Breakfast Potato Patties are loaded with all the delicious flavors of my regular breakfast potatoes (or HomeFries as we call 'em), but in a patty! It's a totally new way to enjoy your breakfast potatoes!

Best of all it uses up leftover mashed potatoes! I love to find a creative new way to use leftovers, and this recipe definitely does just that! It transforms your leftover mashed potatoes you had for dinner the night before and makes them breakfast food! What's not to love?!!

This recipe is my entry into the Idaho Potato Recipe Contest sponsored by the Idaho Potato Commission and being held in conjunction with the 2014 Food and Wine Conference in Orlando, FL this July. 

The Idaho Potato Contest tasks entrants with "Re-Inventing Breakfast Potatoes" by creating an original recipe using Idaho Potatoes. Using Idaho Potatoes was the easy part. I always use Idaho potatoes, as they are consistently superior to potatoes grown in other states. No offense to any non Idaho potatoes, it's just a personal preference from years of working with potatoes.

The part about "Re-inventing Breakfast Potatoes" was a whole different ballgame! This was a challenge for me. I really had to think about this one!! I have only ever made breakfast potatoes one way. My family loves my homefries, so there was never any reason to change...until now!

I decided to make a potato pancake, of sorts, using leftover mashed potatoes and flavoring them with all the goodness of breakfast! I made this on Father's Day, and I would be telling stories if I said we weren't a bit leery of mashed potatoes for breakfast, but it worked! Everyone was pleasantly surprised and gobbled it up! Even Madison loved it, and she is NOT a breakfast eater y'all! 

The leftover mashed potatoes combined with crisp bacon, sauteed onions, and freshly minced garlic gives these potato patties all the flavors you want in your morning potatoes in one easy to make patty that is perfect to top with a poached egg. The flavors work so well together, you'll want this for breakfast all the time!! I even ate it for lunch today after its photo shoot!

Thanks to the Idaho Potato Recipe Contest, new breakfast potato doors have opened for my family! We loved this Breafast Potato Patty so much, we were inspired to think of other ways to enjoy potatoes for breakfast and will be trying new and different ideas in the weeks to come!

Breakfast Potato Patties

By Life Tastes Good
Published 06/18/2014

Ingredients

• 2 cups leftover mashed potatoes (or about 4 Idaho yellow potatoes, mashed)
• 2 thick cut slices of bacon, diced
• 1/2 yellow onion, chopped
• 1 teaspoon freshly minced garlic
• 1 egg
• spinach leaves
• poached eggs

Instructions

1. Heat a large skillet over mid-high heat and add diced bacon. Cook bacon until it starts to crisp on the one side and then flip over to crisp the other side.
2. After flipping the bacon, add the chopped onion, and 1 teaspoon freshly minced garlic. Stir and cook until onion is soft and bacon is as crispy as you like it.
3. Add the bacon mixture to the mashed potatoes with 1 egg and combine well. Form into 4 patties.
4. In the same skillet over medium heat, cook the patties until seared on one side then carefully flip them and sear the other side to get a nice crispy crunch on the outside.
5. Place the cooked patties onto a bed of spinach leaves and top with a poached egg if desired. Enjoy!

Yield: 4 Servings
Prep Time: 10 mins.

Cook time: 5 mins.
Total time: 15 mins.

Tags: breakfast, potato, patties, mashed potatoes, bacon, Idaho Potato, FWCon, Poached Egg, Spinach