make-ahead holiday (or any day!) breakfast recipes | vegan

Hey everyone, it's Caitlin and my outrageously fluffy sweater, and welcome to another video. In this video, we are tackling the make ahead holiday breakfast. I feel like this is a classic Christmas morning thing. In my family, we celebrate Christmas, so I'm not sure about other holidays, but if it applies to you too and you celebrate a different holiday, actually, let me know in the comments below. But it's a very classic thing to make something the night before, put it in the fridge, forget about it, and that way you can wake up on Christmas morning, put your thing in the oven, and then have fresh stuff ready while you get to sleep in, because maybe Santa had to stay up late and eat the cookies and do other things. I don't know. You didn't hear anything from me. Anyways, anyways, today I have two easy, delicious, and vegan make ahead breakfast recipes for you. We've got our sweet recipe in this corner with our overnight French toast casserole. Then we have a savory recipe, which is a vegan breakfast casserole with sausage and kale. They're both bested. They are both delicious. You can make either one. You could probably make both, but enough jibber jabbering for now. Let's get onto the recipes, but actually, first we'll talk about the French toast casserole, because we're making that one first. So I always love to share little tidbits about recipes. I find it really fascinating, and I feel like you guys learn more, and it's maybe more enjoyable for you too. So the French toast casserole is a derivative of French toast, and I would say bread pudding, but French toast, ironically, actually originated, I believe, in Roman times, and then it was actually coined French toast in 17th century England, and was then brought over to the United States, where it has kind of taken off here, and it's seen as a breakfast staple in a lot of cafes. So here in the United States, it's a common breakfast dish, and it's usually served sweet, though there might be some savory twists on it, but over in France, it's actually known as, my video editor told me this, ready? I'm probably still going to get it wrong. Pain perdu. How'd I do? But that essentially means lost bread, as in a way to repurpose stale bread, and it's sort of a dessert there. I feel like the French are a little more classy. I'm not French, so I'm desecrating it even further, chopping the bread up and putting it into a casserole. Let's go. All right, the thing that I love about this recipe too, is that it is so customizable. So this is sort of a basic recipe, but you could totally add in extra fruit, chocolate chips. I have a full list of flavor suggestions on the blog. But to start out, we're going to take some bread and slice it into cubes. I am using sourdough bread. I feel like that's the best vegan bread that works. If you want to make your own vegan brioche, that works well, but I don't have time for that. I bought store-bought sourdough bread. So you keep your bread up, make sure it's nice and dry, and go ahead and put that into a nine by 13 casserole dish. This does serve a good amount of people. So you could totally cut this recipe in half too, if you're serving a smaller crowd for breakfast. So now we're going to make our custard or egg mixture. I tested this a few times to get the perfect consistency. So definitely check out the ingredients on the blog. But the main bulk of it is plant milk for creaminess, cashews for creaminess, and to thicken it, and then chickpea flour, which is going to make it a little bit more eggy in texture. We're also subtly sweetening it with some maple syrup, vanilla, and cinnamon. But again, like I said, you could totally customize this, add in apples and apple pie spice, gingerbread spice, you do you. But we're going to pour this custard mixture over our bread cubes. Try to get everything evenly. You don't want really any dry spots on top. It will absorb it some in the oven, but I just like to use a spatula to press them down to make sure everything is nice and even because we're also going to be soaking this overnight and you don't want dry crispy toast on top. You know you want that custardy, delicious French toast. So after you set it in the fridge overnight, you can do 8 to 12-ish hours. It should look something like this. The mixture should be pretty thick already. And then here I'm sprinkling mine with some chopped pecans because I love the flavor of toasted nuts. And if you want an extra crispy golden top, I recommend finely chopping up some cold vegan butter and baking it in an oven. So you can see the bread puffs up some, it gets nice and golden, the pecans get toasted, and here I'm topping mine with some blueberries and powdered sugar for a little bit of a festive treat. You could totally just do sliced banana, any other fruit. It's really delicious and I just think the key here is that custardy, bready texture. And even though this isn't traditional French toast and it's cubed up, I still think we nailed it. So now we're wrapping up sweet and moving on to savory. And we are making a vegan breakfast casserole, or more specifically a strata. You could spell strata with one T or two Ts. I believe the pronunciation is the same. And in my research, at least that I found, it actually has origins in the United States or Americas. So the article I found said that this dates back to 1902, so it's not too old. And the original first recipe was just bread, white sauce, and cheese. So there were no eggs, but nowadays it's more of a popular brunch dish. So it typically is bread, eggs, and