I will to do it sometime

My family’s favorite breakfasts are baked oatmeal, biscuits & gravy, and fresh fruit and yogurt. Thats about as fancy as it gets here. If I do a “big” breakfast with all the fixings I don’t serve it for breakfast, I make it for dinner. Our family are light eaters in the morning, though.

Julieann

I have found that I prefer baking bacon – for a large family like ours, it really helps.

We had an ‘make your own’ omelet station on which appeared lots of salad bar leftovers: peppers, cheese, mushroom, green onions, chopped tomatoes, bacon bits, salsa. . . people would come looking for other hoped for leftovers that I hadn’t thought of putting out. Almost any food you can think of, SOMEBODY would like to put in their egg! One club memer liked ‘spaghetti omelet’. Egg mixture poured over warmed up spaghetti and tomato sauce. sounds icky to me, but I wasn’t feeding me!

Alot of other leftovers ended up in casseroles on the hot food line. This bothered me at first, as I want BREAKFAST when I go to brunch, but I finally realized that a lot of the club members wanted lunch. They’d come down for the weekend, were sleeping on their boat and had arisen as early as I to ‘batten down the hatches’ before returning home for the week. They’d had coffee and toast much earlier and were ready for something hearty and lunch-y. Casseroles allowed me to use up very small amounts that otherwise would have to be trashed because of not being ‘enough’ and because we only served those 3 meals each week.

Seafood leftovers went into a seafood pie with leftover or instant mashed potato as the topping. Other meats or poultry might go into similar dishes. Sometimes, there would be leftover frozen puff pastry from a dessert, and so the pies would have beautiful puffy tops instead.

Smaller amounts of leftover meats would go into ‘quiche’ type dishes–I kept frozen piecrusts on hand, but at home, one is easy enough. The same sort of ingredients might also be mixed with leftover rice and the egg mixture and baked.

I was in california, so corn tortillas, enchilada sauce, and a bit of meat and cheese became tortilla casserole.

A club member came to help one day. She’d done a lot of the cooking before the club was big enough for hired help. She taught me to make seafood lasagna: Lasagna noodles, white sauce, whatever cheese, and leftover seafood. (other lasagnas were not as popular, but this was beloved, I think she’d been sent in on purpose by people who missed it!) Sometimes, I’d make a seafood casserole with this idea, but using leftover pasta that hadn’t any tomatoe sauce on it.

We had a ‘toast your own’ station as well. At the end of the day, bread which had been sitting out was frozen, and used the next week for bread pudding/french toast casserole. Leftover doughnuts and danish might also be cut up and added. The surprise bits of fruit filling in the danish were yum in the pudding.

Leftover prime rib (OK, not a frugal leftover, but this was a club!) was cut in strips and served in gravy which was hyped up with a bit of wine from the bar. Perhaps also mushrooms, onions.

It’s been a while since that job, that’s all I can think of right now!