionados, you need to crack 1 dozen eggs.

By the way, the recipe as shown here easily feeds 6 people. You can obviously adjust up or down to fit any number of hungry people.

Beat the eggs with a fork to break up the yolks and get a little air into the eggs…then stir in 1/4 cup of milk.

Pour the eggs over the potatoes…

And cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes stirring occasionally to scramble the eggs into the potatoes.

When the eggs have cooked through and are no longer runny, add some grated cheddar cheese right over the top.

Stir the cheese and cook for a minute until it melts. Then plate it up and dig in!

As Mike says, “It’s not much to look at, but it sure is good.”

Amen to that!

Here’s the recipe – compliments of Mike, inspired byFrank’s Diner in Wisconsin.

Garbage Plate