cheese. Obviously we're making a vegan version today, so we'll be using a vegan egg mixture that's going to achieve the same effect. And we'll also be using vegan cheese. And I'm spicing things up a little bit and adding in some vegan breakfast sausage as well to take things to the next level. So let's get into it. If you are a savory breakfast lover, you really need to try this recipe out. It is so delicious. And honestly, I made it for breakfast for dinner when I filmed this, and it just hit the spot. So for our vegan egg mixture, we're doing something a little bit different than the French toast, because the French toast, we wanted it to be a little more loose and custardy, whereas this one we want to be more firm and eggy. So we're using a combination of chickpea flour again, but we're also adding silken tofu and just a little bit of turmeric for color. We're still adding plant-based milk, so it should be still pretty creamy. And then obviously some salt to, you know, season things up. But that is pretty much it for this egg mixture. You could probably make this with a store-bought liquid egg mixture too, but I know not everyone has access to it, so I wanted to make my own homemade version. So you can set that aside, and now we'll work on our filling. First, you're going to start by warming some oil in a pan, and we're going to saute some onion until it's golden and translucent. And then we're adding in our vegan breakfast sausage. So for this recipe, I am using the Impossible breakfast sausage. I found it at my grocery store recently and wanted to try it out. You could also use the Beyond Meat sausage links and just remove the casings and break them up, but I recommend a softer vegan sausage. If you have questions, see the blog post, because I talk about substitutions. And then for some extra umami and color, we're adding in veggies. I'm using mushrooms, red bell pepper, and garlic, and also some kale for some nice color. But honestly, you could really use whatever you want here. Just make sure you cook a lot of the out before you add it to the casserole dish. Same deal here. We're going to take our bread slices and cube it. I'm using that same sourdough. You just want the bread to be dry, but not too soft like a white bread, because it tends to get more soggy. Sourdough has more of a tough structure, which is why it holds up in the casserole better. So you're just going to add in your cooked filling along with the bread cubes. You want the bread cubes to stay mostly on the bottom, because you don't want them to be too dry, but you do want to mix this filling in so you don't just get a layer on top. I'm also adding in some vegan cheese here, and hear me out. This is the one recipe where I actually recommend getting the big blocks of vegan cheese and cutting them into cubes versus buying shredded vegan cheese. Often that stuff is coated in things, so it doesn't stick together, and it doesn't melt as well. And also when you cut your vegan cheese into chunks, you get these like gooey cheesy bites because we're baking it in the oven, so it will actually melt, which is great for vegan cheese, you know? So we put the egg mixture on top, and then just make sure it's spread around evenly, and make sure any of the bread cubes that are on the top have the moisture on it. So same deal as the french toast casserole, just cover it tightly. And before we put this in the fridge to soak overnight, we're going to top it off with more vegan cheese. It just saves us a step in the morning, and there's no harm in just putting it on now. So the bread will absorb some of the liquid as you can see here, and it might puff up a little bit. And then we're just going to bake it in the oven. The cheese melts, like I said. It gets so nice and golden. The breakfast sausage adds a ton of flavor, and I used the spicy one, and it was actually really spicy. So I really recommend trying this recipe out. It was really delicious. All right friends, and there you have it. Let me know if you are team sweet or team savory in the comments below for this specific video. Not in general, just which one of these two recipes sounds better to you. And if you have any make ahead recipes that you like to make for the holidays, leave a comment down below too. I'd love to get some inspiration from you. Other ones that I know are cinnamon rolls. I think that's about it. Usually we just do cinnamon rolls or french toast, but I'd love to know what you guys like to do and what you like to enjoy. And if you want the full version of these recipes as always, they are linked in the description of this YouTube video. So it will take you to my blog post where you can find the full ingredient list, directions, and ingredients are in American or United States measurements, and grams as well. So I got you covered. We also got a full substitution list. So if you have a question, it's probably already answered over there. And while you're here, if you made it this far in the video, number one, I appreciate you because most people do not. Number two, if you're not subscribed to my channel already, why don't you hit that little button and we can see more of each other virtually because, well, I'm looking at a camera lens, but I like the theory of seeing you more often. And I hope you like the theory of seeing me virtually. This video has very chaotic and energetic energy, but I guess I'm kind of here for it. Okay. I'm going to end my ramble, say goodbye to you. I hope you're having a good holiday season and taking care of yourself. And I look forward to virtually seeing you in the next video. Bye.