One of my goals for 2023 is to throw away less food. This means finding a way to use that half eaten block of cheese or the lonely spring onion sitting in its bag, waiting for someone to rescue it. It’s time to get creative, my friends! Food is expensive!
So, yesterday was my “clean out the fridge and prepare for next week day” and I was determined not to throw away anything if I could help it. It was a nice goal but not realistic – yet. If you read my labor day post you will recall that I received 3 orders from Instacart and then our plans changed at the last minute, leaving us with more food than we could possibly eat in a reasonable time.
One of those orders came from Sam’s Club and I was frustrated to see that they had left my package of cheddar cheese slices out in the sun so that by the time I was able to bring them in they were already melted together. I wanted the slices for the hamburgers we were grilling so two large blocks of melted cheese did me no good. I did manage to pull apart enough pieces of the slices to cover our burgers but I was still left with 1 1/2 blocks of cheese blobs.
I had ordered two loaves of french bread to go with our seafood – buttery bread dipped in old bay seasoning is how our family rolls but apparently not on Saturday. I still had 1 1/2 loaves of bread left.
I’m just going to put this out there – I have an egg problem. Remember earlier in the year when eggs went up to around $8 a dozen? I was flipping out because we eat a LOT of eggs!! So whenever I found them for less than $8 a dozen, I stocked up on them. Like the time Walmart had their boxes of 60 large eggs for $3!
Another issue – milk! We just don’t drink it BUT I do use it in cooking. I started buying smaller cartons but it’s sometimes cheaper to buy the bigger gallon so that is what I had a gallon in there this week.
Sausage patties from Aldi’s were always kept in the freezer until the price jumped from $5.49 to almost $10 over the course of 2023 – ridiculous!! I have several half used packages in my freezer but always seem to forget about them when I’m making breakfast.
Not this week! This week I pulled that french bread apart and put it in the bottom of a baking pan. I broke 12 eggs into a 4 cup mixing bowl and added in 1 1/2 cups of milk. I nuked the sausage patties – I had 7 – for a total of three minutes to get the chill off and then crumbled them over the bread pieces. I poured the egg mixture over the bread and sausage and sprinkled salt and pepper over it. I also used some hot sauce in the eggs but that is a personal preference. Then I covered it all with the chunks of cheddar cheese and tossed it in the oven on 350 for 1 hour – I like to make sure the eggs are cooked!
It smelled amazing while it was baking and now we have 12 pieces of casserole to split up in our lunches for the week. If our son would eat veggies I would have thrown some of those in too but he won’t so I didn’t. 🙂
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